Can behaviour coping/ improvements happen between ages of 5 and 7 years old? (demand avoidance/ dysregulated emotions/ meltdowns)

Hello 57511, I am Number.

I would like to ask one question please.  Does your child inexplicably NOT do things that you would expect them to want to do?  If so, can you elucidate on any such matters.

I only ask...so I can see if I might be able to help.

No pressure, either way.

HI,

It can be managed if both parents work together, strong boundaries but this is not always effective as i have seen myself over the years with my son. 

Things really went downhill when he started secondary School (mainstream) they had got him an EHCP and we had family support but none of it was helpful. 

My son is challenging and can be aggressive and reluctant to rules and boundaries and consequences have no effect only he rips the doors off and smashes things up.

I must warn you it could get worse, as soon as my son started puberty all hell broke loose. It is such a hard one to manage and cope with and I have suffered with my mental health to such an extent i wanted to give up. Now he is doing alternative provision he seems much happier but there are still anger issues with him.

He is better now he is not in mainstream School and we are looking for another one for him, a special School and they called me yesterday to say they have a space available for him so this will go to panel again and hopefully he will get it.

The school and council have been rubbish and i have had to put in many complaints. You know your child better than anyone all i can say is keep fighting and ringing people all the time, Email and keep a paper trail  even complain if you have to .

does he have any diagnoses, has he been screened for ADHD? if so medication can help but as my son is 13 he is refusing 

I should add that the warnings I refer to above were before I realised that PDA was a semi-recognised thing, so I was sometimes going about it the wrong way although I was beginning to work it out, in that a straight demand was not easy for him so I gradually changed my approach and now have more techniques to help in these situations.

I am by no means an expert except that my son is mildly autistic with mild PDA. He was not massively disruptive at school but it took him a long time to "socialise".  He was and still is getting told off because he can't stop talking and he struggles with instructions, and the order of things. He did change quite considerably around Year 4.  He was not diagnosed and so was not officially under the SENCO's wing, but she did make a point of coming up to me at the school gate to say she had been on a day trip with his class and the change in him over a couple of years was significant.  He was more relaxed and chatty, and more sociable. A lot of things I read say you can't grow out of autism but it seems to me that you can evolve. He did go through a period of severe meltdowns at home after that - year 5 as I remember - for example if he was in one of his obsessions and after a series of explanations and warnings he was told that it was time to stop, but that seems to have changed too, although he can still be quick to anger, especially if he is in one of his angry weeks. There are new issues now relating to OCD, and I worry that he is coping to a large extent on the outside at school but that it's exhausting for him on the inside, and although he will accept loving gestures he flat refuses any support, which I think is related to the PDA and the refusal to accept advice or suggestions for different ways of doing things.  So I would say it must of course depend on your child, but that it will not necessarily stay exactly the same for ever.  

I can only say that I was selectively mute for months on end when I started school at four and a half, but my bouts of mutism ended by the time I was seven. I must have constructed coping mechanisms for myself, I certainly had no particular or focused help at school.

I was very angry when I was his age. I got better. But then my parents pulled me out of school. A lot of it will depend on resonable adjustments. Your sons solution will be very spicific to him. For example I was a precousiously verbal child who spoke like he swallowed a theasurus. My reading / hand writing was poor though (dislexia) which caussed a lot of frustration. However my comprihension and retention of (most) information was stupidly good which made me very easily board.

With homeschooling my parents were able to fit lessons around my strengths and weeknesses like a glove to minamise my frustration. I imagine your son may need a similar level of educational customisation.

I'm just guessing but in the average class the teacher produces a lesson plan for each kid but they are all (nearly) carbon copies. Your sons will need to be radicaly difrent. Like a second lesson inside a lesson, which may require a dedicated teaching asistant to facilitate.

The reality of teaching is it's not like a sope opera, it's more like an epic. You miss one episode and you are lost. You don't catch one foundational principal in education an every subseqent lesson is wasted on you. Your son probably needs good one to one suport to figure out where he lost the 'thread' of the lesson and pick up from there with some creative teaching stratergies. Unless of course its actually boardom on his part because he learns the lessons too easily and feels half the class is just wasting time. Again the answer is aceleration and one to one suport.

Or he might just be disinterested. Not every child is instantly facnated by maths. it can feel very dry. But there are ways to make it intresting. Like linking maths to prity diagrams, or music, or showing how maths is usefull for cool things like blowing stuff up or sending rockets to the moon. Stuff that captures kids imagination. Again that probably requires an imaginative 1 to 1 suport worker / TA who is present in basicly every lesson exclusivly for your son.

Basicly if school feels like a prison where he's just being bossed around but not actually learning he's going to hate it and probably get progresivly worse. If he feels like he has a more cooperative and profitable relationship with his teachers he's probably going to get better.

