Help For AS 8-year old Boy With Emotional Disregulation

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Our 8 year old son is having a bear of a time at school lately with his behavior and I'm hoping to get some advice on how to handle it. He has been in a special education classroom since kindergarden, and every year they tell me his behavior gets worse. His behavior at home has improved dramatically over the last few years, so why he is not improving at home is a mystery to me. He is very smart, but it seems like he doesn't know how to handle his negative emotions so he just says everything is "too hard" or "I can't do this". He has started to throw fits at lunch time in the cafeteria if we don't order him something the other kids are having (there are four choices on the menu and no matter what we order him he will always want what someone else has).

Recently he has started to make spontaneous admissions that his teacher has been grabbing him really hard, not letting him sit on his legs in his chair to do his work, and even picking him up by the armpits and slamming him into a chair. My son has no reason to just randomly make this up, and it took him a long time to tell us. We had a meeting with the school last week but of course they deny everything.

He does not meet the criteria for ODD, thankfully, but his outbursts at school are starting to worry me. I know 3rd grade is a time when the gap between groups of kids widens, and I'm afraid he doesn't have many friends at school. Whenever I ask how he is with other kids, they tell me he's fine, but at recess he kind of plays by himself. One of the playground aides has befriended him this year and talks to him when the other kids won't.

The behaviorist at our school is awful. She completely left him to his own devices last year in a room where the teacher was not familiar with AS, so he got kind of swept to the side. We have tried to talk to them, but they always just roll right over us and kind of tell us what we want for him isn't reasonable under ABA (which is NOT working for him).

His outbursts might include sighing, grunting, pounding his desk, crying, running away from his desk or his task and generally making a big show of things. He fights everyone tooth and nail about doing his schoolwork. It is NOT hard for him. Once he's made up his mind to do it, he can get through it fairly quickly and accurately.

I don't know what to do to help him through school. We are considering therapy, but our health insurance doesn't cover AS related therapy, and where we live the hourly for a child psychologist dealing with AS kids is astronomical (over $200 per hour in most cases). He is one of those kids that will figure out what your'e doing with him fairly quickly and then start to fight the system. It is tiring...we are exhausted, and I just want my child to be functional, have friends, and have an easier time at school.

Have you looked into non-public schools in your area (these are special ed schools they send kids to when they can't meet their needs in a special day class)? It might be worth consulting with a GOOD educational advocate to see if you can build a case that they aren't providing an appropriate setting for him behaviorally.

Do you ave the means to try a private school, like maybe Montessori? Or to homeschool?

I'd say you need to change schools.

This:

and this



are abusive.

And this



is someone who is completely useless and shouldn't have a job.

Also, sighing is not an outburst. Give the poor kid a break.

Have you read anything about autistic intertia, or autism and transitions? This is a more likely reason than defiance why he has trouble getting started on his work even though he's fine once he gets started. Autistic people tend to have "sticky gearboxes" in their brains, so we have a lot of trouble moving from one activity to another, or getting started on things: once we've moved over that first hump, it's a lot easier to keep going.



I had this problem with one of my autistic music students. I think it's a combination of perfectionism, and not knowing how to get from "I can't do this" do "I have figured out how to do this"- autistic people often have trouble with things that require multiple steps, planning, and seeing future outcomes. It might help to break down the steps that he needs to do in order to get things done (into really small detail, and maybe use a visual chart if he's a visual thinker), and to remind him whenever he goes into "too hard" mode of times when he's found things difficult in the past that he can do now. He'll internalise it eventually. My student is 14, he's only started interalising this stuff in the past couple of years, and I've known him since he was 9.

this is why I homeschool my son!

I wish I could homeschool or send him to a private school, but its not in the cards right now.

About the inertia...I have this with my own AS struggles, so I'm sure that might be a part of it, but I have a feeling its not all of it. I think a good 25% of it may be that they've always just made a system for him whenever he has trouble, so he's kind of learned to manipulate them into making it 'easier' for him. Like I said, I think the other 75% is probably emotional disregulation, not knowing what to do with his negative feelings. I'm sure all 8 year olds don't want to do their school work, but when he feels that "don't want to" attitude it blows way up. He transitions fine when he wants to.

I think finding a way to fund therapy is probably our best bet right now. I'd really like to see him mainstreamed because he is increasingly aware that something is "wrong" with him (I don't think that, but he's started to voice those concerns) because he is segregated from mainstream kids most of the day.

I am particularly surprised that the school is being so unhelpful, since he's in a classroom that theoretically should be more helpful than usual. I hope that you can figure out a way to deal with this in an affordable fashion.

Under what circumstances is he able to transition well?

I was trying to type a reply and I hit the wrong button. Now I start again.

Our younger Aspie guy has some similar issues - lots of demand avoidance/anxiety issues. I posted a few months ago about finding the right kind of help, which we eventually did find. In our case, it is definitely therapy - we found an amazing local psychologist who specializes in Aspergers syndrome. It it expensive, we can barely afford it and my parents' in law pay for half. Even at $100/hour, it has been an amazing thing for our guy (7) and our whole family. A lot of psychologists use a sliding scale payment plan too, since most of the "good" ones are out of network for insurance companies.

On Christmas eve, Grandma in law commented, "He's like another kid!" Our aim isn't to change anything about him or cure his autism, but he was trying to control every single tiny aspect of his life and his inflexibility was his primary coping mechanism for any emotional change or upset. His emotional response was either 0 or 100.

So we worked on coping skills for the first few months - NT kids pick this up by observing kids, ASD kids don't. Now we're on to working on emotional recognition, both in himself and other people. Instead of instantly being overwhelmed by any emotion he has, he can stop and think about what he's feeling, why he's feeling a certain way and he has the coping skills to be able to handle how he feels - better than hitting/biting/screaming. We're also working on flexibility, by giving him control over the things that he can - he has a lot of anxiety about time/being late, so we got him a watch. We got a calender to give him a visual schedule so he knows about changes in routine ahead of time.

I'll press that these "outbursts" are his way of communicating that he's not able to cope with what is going on at school, whatever the trigger. Could be sensory, could be an underlying processing deficit. He might need help, but can't/won't/doesn't know how to ask for it and the above actions result in some kind of attention (even if it's negative) that he falls back on what has worked in the past.

Transitions can be really difficult - we do lots of visual scheduling and give him the control of writing things/changing things on the schedule if we have a last minute change. I had always kind of assumed that this kind of visual schedule was primarily beneficial for kids with more severe deficits, but it has been an amazing tool for us - our guy can read really well so in our case we don't use pictures, just words.

I think you may need to find another school and find a way to get him moved there -- the current one has shown they are incompetent and uninterested in learning how to help your son. Read From Emotions to Advocacy by Peter Wright, and everything you can on the wrightslaw.com website, and consider hiring an advocate or searching for alternatives you can afford.

I'm reading a really interesting book, Lost at School by Ross Greene. (He also wrote The Explosive Child.) I'm only in the first chapter, but he really lays out an idea that I've never seen stated so clearly before -- kids with challenging behavior aren't lacking motivation and knowledge about how they are supposed to behave, they are lacking behavioral skills such as emotional regulation, flexiblity, etc that they need in order to function in the classroom. Schools are set up with a rewards and consequences model (stickers and timeouts), and this does nothing to help them. There are supposed to be more details about how to teach these skills later in the book.

I suspect though, that most of them need to be identified and taught in the school setting, so therapy outside of that setting (especially if the school staff is not following the recommendations) can only go so far.