Understanding Consequences

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Well, this particular approach to house training a puppy is absolutely fascinating (for certain levels of 'fascinating') but doesn't actually detract in any way from my original point that the best way of reinforcing positive behaviour by conceptually-limited subjects is by appeal to them at a basic level of emotional/physical response.

If you think you can train a youngster out of carrying a knife to school by picking him up and putting him in the garden, then you undoubtedly have much to teach the present generation of child psychologists.

Your original point seemed to be that pain was the best way of making animals and small children understand.
What do you think will happen when the child is big enough to hit the parent back and hasn't been taught by any method other than "Do this or I'll hit you."?

My "fascinating" method is the one recommended by dog-training experts, for the trivial reason that it actually house-trains dogs rather than having scared dogs who are being punished for no reason that they can understand, because unless you catch a dog in the act, it won't connect the punishment to the carpet soiling: if you do it 5 minutes later when it's lounging around minding its own business, it will think it's being punished for lounging around minding its own business.

See: http://kb.rspca.org.au/How-can-I-toilet ... g_296.html

http://www.dogtrainingbasics.com/Potty% ... Basics.htm



http://www.perfectpaws.com/htrp.html

dogs and cats and other animals definitely should not be tortured as a way of making them learn anything. If you want to have a pet, learn it's language - dogs and cats that are allowed to grow up with their parents are taught by said parents where to go to toilet. If you insist on getting a puppy that's still so much of a baby that it doesn't know where to go to toilet, you are quite frankly asking for it. Toilet training a child is a long process. a puppy is much like a two year old - if you think rubbing your two year olds face in their poo poo would teach them not to do it in their pants, by all means, go ahead [saracsm].

this lady has to figure out what will work for her particular child.

Although tbh none of the stuff he did seems like such a big deal to me but I am not a parent..

No my original point was that when children cannot perceive negative social outcomes to their behaviour, then that negativity is best impressed upon then at an instinctual level of understanding. I proposed smacking, but if anyone has a better method of communicating the immediate undesirability of a consequence to a child's actions, I will be glad to learn of it.

Perhaps, for example, they could be encouraged to consider their misdeeds to the backdrop of a haunting selection of panpipe melodies?



I believe that if this were even conceptually a common response to childhood chastisement, it would have been demonstrated throughout the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in the form of an epidemic of attacks upon parents by their children.

Whereas the reality of corporal punishment was well-evidenced during this stage, attacks on parents were not.

You may find it necessary to explain the negative evidence for this hypothetical reaction to childhood punishment as part of your attempts to justify your personal prejudices on the matter. I will be interested to observe the results of such ratiocination.



As I say, I first proposed the dog-training metaphor as a distinct example of interactions which could only be understood at the physical/emotional level. I did not intend to enter into debate on the best methods of house-training a puppy, which I would regard as comical were it not for the fact that they are ways of specifically avoiding the subject in hand: Which is, how to impress upon a youngster with limited social perceptions, the undesirable social consequences of actions such as taking a knife into school?

This is the essential subject matter that -- throughout all your irrelevant piffle about puppy training --- you have consistently refused to address.

You need to be very careful when disciplining an autistic child. Granted, disciplining and having consequences for bad behavior is very important as the old saying goes "spare the rod, spoil the child." But is absolutely paramount that you set a good example when enforcing the rules and choosing to discipline . For example. When I was in 4th grade. Me and my friends during recess would go behind a building and puff on cigarettes. We knew this was a violation of the school's rules and one day we got caught. We all got called to the principal's office and got a spanking for it. Not only did I get spanked but I watch my friends get spanked as well. The moral of the story is that not only did I get disciplined for breaking the rules but I saw others getting disciplined for breaking the rules as well. As a result of that, I took obeying the rules seriously and didn't question them. On the other hand, If I got in trouble and my friend didn't get in trouble or vice versa or if there's any situation where some of us get in trouble and not the others , then I am less likely to take obeying the rules seriously since the person of authority and has no integrity and cannot be trusted.

