helpful ways to discipline?

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I am having trouble coming up with ways to discipline my son. The only form of punishment that we use right now is taking away privilages. This works somewhat, but causes a ton of anxiety for him. For example. When he got in trouble yesterday, I took away his IPOD and his television. He went wild and started physically attacking me. Then, for the duration that his electronics are taken away, at random he obsesses over being bored, when he's going to get them back, and will attack me when I remind him that they are taken away for XX amount of days. He will scream, cry, and attack until he gets them back. I am having a difficult time understanding if taking away his privilages is the right thing to do. I always try to calm him down by talking low and telling him to "settle". Sometimes just sitting and holding him is enough to calm him down, but he always goes back to having his melt downs.

Are there better ways to discipline without getting attacked everytime? Maybe allowing him to have these things at all is not the correct choice. Any thoughts?

How old is your child?

I have always used the "Positive Discapline" methods which really tie the behavior to a natural consequence. So if your son was in trouble for treating his ipod inappropriately, it might make sense to give it a time out - see they're connected. If he bops his brother, taking away the ipod doesn't make sense as they are not connected. It might make more sense to have him do something for his brother.

For most of our kids, discapline needs to make sense to them. For me right now when my son misbehaves (it's usually being waaaayyyyy off task and wasting other people's time) I ask him for his time, to help me catch up for the time I wasted. It's connected.

I don't have much advice as my son is only 5 years old but he does love to play with his Nintendo DS all the time. We do take away his privilege to play his DS and have him earn it back by being a good helper around the house. Little chores or his homework assignments. Right now this works for our 5 year old. My son gets in trouble at school for refusing to listen to his teachers and do his writing assignment. What we did here at home was this; before he can do what he really likes to do (play his DS) he has to do a writing assignment for us since he refuses to do it for his teachers. He does it fine and excellent most of the time and earns his DS back, his behavior at school also improved by doing this.

Ok, so try to make the "punishment" related to the "crime". I got it now. I guess this is going to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I asked him to pick up his legos that he was playing with and he said "no". So I said if I have to pick them up, they will be mine. He didn't seem to care about that though. They are still sitting on the shelf where I put them and he doesn't ask for them. Now, if I take away tv or ipod, he just has a fit. I'm still trying to figure this out. Maybe rather than taking something away, I should just give him a chore to do. What if he refuses to do that chore? Ideas? He is 7, to answer your question too.

As Kailuamom said, its best when you can rely on natural consequences so that the cause and effect have a logical connection for him. This is not always possible. I would caution you to consider carefully when a situation requires discipline and if the action you take under the guise of disciplne is likely to have the effect you desire. Typically I think the goal that parents have when they discipline a child is that the discipline will prevent the offending behavior or action from being repeated in the future. Unfortunately, with ASD kids, the behavior or actions we, the parents, don't like, is often something that is beyond the child's control. In such cases, no amount of discipline is going to prevent that behavior from occurring again. You need to find a totally new way to avoid that behavior if it is really intolerable for you. In addition to not preventing the offending behavior, you are likely to cause your child to lose trust in you if you discipline him for something he cannot control.

Many folks here firmly believe that screen time is somewhat essential for many ASD kids (and adults) as it gives them much needed downtime and otherwise provides them relief from over-stimulation they experience in a typical day. I would venture to say that your son's extreme reaction to having ipod and TV time totally taken away for DAYS should tell you that this punishment is just flat out too much. Some parents here have stated they reduce computer time instead of taking it away or as others just mentioned, the opportunity is given to "win back" the priviledge that was taken away. Bottom line, you gotta get creative when trying to motivate ASD kids! Find as many opportunites as you can for positive reinforcement and when some type of punishment is really a must, try to make the connection between what your child did and the consequence for his action as clear as possible.

With a seven year old, I think a time out can usually be effective, if you are having trouble coming up with the natural consequences Kaulimom so well described, although for impulse control issues I actually think time out is a good natural consequence because it gives the child time to "think about how they can learn to control the impulse."

I think one thing you need to let go of is the concept that he needs to act like he cares about the consequence; it is actually entirely possible for a child to absorb and apply lessons even though they aren't upset by the consequence. The most important things they need to know are (a) what the consequences will be and (b) that you will carry out them out consistently (say what you mean and do what you say).

The best way I found to get my kids to pick up toys, btw, is to make it a game. It can actually be fun to do it together.

