pulling evil faces, calling horrid names all the time

[mum232010]

feeling so sad and down today, hence why i am on here with 'help me please' threads, haha.

 

dyl' is constantly pulling faces, the usual at the mo' is pulling tongue out, in peoples faces when things dont go his way, he will come right up to you, in your face and have the most eveil look about him, he goes right up to his 3 yr old sister and even pushes his face on hers whilst doing sit.

 

he also places his hand infront of your face when e doesnt want to do something, he does this so much, when i am trying to explain to him what he has done wrong, even when i am quietand calm. he always looks the other way, hates making eye contact, always looking at the floor.

 

gritting teeth in peoples faces is another one too. and when he is told not to do something we get a 'har har' really loud, and it makes my blood boil, though i dont let him know this. this usually results in quiet time as he will run riot shouting har har louder and louder until its too much for anyone around him, especially my parents, i can see them getting so angry with him, s they simply dont undrstand him.

 

this is all happeninf all day long, throwing thigs, kicking thigs, slamming door, throwing chairs, running to his room, throwing things in there, breaking them. throwing anything he can find ( hence why he is excluded from school at the mo).

 

constantly saying silly names to everyone like ''lamp head' 'carpet brain' depending on what room he is in at the time.

 

its making my blood boil as there is no break inbetween these anymore, he is constantly doing one or the other from the second he leaves him room when he wakes up until the second he falls asleep at night. he is just one very evil boy!! that may sound harshe but its getting worse, the drs called it 'jekyl and hyde' as he was one or the other, but now its just all the time the evil one. i dont know what to do anymore. PP have given me so much info ignore the bad paaise the good, etc, i know it all but nothing is working.

 

grrrr, rant over xxxxxxxx

[baddad]

Sorry to say this, but he is showing huge 'theory of mind' in the way he enacts all of these behaviours. Pulling faces and shout 'haha' both indicate an absolute understanding of the impact his behaviours have on his victims. He's also developed quite specific strategies for avoiding sanctions by refusing to look at you and by forcing you/others to look away from him.

Probably not what you want to hear, but from this and your other posts I get the impression that your parents actually do understand him, and are accepting at face value what they see him doing rather than trying to find alternative explanations that really don't seem to fit.

My own advice would not be to 'ignore the bad and praise the good'. I think the second part is absolutely spot on, but the first is just a green light to enact more of the same behaviours, because they get him exactly what he wants without any consequences. At the moment Dylan is six and displaying all sorts of violent and aggressive behaviours. As long as they work for and reward him he is likely to continue to do so, so looking forward another six years you'll have someone twice as big, twice as heavy and twice as reluctant to change the behaviours that have become ingrained. Jump forward another six years and you've got a major problem on your hands.

 

Hope that's helpful, even if not very reassuring.

 

L&P

 

BD

[trekster]

He could be depressed and expressing this as anger. In me ignoring the 'bad' didn't work because i didn't realise it wasn't the expected thing to do. Also sometimes i would mishear things eg "its ok to do x" might be heard instead of "its not ok to do x".

[mum232010]

now i am thinking its all me, and not him, so many people saying he needs a good smacking,

my answer there is this.

i was a childminder for years, and the kids i looked after were happy, and knew boundaries, not a problem, i have a 9 and 3 yr old, again, both know boundaries, if it is my parenting then surely the PP would have told me so? the peaditritian praises me and dp for how we are with him. i just dont get though if he is 'normal' then why is he like this? and why would every specialist involved think he has mixed things of asd, thats wht it is taking so long to diagnose him? if he did know what he was doing and still doing it, then why dont the other 2 do it, or any other child i have ever known done this too??

 

i hate the'questioning myself days' i feel so down and its driving me mental.

[justine1]

now i am thinking its all me, and not him, so many people saying he needs a good smacking,

my answer there is this.

i was a childminder for years, and the kids i looked after were happy, and knew boundaries, not a problem, i have a 9 and 3 yr old, again, both know boundaries, if it is my parenting then surely the PP would have told me so? the peaditritian praises me and dp for how we are with him. i just dont get though if he is 'normal' then why is he like this? and why would every specialist involved think he has mixed things of asd, thats wht it is taking so long to diagnose him? if he did know what he was doing and still doing it, then why dont the other 2 do it, or any other child i have ever known done this too??

 

i hate the'questioning myself days' i feel so down and its driving me mental.

