Running Away

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Hi there, I am new here as my daughter has just been diagnosed with ASP and ADHD she is 5 years old. Recently she has begun running away out of the house. She also with run off if we are in the store and not listen to me calling her. Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this? She has scared me badly as she has ran all the way to her Grandma's house which is over 6 blocks away. I have put extra locks on the doors at home and put her in the cart at the store. I have tried to explain why she cant run off and she will say because I will be scared or worried about her. She just doesnt seem to put the two things together, and that running away isnt good. I am hoping to get help through the school system as she is starting kindergarten soon. I am terrified that she will just walk out of school and get lost. Thanks so much for any help you can give me.

Steph

Gosh, I see people are looking at this post, but I suspect that like myself, they don't know what to say! This never happened to me, and it sounds absolutely frightening! I see so many great suggestions on this forum, and actually looking forward to an answer to your inquiry, because I honestly can’t think of what could be the trigger, or how to stop her from doing this. Perhaps if you can think of any more details about when this happens, it may reveal an answer?

Hoping with you for help!
Ingie

It sounds like she just gets bored, and just decides to go somewhere else. Next time it happens, make sure to ask (if you haven't already) "Where were you going to?", without sounding too upset, preferably. If she starts thinking more about what she's doing, instead of following instinct, she might make the connection better between that and making Mommy frantic. Right now, she knows the answer when you ask her why to not do it, but that's more 'The thing you have to say when Mommy is mad."

Other than that, not much in the way of advice.She'll keep doing it till she has a good reason not to. Which hopefully won't be something bad happening.

I've had this happen with my younger son for years on and off it started when he was 3 and stil happens not and then at 9 but lucky me he's not sneeky at all he laughs very loud and slams the frount door. The only place he goes now is the park thats 4 or 5 houses down from us on the same side of the street. We did have wind chims and alarms on the doors when he was younger because then he was trying to get out with out being heard now it's more of a way to let me know he wants to go to the park. Blackanddecker sells the alarms that can be set to chim when the door is open. Very easy to put up and they also have door stop ones I use when we are traveling or he's at a friends house. I know leashs look bad but util you get a handle on her running away outside the home I'd use one. You can't watch the news with out hearing about some wackjob that killed a little girl anymore. Better people stare then you god forbid end up on the 6 o'cock new cast begging for your child back. Make sure the school knows she's a runner most schools have plans in place for this now and will keep an extra tight watch when they know a child is prone to take off.
Other then that just keep talking to her about how most people aren't bad but some are and they would hurt her very,very bad if they found her alone. Also tell her before you go out or if you see her near the door over and over again that the rules are you cannot go out with out a grown-up whiel at the same time telling her why. Making sure she gets alot of outdoor playtime it a wonderful way to cut back on the running because she needs the release. We go to the park daily then take a long walk home. It places we have lived before a lock fenced backyard full of toys and a water table helped a ton we made that the "safe" place to go outside by him self we had a chime on that door so I knew he was out and could watch him from the window but it gave him the freedom and the outdoor time he needed. I'm looking for a house with a yard right now to get that restarted with him and I'm planing to put in swings, a trampoline and what ever else I can think of to make his safe outdoor space a fun place he won't need to run away from. I hope some of this helped alittle. Good luck and know you aren't alone.

I'm not sure how helpful I'm going to be, but I can try. put rules in it
I guess the first thing to try and work out is why is she running away? Is it because she is running away from what ever the situation is that she is in or is it because she has a strong urge to run? Next thing is to right a social story for her, with pictures. Keep it simple, relate it to her and put rules in it. Eg, ??? likes to run, she likes to run really fast, it makes her heart beat fast and she feels happy. Mum gets really scared and worried when ?? goes running without telling mum. When mum is worried her heart beats fast too but she is scared and feels sick when this happens. If ?? wants to go running she has to tell mum so that mum can take her to the park where it is safe for her to run. If ?? does this then ?? will be happy and mum will be happy to.
I'm not great at social stories, I'm still learning, but they do help. Read her her social story every day, hopefully the rules will stick.
Next thing I would do is to give her lots of regular exercise. Lots of running at the park, jumping, long walks etc. Hopefully she will get tired and not need to run so much. If she is running because she is scared, then you need to some how change her environment and again rite a social story giving her some or at least one coping strategy.

Not sure if I helped at all, but good luck.

My son went through this before we knew he was AS, and while I was pregnant with my daughter, and I came down really hard on him for it. It did work, even though I don't find harsh consequences normally to be the best with AS kids. It just was such a safety issue, that I was going to do whatever I had to for him to "get" it. He learned to follow the rule to avoid consequences long before he understood the why of it, but he does now understand the why of it, so it all worked out.

