Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi just wanted to hear from other parents. I am really frustrated at the moment. My 9 year old who has Autism hates school hates his teachers. He tells me that he has no friends and everyone treats him like a baby. If i tell him to do something even simple like brush his teeth we have a major arguement he just says no. If i ask him he starts arguing with me and says no im not doing it and it ends up a battle and then me shouting at him and him crying and 20 minutes later him then brushing his teeth and apologiseing. If i ask him to eat his dinner he says no im not eating at the table i want to eat in the living room so that he can watch TV. I give him a choice and say you either eat it in the Kitchen at the table or you go hungry simple. He then starts arguing with me saying no im eating here in the living room and thats it! This carries on and I end up shoutinga nd feeling absoutely drained and gulity for shouting. It seems that he does this for everything and I dont know what to do. It breaks my heart that he talks to me in a horrible tone of voice and then lies and says you said the other day that I could do whatever it is that he wants to do. You are horrible you are nasty to me. You never listen is what I get from him. When he calms down I ask him about his behaviour he then apologises and then the next day it starts again. I have punoshed him by grounding him and not letting him watch TV etc which he then says yes mummy I know Im grounded today and he complies to the punishment. I think im just frustrated any help appreciated!
claira said:I am new to this. My 6 year old has just been diagnosed with autism. At the moment he is swearing when he gets home from school and even swears at the local park and with children around his neighbourhood. We keep on telling him that this is not acceptable but he does not understand. Its getting to the point where I don't want to take him to the park etc.Has anybody got any advice?
I am new to this. My 6 year old has just been diagnosed with autism.
At the moment he is swearing when he gets home from school and even swears at the local park and with children around his neighbourhood. We keep on telling him that this is not acceptable but he does not understand. Its getting to the point where I don't want to take him to the park etc.
Has anybody got any advice?
I don't really have a solution, but we have tried numerous things with my son with limited success. This is before we knew anything about ASD, and just thought our son had a lot of social and anger issues and was immature for his age, so I can only really comment about whether things helped or not or made things worse.
We first found out he was swearing by his school who broke it to us. At first we struggled to believe it as we don't use such language at home, but when I observed him from a window of our house playing on our housing estate - it suddenly made sense.
We finally after a lot of persuasion got him to admit that he is swearing and explained that it was wrong... not that that made the slightest difference.
We thought it must be from the estate kids that he's picking up the bad language, so we isolated certain kids from the estate that we had marked down as the "wrong sort" that he might be playing with and told him he wasn't to play with them any more if they kept on swearing or encouraging him to play inappropriate PS3 games which encourage violence...
He accepted this quite easily, and stopped playing with those friends - and for a while we thought things had improved. His anger levels at home also reduced (as they were always high after coming back from playing).
The swearing returned though, and we found out even the good kids swear - and as our son had so few friends, we felt we couldn't extend the punishment any further - so just explained that just because they do something that he knows is wrong, doesn't mean he should copy them. I gave him the example of smoking, asking if they were smoking - would he join in, even though he hated it when his mum used to smoke? He said he didn't know, but he probably would.
So we established peer pressure and copying others was a big part of it.
As time went on we got him a mobile phone, as he was starting secondary school in the following term. It wasn't long until we found he'd installed Instagram against our instructions, and was swearing at all his friends from school - calling people names and just being quite horrid to be honest. We confiscated it and I got him a "brick" with no internet access on it - at least until we felt he'd matured enough or understood our reasons.
We returned his phone to him about 3 months later after a period of good behaviour. Within a couple of weeks, he was having problems at secondary school, and his tutor got in contact with us as kids were complaining about his language. We checked his phone and he was doing it again - worse this time than before. So again we explained that people get offended by the language he's using.
We tried a different tack this time which did apear to have some success. This time, we admitted and accepted that "some swearing" with his mates in informal circumstances like when playing football or messing around, is viewed as more acceptable than using that language around people that aren't his close friends or around adults or more formal situations like when at school. We explained that people that don't know him as a close friend would think badly of him if he swore around them - and they would only remember him for his bad language, and not because of anything else.
He seemed to accept that, and the school reported less incidents of casual swearing.
The fact that he over the past few months has gotten into numerous fights and used foul language in the process I think we have to treat separately - the fact is, he seems to have finally understood what casual swearing at inappropriate times means.
We're still not happy that he does swear - but seeing as kids his age all appear to swear, we found the absolute rule of "no swearing" just didn't work and he rebelled against it, and the other approach where we explained different situations and circumstances at least restricted it somewhat.
Hope that helps.