From personal experience at home the thing that has worked best is changing our mindset. That is limiting demands and giving notice, sometimes giving options. Things change as they get older and challenges change, but the thing that has worked most was changing our expectations, enjoying things we can do together as a family and accepting that some things we might have done are not possible.

My daughter is in year 2, they do have some strategies to help with her emotional regulation but as they are suspecting ADHD for her she is still too young for assessment. She has got a bit worse as the workload has got harder, she says she misses reception because they played lots. But maybe she would be much worse without the strategies and SEN input? Hopefully the EHCP will steer the school in the right direction and his teacher can provide him with the environment and guidance he needs. I’m not sure how long they take though as we haven’t got to that point yet

Hi Max this is really useful advice, thank you.
Sorry you had a rough experience as a child - I guess we are lucky now that much more is known and more tolerant these days. Our approach definitely wouldn't be enforcing/ ABA etc.
Given what you mentioned about altering mindset, we are also wondering if things dont improve we should look at changing environments and several other 'normal' things - ie not bothering going to parties that we know hes not prob interested in. And even weather a small specialist autism school, or a montessory school where they get to learn by playing and building etc may be better suited to the way his brain works.
I have several friends who have autistic boys and most say that their kids have learned to 'cope' better with their own feelings and environments at say 7 years old than 5 years old, but we are of course aware that autism and PDA is a life term condition that should be worked with and not against.
Thanks

Also, As it's so challenging at the moment I was also looking for a steer to hear if anyone had positive stories of their kids handling the challenges of autism/ PDA better at say age 7/8 as opposed to 5. Our hope is he can learn and develop and things will become a little easier that now. thank you

thanks very much for your reply - appreciate it. Will check this out for sure.

As it's so challenging at the moment I was also looking for a steer to hear if anyone had positive stories of their kids handling the challenges of autism/ PDA better at say age 7/8 as opposed to 5. Our hope is he can learn and develop and things will become a little easier that now. thank you

thank you for your reply GuybrushThreepwood. It's a good question - we used to think maybe it was too much going on, 30 kids, noise etc but actuall;y think thats not the main issue. He really doesnt like talking about his feelings but he saids he hates classroom as the work is too hard - things that are reading, writing, maths i think he just reaches capacity v fast and a whole day of the threat of that means he just rejects it. first half of term he would stay in class most of the day, now not at all. maybe his masking has run out.
All he wanst to do is build things and play with marble rub/ building blocks etc and currently the teachers let him do that. he gets v dysregulated if 'forced' to do things he doesn't want so it's counter productive.
We'll keep trying !

I tried to write you a long response and if it shows up then great but the internet seems to have eaten my words which is making me really angry. There's nothing worse then having tried to formulate a useful response for somebody to find that it has vanished. You take all the energy and donate it to somebody else only for the internet to be a git 

My main advice was to look up Sally cats PDA on Facebook because she explained it in a way that made me understand myself. My other device was to listen to your child and do what you think is best, that does not mean going along with what teachers and counselors say as they are often clueless about PDA. Most of them don't even agree that PDA exists. 

I would advise a mindset change. PDA (I'm sure I have it along with my father and my youngest niece) is just hellish from the inside. There are times You can't do things even if you want to more than anything in the world. And when I say times, I mean daily. I am afraid your child is going to find life very difficult and I am so sorry. They will find it more difficult if they are made to do things that conform with society's needs, especially if they are forced into it by guilt which was my mother's technique for managing me. 

With the right therapy he may be able to cope better but if that therapy includes ABA and forcing to do things in ways that neurotypical society finds acceptable you will probably find that you are making matters worse. I am sorry to be blunt. Whilst I did not receive official ABA my parents made me conform through beatings, deprivation of food and being locked in my room and punished every time I stepped out of line. Granted I wasn't diagnosed as a child but I am still carrying the scars that my parents left. 

I would encourage you to completely review how you think about your child's PDA. Do things differently, do things how they work for you not what teachers or therapists tell you that you should do. Look up Sally cats PDA on Facebook, she has a lot of really useful information that has made it much easier for me to understand myself. We might be quite difficult people to get along with especially when the hormones kick in, but the PDA as I know are highly creative and have so much passion if it isn't stamped out by the rules of society. 

I hope I haven't made that sound too bad I have been trying very hard to make this a balanced view but I am PDA/ADHD/traumatised and I don't do balance very well!

It probably will depend what is triggering him to want to run away from class and whether that trigger can be removed for him. Is he able to communicate what he doesn’t like about school? If it is all rooted in demand avoidance then his teachers will need to change their approach when he is asked to do things. Is he in a mainstream school?