Filtering impulses

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I had a realization last night.

Eldest has been...difficult this year. To say the least. All seven year olds are tough, but he's been downright obnoxious over the past few months.

He's taken to teasing his little brother, causing Youngest to emit ear-splitting screeches of rage because Eldest insists on infringing on her personal space. Not that Youngest doesn't do the same, but he'll generally stop after he's spoken to. Eldest will just Keep. On. Doing. It.

He'll ask to do X. He'll be told "No," or not today. And he'll ask again, and again, and again, and make comments about how much he likes X, and wishes he could do X, and how he never gets to do X, and why can't we do X? Not unusual for a kid of his age, but again: It does not stop.

He took a swing at his mother last week when he was told that he couldn't run ahead of her on the way home from school.

He tried sticking some "bouncy balls" in his pocket at the store today -- he says that he was just doing it to free his hands so that he could pick up something else, and I'm inclined to believe that...but he did it again, after being caught the first time.

Last night, we went to get out Christmas tree. It was not a fun excursion, as Eldest whined the entire time about what he wanted to do, and what we weren't doing, and so on and so forth. The thing that his me on the way home was that his behavior, as mentioned, wasn't unusual...but it was so exaggerated.

It's like the filter between Thought/Desire and expressing that Thought/Desire is disabled. It doesn't occur to him to just Not Do It. When confronted about this behavior, we've gotten answers like "I don't know why I did it," or "I couldn't stop."

(Then again, at school he's apparently a perfect angel. Eager to please, willing to listen, not a discipline problem at all. This is simultaneously infuriating and wonderful.)

Is there a way to help him build that filter? To put some measure of distance between Thought and Deed?

I think at school they are "white knuckling" it a bit and holding it together. They seem to hold it together there because they exert so much energy in doing so. But that comes at a price: the inability to do it for long means when it isn't terribly important to "white knuckle" it and keep it together they are able to relax and let go a bit. So that is when the filter falls away. I would ask you: Do you really want them to have to "white knuckle" and hold it together while with you? Or do you want them to feel at ease and comfortable? I know it is difficult when they react inappropriately, but I would rather my daughter be herself and comfortable with me-and we slowly work on being comfotable AND building that filter a bit. It's a slow process that can't be hurried along without a cost.

Time. Patience. Consequences.

My two eldest are 2 1/2 years apart and more or less NT. When my son (eldest) hit 7 I would have sold him to the circus for a nickel. At least when he wasn't being adorable. Cuteness is a survival trait. They fought. They argued. DS attacked DD a time or two. Impulse control? What impulse control? You don't want to know how many times I heard "they were just fine until you got here" as all hell is breaking loose. They truly confirmed my mother's belief that you should never let the little boogers outnumber you.

They survived. I survived. They are adults with families of their own and I am very proud of them.

So, with ASD for either or both? Or you? The same. Time, patience, consequences, and back up.

7-9 were very hard years for us - kids develop by leaps and bounds during those years, and DS just wasn't keeping up. With him, the more social stress at school, the more anxiety, the less energy he's got for filtering, the more impulsivity...and that tended to drive worse social choices which made for a really, really vicious cycle. He was also "well-behaved" in school, but was not letting on how much he was struggling with his peers.

I think of DS as being kind of like that famous plate-spinner on the Ed Sullivan show. Since he has to do nearly everything cognitively and consciously, he can do only so many things at one time before plates start falling. Impulse control is usually the first thing to go. As parents, we've learned that a sudden spike in impulsivity means we need to scale something back somewhere.

As he gets older, there are some things that are coming to him more naturally, so we're slowly experiencing less of this.