OASN: You might wanna look into why your son chose to take a knife to school. It may be a matter of peer pressure. Some kid or group of kids might have told him to do it in exchange for being friends with him or joining some club. It's very important to know that most artistic kids are outcasts in school and will typically do anything to make a friend are two or to feel like you belong. This makes them gullible and an easy target for exploitation by bullies.

Or you could just sit them down and list the possible negative social outcomes. Just because they can't see them themselves doesn't mean they won't learn if you explain it enough.
I'm not saying "don't punish", but punishment is useless if the child has no idea why what they've done is wrong.

And you don't need to get narky just because you were wrong about the dog training.

But this is merely returning the debate to its orginal premises --- the child doesn't understand what he's doing wrong, and explanation is not helping the situation. If you had been paying attention, you would have understood that all along.



I brought it up as an analogy. Subsequently, different opinions were expressed upon the matter of puppy-training itself. Now the subject area in general seems to have been adopted by you as though it has direct bearing upon the major subject in hand -- which, I repeat, is a child's lack of responsiveness to potential social outcomes with the directly observed result that he is willing to take a bladed weapon into school.

If you want to continue to toss on about the best way to housetrain a puppy, then good for you, but please don't express your certainty of the relevance of the subject to the specific area of child development unless you can think of a very good reason to do so, because you will otherwise render yourself even more ridiculous and irrelevant than you are at present.

If he's still not undwrunderstanding even after an explanation, then I would venture to suggest that either he hasn't understood some part of the explanation, or there's some social point that he's not understanding that the parent hasn't yet thought of to be able to explain. In either case, I'm not sure how hitting him will make him understand.

"Ridiculous and irrelevant " is verging dangerously close to a personal attack, just FYI, and I'll remind you that it was you who made the flawed analogy and then got upset when I argued under the assumption that it was a good one.

1) The child has already demonstrated that he does not appreciate the full implications of such verbal explanations, which is why the problematic behaviour keeps reoccurring.

2) I never claimed such treatment would help him to understand such negative outcomes, merely that it would provide him witj an unconsciously-understood cause-and-effect relationship between socially negative behaviour and its emotional impact upon him

If you had been following the debate with anything more substantial than a purely superficial level of understanding you would have apprehended both these points long ago.



It is not a personal attack, or anywhere near being one; it is a critical appraisal of the quality of your argument, which I observed at the time had become fixated on the house-training of puppies, and which even in its latest form of expression returns to that subject.

Since I am not particularly interested in methods for preventing puppies from sh*****g on carpets, I will not consider further debate on the subject.

I have little doubt, however, that you will return to the subject, since it appears to provide you with a highly-personal reason (and possibly your only advancible line of rhetoric) to continue to ignore how to address severely antisocial behaviour, verging on the criminal, by an autistic child,

If you want to dwell on dogshit, that's fine, but please don't expect me to share your evident fascination on the subject,

What I've gathered is that the child doesn't understand the explanations that have already been given. It doesn't necessarily follow from this that he's incapable of understanding.

You are making yourself ridiculous and irrelevant is clearly not attacking an argument. Don't be deliberately obtuse.

Also, you do realise that this is the 3rd or 4th post since I stopped debating puppy training? You're the one that keeps bringing it up, and since the subject makes you fly into paragraphs of rage, maybe you should stop talking about it since it upsets you so badly.

He doesn't necessarily need to understand them, he needs to obey them. You don't expect a child to understand the Highway Code before it understands not to run out in front of loving vehicles. You simply enforce that understanding, through hand-holding when crossing the road at one level, and through smacking the child if it tries to run out into the road at the other,



This doesn't even make syntactical sense, so I will leave it unexamined as a sufficient monument to your critical faculties.



This is highly disingenuous, verging on the outright dishonest.
1) You brought up the puppy-training subject since you proposed to disprove the applicability in terms of real-world practicality of a related metaphor raised by me.
2) Even though I dropped the metaphor as not being strictly relevant within two posts of its original mention, you have been attempting to harry me on the subject by suggesting I had got it wrong over the course of repeated posts,, and by proposing practical pet-training methods that did not concur with that initial metaphor.