I do get how you feel.I never felt like that with Sam cause he is good but just very,very different and knew something is not right so I was very confident it wasnt down to my parenting.However with Dan,who is being assessed,I do question myself alot and do understand how frustrating it is.I know that even if he doesnt have ASD I will take it on board and re-evaluate my parenting or find other solutions that may work with the help of outside agencies.I think until I know I will keep worrying,so try not to until he has a dx or not.

[call me jaded]

How difficult for you. I can understand why they're having difficulty with the diagnosis because there does seem to be an amount of self awareness there.

 

Short term fix, could you lessen the situations where you feel totally overwhelmed? Get out of the house and go somewhere (the park?) where there aren't too many people around? Perhaps he wouldn't feel the need to be so 'in your face'. More to give you a break than to deal with any of the behaviour, though 'walking the legs off him' might not be so bad!

[call me jaded]

From the depths of my memory your Jekyll and Hyde comment rang a bell. Just thinking that the Hyperactive Children's Support Group might be interesting to you.

 

Our totally additive-free diet here at home is a variation of the Feingold programme they describe - works for us! Been doing it so long it's second-nature.

[baranigirl]

thats a really interesting site thanks CMJ !

[baddad]

now i am thinking its all me, and not him, so many people saying he needs a good smacking,

my answer there is this.

i was a childminder for years, and the kids i looked after were happy, and knew boundaries, not a problem, i have a 9 and 3 yr old, again, both know boundaries, if it is my parenting then surely the PP would have told me so? the peaditritian praises me and dp for how we are with him. i just dont get though if he is 'normal' then why is he like this? and why would every specialist involved think he has mixed things of asd, thats wht it is taking so long to diagnose him? if he did know what he was doing and still doing it, then why dont the other 2 do it, or any other child i have ever known done this too??

 

i hate the'questioning myself days' i feel so down and its driving me mental.

 

Hi again mum232010 -

not sure if it's my post that's made you feel like this but if so i think we've got a wire crossed somewhere(?)

Reading the last line of your post I thought the advice most people was giving was the very opposite of 'needs a good smacking', and whether that's the case or not I wasn't advocating smacking as the answer, just some sort of sanction scheme that gave a clear message that bad behaviour wasn't acceptable rather than just ignoring it.

 

I'm also not 'blaming' you for his behaviour, just offering my opinion, in response to your request for advice, that what you are currently doing in response to the behaviour isn't going to change it, and is possibly rewarding it.

 

As far as your experiences with your other children go I don't think that's relevent in this scenario. The fact is that different children do have different temperaments. That has nothing to do with autism - it's just a fact of life and human nature. If your other children are more passive by nature and didn't 'challenge' you that's a difference in them and Dylan, not a difference in your parenting technique. It's just a matter of perspective - taking the view that Dylan is 'more' challenging than your other children, whereas the difference might equally be that your other children were 'less' challenging than Dylan and therefore didn't need the kind of concrete boundaries and 'hands on' (but not smacking!) approach to discipline that he does seem to need from what you are describing. And again, that has absolutely nothing to do with autism - there are plenty of parents of NT kids who will describe exactly the same kind of differences existing in their families.

 

As I said in my original post, the behaviours Dylan enact are, as Jaded put it, behaviours that indicate awareness. The other behaviours mentioned, the refusal to make eye contact etc, are also perfectly normal behaviours that most children will enact when being 'told off' or otherwise sanctioned.

 

For what it's worth I believe generally that there are far better and far more efficient methods of teaching right and wrong than smacking. Praising good behaviour, as I said in my first post, is certainly one of them. But I don't think it's a complete solution, and I think if practiced without sanctions, expectations and boundaries it will almost always be confusing for the child and, by implication, ineffective and negative.

 

Hope that clears things up.

 

L&P

 

BD

[mum232010]

hi all.

no it wasnt your post, lol, dont worry, i was having such a bad day, then i went for a cuppa at my mums and she was not been very nice about the situation, and again, trying to tell me what to do with him, etc etc. so i was on a downer anyway.

 

i do see your points totally, and i am glad your all giving me ideas and tips, i think once he goes back to schools for the mornings he may settle a bit better, and be home at lunch for the rest of the day, that way i have a break from him too, and can cope better in the afternoon wih him.

 

he si a little worried about going back to be honest, dont think he knows what to expect, i have explained it all to him, so hopefully he should settle. he is very hyper again today, just bored i think, cant go out to the park as school said by law i cant take him out during school hours or i will be prosecuited! and kunch hour time wont be enough, plus he just runs away anyway, and in to roads and sees no danger so that is usually a 'in the car 2 people job' as i dont drive. we are going on the field next to our house after school time with the football, he likes this, run off some of his energy.