Remember, also, that your son may have executive function issues, and literal thinking issues, making it difficult for him to know where to start and what to do when an instruction as vague as "pick up your legos" is given. Have you asked him WHY he said "no?" Logical and reasonable reasons might be that he is in the middle of something at the moment, in which case the issue can be solved by telling him he needs to do it within the next half hour, and then setting out a timer so he'll have a visual cue on when that time will run out. Another answer might be that he expects to want to play with them again later today, in which case you may need to explain to him why we constantly put things away and take them out again. And so on. Most AS kids are extremely logic oriented, and if you can get inside their unique version of logic, you can usually solve these stand offs. Or, at least, that was my experience.

If all that fails, when it comes to picking up messes, I found that asking my kids if they wanted to hire my cleaning services worked. Since they got an allowance from a young age, I could tell them that if they don't want to do the chore by time X, then they could pay me $X out of their allowance to do it for them. Only once did either of them ever take me up on that offer Some people hate that idea because they feel it teaches kids they can buy their way out of an unwanted chore, but it seems real life to me: adults CAN buy their way out of unwanted chores, provided they have enough money. All I did was give my children the same spending choice.

I can't even think of the last time my kids were disobedient. They've absorbed the idea that people respect each other, and help each other, simply because it makes life more pleasant for everyone. They want to be part of life's solution, not it's problem, so with either (one is NT and one is AS) if I can sell them on the WHY we do something, they'll follow it. The sales pitch is huge with both of them.

I don't often give ultimatiums like....if you don't pick these up they're mine because that may be a little unclear to an aspie. I say something like, if you don't pick this up by x time, the toys are going to be in time out. I also do this when a child is having trouble sharing or is using the toy inappropriately.

If you notice that the child doesn't ever go looking for the toy.....they have too many toys!

I have given bags of toys away from this happening. I will put toys in time out, and then cycle them back into the population if I think it's warranted. When I notice too many toys are completely forgotten about, I donate. I tell the family that this can happen and it has only backfired with DH, the kids have never cared.

The premise of positive discipline is to have the child connect their action to the natural consequence. Just like if you mess up at work, no one takes away you TV, right? There is no place in this process for intentionally making the child feel bad. they actually coach you about empathizing with your child if they are feeling bad. It helps them focus on the issue rather than what a jerk mom is.

Here's a link to the website. http://www.positivediscipline.com/

I will say that this doesn't work as well for my AS son as it did for my NT son. I don't think it's because of a faulty philisophy rather the issues are just more complicated with AS.

My son is 3.75 and HFA (rather than aspie). But we have had similar issues around picking things up...we had a stand off for an entire day once where he didn't get anything he wanted (other toys, my attention, TV etc) until he picked up the cards he had scattered around. He has been WAY better ever since - but we make sure to have tidying up as a regular item on the visual schedule, and we all participate in it. He does need help though - if we tell him to tidy up he has no idea what to do, but if we tell him to put his cars in the green box, he runs to do it!

His speech therapist has a little song she sings "Put it in the box, la la la la...Put it in the box la la la la la..." - she makes him put away every toy before he can get the next one out, and he willingly complies because he wants what comes next. We also use that tactic at home - if you want TV/ipad/whatever, then you have to do X first. It helps that my son can't reach where we keep the ipad, and hasn't figured out the remote control yet!

The other thing we do is toy timeout, as suggested earlier. We use that if he throws something - it rarely happens now, but if it does, the toy goes up in a very visible place and he is told when it will come down (it needs to be a discrete point, like after lunch or when Daddy comes home, for example - or a time, if your child can tell the time). Shorter times work best because when you bring the toy down you remind why it went up in the first place, and they can still remember the pain of losing it.

Does he know before hand that you are going to take away these things? Is he given warnings and a time limit to complete the task you are asking of him? Also I personally would only take one thing away, not two or everything.
We had issues with our kids (9 year old aspie son and 6 year old Autie daughter) with them making a mess and not cleaning up, sneaking food and hiding the "evidence". Its hard to get them both to ask for things or to ask for help. I have no problem giving them snacks but they do not ask. We came up with a token method. We put it into place after my son got his rabbit that he promised he would be responsible for. So when they do everything they are supposed to do for the day they get a token and once they have so many tokens they are allowed to buy something at the store. Typically when my son wants a new toy we will tell him how many tokens he needs for the toy. They only time we take away tokens are for serious things like hitting, fighting, saying mean things to us (talking back). If they dont do their chores they simply dont get a token. This worked well from the start for my son but my daughter was more of a challenge. So one time she did not have any tokens and we went to the store and my son was able to buy a pack of pokemon cards but we had to explain to my daughter that she did not have any tokens because she did not pick up her markers, ect, ect. Of course she had a major fit in the store but it was worth it because now she will pick up when we ask because she wants her tokens. We also give them a warning when we are going to take a token away. If they say something mean to us we talk about it and we tell them that if they continue we will take away a token.....loosing a token is a major, horrific tragedy in this house so it is very effective!