The last time you explicitly mentioned it was in your post at Fri Nov 22, 2013 11:40 am, in which you said: "And you don't need to get narky just because you were wrong about the dog training."

Thus demonstrating that the topic was of personal interest to you as a means of attacking my arguments, even though I had explicitly abandoned that metaphor in my post Fri Nov 22, 2013 8:13 am

In which I stated: "OK, I never pretended to be Barbara blimmin Woodhouse."

But despite which, you have persisted in attacking me by reference to specific puppy-training methods, as though these were somehow relevant, and then accusing me of being 'narky' in relation to my original proposition of that metaphor, as though it proved your point, when in fact I had abandoned it long before.

In any event, now that we are at last in agreement that the puppy-training analogy is not strictly-relevant, I expect that you won't mention it again. This will be a positive development, both in terms of that fact that you won't attempt any further to apply particular methods of pet-related housetraining to the development of a child, and in terms of the fact that I won't have to bother with your puppyshit obsession ever again (with any luck).

Now, do you have any relevant observations to make with regard to the subject of discouraging delinquent behaviour in autistic children, or not: And if so how do you envisage it being achieved?

I think we're both misunderstanding each other here.
I'm not saying "don't smack, ever". And, if I've understood you correctly, you're saying "use smacking as one tool among many". Is that correct? Because that seems quite reasonable to me. Your first post seemed to advocate just hitting the child and nothing else.



No, that was the consequence of typing on a phone with a malfunctioning keyboard that kept crashing, so that I posted without checking if I'd put in quotation marks. I was, in fact, quoting you, but I'll forgive your inability to remember what you said half an hour ago. Here it is in quote tags so you don't get confused again.



^ There is exactly what you said; I've only added emphasis to show that you clearly were not attacking an argument.



No, that was mentioning that fact that you were wrong. The last time I debated it was in whichever post I posted those links in.



Well, I have actually made suggestions that you've replied to. Don't expect me to keep repeating myself because you can't keep track of the conversation.

That's how I thought when I was real little it was very hard for my mom to teach me. I could remember thinking I got in trouble for no reason and I was just minding my own business and then my mom thought I hit my brother and I never did. I was just coloring. Of course she couldn't just tell me and explain it to me because it was all wa wa wa like in Charlie Brown because I was visual so she had to draw me pictures. it was a fortunate my mom figured this out how my brain worked than assuming I was lying when I would deny things.

Please don't blame your lack of comprehension on me.



This is an outright lie. Such suggestions as you have made have been purely in reaction to my own posts, and have contained nothing of substance (except a hilarious claim that 1950s.60 kids had a tendency to attack their own parents in revenge for the infliction of corporal punishment, which even you seem to have abandoned without debate)

I am perfectly abreast of the conversation, and if you have evidence that I am not, then I suggest you produce it now ... or just shut up. Your choice.

I really appreciate all of the insight on this. It is beyond great to hear form others who think along the same lines as my son does.

We have tried a spanking/ belt approach and it also had not result so we stopped.

There was a post that mentioned if it had been spelled out to him that knives are not allowed in school and up until I read that I had never thought to explain all of the rules to him so black and white. We have since then gone over the handbook line for line and hopefully this helps.

He usually responds very well to a reward/praise situation. We have in place with the school (who is beyond wonderful working with us) where he is awarded a sticker at the end of the day when he has a good day; no meltdowns, is respectful , follows expectations. When he gets home we go over the report his parapro writes and he is awarded a quarter if he received his sticker. This is a pretty awesome reward for him because he LOVES the quarter machines at the store and he is able to reward himself the treat of getting something out of it.

As far as removing iPad, TV and things those are more of a reward in our house for when they are deserved. My son is allowed time on those when he receives his sticker and when he behaving appropriate at home. This rule also goes for our older (16) NT son. He is not allowed these things when he forget to turn homework in, forgets to do chores as this keeps that reward even between our boys.

i am definitely going to try and not over explain the situation that arises from here on out and hope that maybe the short and sweet version will help keep his focus on the situation. I know I have to try harder to understand that once that conversation is done that in his mind everything has been handled and he can just continue on as if everything is normal again.