My NT (we think) daughter also likes to run, and when she went far I came down hard, but now she tends to run within limits, and while I still hate it, the limits she has put on herself more or less take care of the safety issues, so we've allowed it. Basically, she stays within sight, following the "if you can see us, we can see you" rule.

I think this is one of the most frightening things kids can do, and when it comes to safety I am willing to force it on the kids however I can. They are capable of escaping long before they are capable of understanding the logic on why they shouldn't do it, and its just the way it is. In the world of pick your battles, I definitely pick this one. Other things can set aside while focusing on this item (kids get confused and frustrated if you are disciplining on too many items at once).

Meantime, add locks and bells, to slow her down and increase the odds you'll know. School will be another issue; make sure they know she does this, but most kids don't do it at school for some reason.

When my nonverbal teenager was running away to get more paper or coffee than I was giving her and entering random people's homes to go make coffee in their kitchens, I put something like wanted posters with her picture in the mailboxes of the neighborhood explaining her autism and obsessions and how she wouldn't hurt them and here's my phone numbers to call.
I could not keep an info bracelet (even the one I welded on) on her and she was too young to have a tatoo. I gave cookies and posters to the local police as well.
There is also a product with ... radio?...GPS?... put out for alzheimer's wanderers and children that will let you know where the kid is. Again, we could not keep it on her. I can't recall its name. I found it by googling for wanderers.
And leashes are good. I used that when my daughter was preschool and a runner and I got tired of needing to climb 8 foot fences to catch her.
Now she lives in her own home and knows she will get paper and coffee whenever she asks for it and lives behind an alarmed gate (that we had to make higher after she climbed the shorter one at 3am and ended up in the rubber room at the hospital).

Hey. I had an interesting incident a little bit ago that might be related to the reason your daughter runs away. (Now, mind, we are two different people and I could be completely off track; but then, I may not be, and if I'm not then it could be useful.)

Background: I'm a 26 year old autistic college student. I recently had my first successful employment experience, an internship at the pharm/tox department of my university. Everyone pretty much modified the job so I could do it, and it worked out fine with only a couple of meltdowns over the eight-week period. It really helped that there was an Asperger's woman working in the department already who could act as kind of a social interpreter.

Well, towards the end of it we were all doing scientific posters related to the research we had been doing, and I had a problem because I had been switched from studying circadian rhythm disturbances in fructose-fed mice to studying the long-term cardiac effects of sarin exposure. So I had very little time to work on the second project, and as such little to show. The poster included three other people as co-authors and included mostly their work, with my data analysis, and I didn't like that because I wanted to show my own work, not somebody else's.

On top of that, said boss was in Brazil at the time and couldn't advise me directly, so we were left with an e-mail to work with.

On top of THAT, I had to take a whole day out to get naturalized as a US citizen the week it was due. And had to get dragged out to a restaurant to celebrate, breaking routine of course, the day after.

And if that weren't enough, my boss had basically told me she expected me to win the competition because in all the other years they'd had this program, they had had a student from their lab at least place.

So... basically they were having this poster competition, and I had to spend most of the day standing in a room filled with people, some of whom were coming up to me and asking questions about the sarin project, which I had to try to distinguish from the background noise. It was absolutely grueling--four hours of it. One of the judges came by and I simply didn't understand he was a judge. The second I did well with, and the third; but that first judge cost me the win. It didn't help that I was right next to the girl who won first place, I think.

I pretty much knew I wouldn't win--not when I had only guessed at what half the judges were saying, and had been too overwhelmed to gather my thoughts most of the time--but it was still a disappointment when they announced the winners. I was thinking I had disappointed my boss, and disappointed everybody who helped me so much. And then they called me up to stand in front of everyone so they could cheer because I had gotten my citizenship.

I ran.

I didn't think about it. It was just like I had seen a lion coming for me and I just had to get away. Public speaking isn't a problem for me because it's planned (I had in fact given a successful presentation already that summer, about nitric oxide synthesis); but randomly getting called to the front of a large group of people after such a failure when everybody in my lab was counting on me? No. Unexpected event plus background stress plus already feeling overwhelmed to begin with? It was inevitable.

I don't think I've run that fast in a good long time. I'm kind of lucky I didn't trip and fall, actually.

But that's the recipe. When you simply feel like you have to get away, it's not a conscious decision. You just bolt. There's too much going on, too much to deal with, and you simply cannot handle one more thing. It feels like you are running for your life.

It took me a half hour to gather myself enough to go in and apologize for my rudeness. Ironically, I was later told that the judges had taken so long in deliberating (adding unwittingly to my overload) because I had been one of the people they had been arguing about awarding a prize. Go figure.