Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi , new here. My 7 year old is currently being assessed for Autism. His always quite well behaved at home as we can see when something is triggering him and distract him before it escalates or he will take himself off to his bedroom when he gets over stimulated.
However tonight he has absolutely lost it, worst meltdown yet. Hit myself, his step dad. Told us he hates us were horrible etc. I've put him in his room to calm down and to safeguard ourselves and his little brothers. My question is how do you know when it's his Autism/over stimulated or his just being a pre-teenage boy?
Myself and my partner have sat down and both said the same. We don't know how to punish him as we can't always tell which it is. Obviously if his being his back chatty teenage self he will just lose electrical devices for the day but I don't want to punish him for something he can't help. Be kind I'm sat crying feeling like the worse mum ever
Couple of things...
1. If that's you in your profile pic, sooner or later someone will tell you that publishing personal identifying information is considered a safety issue. Not me obviously, I'm just warning you that those sort of people exist.. ;c)
2. If your kid is 7 and Autistic he probaby doesn't need too much "punishment" as life and his peer group wil be handing some of that out already. I never had a space in my life that I didn't create for myself where no one was seeking to punish me for being me, and it did give me a rather unhelpful attitude in life, until I started to get over it, a process I'm still involved in, that early life trauma really sticks don't it?
5 -15 "Timeouts" in order to cool down, like my gran used to impse on me, are of course useful, if used sparingly and I early on established a 2 way no violence rule in my house with my (ADD) kid. (Like I had to with her mother at the beginnning of the relationship)
I instinctively knew that threats would not work with my kid, (they didn't often work on me) and making threats that you do not or cannot deliver on will get you in a BIG HOLE really fast, I watched loads of my peers make that blunder.
EVERYONE told me "you are her parent and not her friend", advice which I ignored, thankfully.
People told me that her conduct was poor, when she was at the age your kid is , and she didn't "treat adults correctly". I ignored that too, quite successfully.
MY child has out performed the children of my critics in pretty much every case, in terms of adjustment to the adult world, and making it adjust to her, where neccesary, so I guess we did something right. I did an awful lot of exlaing WHY "you shouldn't do that".
I hope some of that is useful or useable. I experienced bad parenting but learned form it and delivered good parenting, based on respect, and where neccessesary providing an explanation of the power dynamics to my child rather than just "because I say so". I DID use silly humour a lot to defuse some situations, particularly "wilful refusal to do something neccesary" if the negotiating was not going to work.
I felt that if I have to "punish" her then I'd kinda lost already.
Good early post BTW, and welcome to the forum!
She backed me into a corner once about what punishment would I inflict on her later, so I told her that I didn't know right now, but it would be almost as bad as in the land far away where they make bad children into sausages.. In my best theatrical "I'm bullsh77ing you" voice, so as she wasn't traumatised. From that point on, most minor conflcit situations could be fairly quickly resolved with a bit of banter (that sounded very distrubing to other adults) but which worked very well for us, adn if it DIDN't work, then I knew there was a real problem and she wasn't just "being naughy".
Oh, and I never lied to her, ever (except on one occasion, when she caught me doing something genuinely inexplicable to her at that time). "Lies to children" does make the parents lives easier, admitedly, but then the kid has to unravel the false information later, and when they do YOUR credibilty is toast.