[quote="jmom05" Then, for the duration that his electronics are taken away, at random he obsesses over being bored, when he's going to get them back, and will attack me when I remind him that they are taken away for XX amount of days. [/quote]

At age 7 perhaps XX days is too big a timescale and feels essentially like forever? We take things away for the remainder of the day and the next day starts fresh. We use 5 minute timeouts a lot with our 6 yo. Each time he hits, kicks, gets out of the chair, etc., I walk over to the timer and dramatically add an extra minute. He doesn't appear to be upset about getting a timeout, which is fine. The important thing is to consistently connect the misbehavior with an immediate consequence, while avoiding a spiral into a meltdown.

Thanks everyone. Getting some good reminders and ideas browsing this topic.

Timeouts NEVER worked for us! I was at such a loss for what to do because this had worked perfectly well with our older NT son and when #2 came along and would never stay in timeout it just about drove me nuts! Trying to get him to stay in timeout was more of a punishment for me than it was for him. Sad to say, it took me way too long to give up on that tactic.

It's funny, we were really, really struggling with this - particularly over impulse control issues - and I was just about to start a thread, but I did some other research online on impulse control (sorry, I can't find the exact articles now) and found a technique where you ask the child to imagine himself starting to misbehave but then stopping him or herself.

DS is a classic example of the child who learns things cognitively, and who only follows rules that make sense. We were having trouble with a couple of relatively minor things: lying (about brushing teeth, about sneaking stuff to read into the bathroom when we needed him to be quick, etc.) and stealing (candy, iphone, sneaking onto the internet.) We also have some issues with swearing and disrespectful language, especially when he gets stressed out. All of these are very clearly impulse control issues - though sometimes those impulses are stronger than most kids' deliberate actions (we have asked him, point-blank "Are you really brushing your teeth, with the toothpaste and toothbrush in your mouth?" and he will say no.)

So, we sat down and had a discussion. One issue was that he gets away with lying and stealing on occasion - so it's a self-rewarding behavior. Another is that he just plain doesn't connect the punishment with the behavior; it just does not happen in his brain. We talked about how, even when he gets away with these things, and even though we all understand that these things are pretty minor, it creates an atmosphere where we parents feel like we don't know whether to believe him or not. We wind up being suspicious and angry, sometimes when he's doing things right. We talked about how unpleasant it is for everyone when someone's feelings are hurt. I explained that this is the real consequence to lying, stealing and disrespectful language.

DS has no desire to break the rules, unless he doesn't understand them or thinks they are stupid. We explained that sometimes our rules may seem stupid to him, but we do have reasons for them - and we also explained that if he feels the need to break the rules, he should first come to us and try to negotiate (we discovered that this particular toothbrush was "bothering" him, and will be fixing that, so we were able to prove that point right then and there.) We then asked him to imagine himself starting to break a rule, and imagine stopping himself. We asked him how doing that would change things in our household, and talked about all the yelling and suspicion that would stop. We asked that he do this every time he's about to break a rule.

I also explained that the consequences we'd set in the past for bad behavior would stay, so if he steals the iphone, he loses a game, if he doesn't brush his teeth, he will have to go back and do it with me watching, etc. I said I didn't want to do that, but we needed to make sure he remembered that these rules are important to us, and this new system isn't designed to let him off the hook, but to help him get there. We're going to try drawing up a contract so that this is all in writing, including the part about him imagining.

Now, of course, all this didn't happen as calmly as I wrote here, and there was probably way too much talking, and it might not work for a younger child, AND we JUST started - but it seems to be working, and I think the take-away of having your child imagine not misbehaving is a good one. We are talking a lot with DS about being partners in parenting him - that we are a team as a family, and we all want to help him grow up and be able to take care of himself. I know this sounds all touchy-feely and new-agey spiritualist, and believe me I am NOT that kind of person, much less parent, (nothing against those who are) but thus far it seems to work better for us than the operant-conditioning kind of parenting. I'm guessing like most here, if it helps my son, I will be any kind of parent I need to be, even if it means tying myself in knots.

I still can't find the article, but the following is one of the ones I found http://www.marvinmarshall.com/impulsemanagement.html