It sounds like you're doing a lot of good things, anyway! Sorry about the problems with the SLP and OT. It is hard to keep various people on the same page about which academic things need to get done. Our contact from the schools who oversees dd's ISP wants to see dd get up to grade level in math this year, and I'm just not sure that's ever happening, or is even very important. If that relationship becomes too troublesome I may see if I can sever it.

Thank you, I can understand that. Our issues are different, I think, from what you have, and our ABA is enjoyable for dd, generally. It all creates a different equation. Makes sense.

Lecka, I'm listening in here, and now I'm really curious. Can you tell me more about why ABA seems like a "big, heavy thing," and especially one that might not be entirely benign? What are the ethical considerations? We're doing it because it's what the neuropsych said we should do, but it hasn't been earthshakingly effective in any way. Now, we are just getting to add more hours. Maybe that will make a difference. Or maybe it isn't really what we need----??? We also have meds. We may need OT. Not trying to divert the thread, just very interested in what you mean here.

Hugs. I am right there with you; both of my parents died within the last year, and it is hard. Each birthday, each holiday, each milestone and anniversary is hard. I think older traditions of a lengthy period of mourning showed a lot of wisdom.

Prairiewindmomma, you are absolutely right about both the short lessons and the physical breaks. Usually dd walks her dog a few times each day. It may not be coincidence that we had a couple of lousy days when it was rainy. All of you who have said to just relax and have reasonable expectations and stop fretting are also right. Somehow the message has sunk in today. I let dd watch documentaries, we read a bit of history, she did a bit of math, we had ABA, and we had a good day. She took the dog out, and she saw a friend. It was good. Thanks for talking me down.

Some people live in a very comfortable world in which those assumptions about parenting have never had to be challenged. I would not base your opinions about how well you are doing on their naive ideas.

Seconding The Explosive Child and, if that doesn't seem to be enough, serious consideration of evaluations. The Strong-Willed Child was a disaster *for us*. Its premise, as I remember it, is the opposite of The Explosive Child. Ross Greene says in The Explosive Child that children do well if they can; if they are consistently having problems, that behavior is caused by lagging skill development. There is no sense in punishing a child because they do not have the skills they need. Instead, he shows you how to help them develop those skills. It's essentially like saying you wouldn't punish for dyslexia, you remediate instead. If I am remembering Dobson and The Strong-Willed Child correctly, his idea is that you need to demonstrate your own authority, with physical correction if necessary (please correct me if I'm wrong). But this assumes that the child does have the (actually very complex) skills to be able to behave as we want them to, and that is not always the case. We listened to bad advice and tried Dobson. We also went to a therapist who did not have the knowledge or experience to suggest neuropsych evaluations. She diagnosed our dd with ODD. Long story short and years later, we got a valid, helpful diagnosis of autism from a neuropsych. But long before we got that diagnosis we'd tossed out Dobson and used Greene, because Dobson's approach made things much worse and Greene's approach helped. You can't punish missing skills into existence, and you can't tell what's at the root of a child's problems without a competent evaluation. (Minniewannabe: please forgive my fairly strongly-worded response to Dobson. I know that for another child, his methods might work. But they were so disastrous for us that, where there's a suspicion of a real diagnosable issue, he's a bit of a trigger for me. Nothing personal. :-). ) And, final note: problems are scary. But I wouldn't be scared of a label. Labels tell us how to make things better. I would be scared of a problem that isn't correctly labeled and thus isn't correctly treated. Trust me, that is worse.

Yes, kbutton, I wouldn't mind the rereading if she were just a little more willing to add a few new things to the mix! :lol: :lol: I loved (still do) rereading favorites too.

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug: That sounds very hard.

Okay, a few more thoughts and questions. OhE, did the OT do the neurofeedback and Therapeutic Listening? I'm glad we have that appointment next week, that may be important. Private reading is on grade level, as long as you're not picky about whether she can actually pronounce names of characters and places so that anyone else will recognize them. Familiar words she gets, but not new things she needs to sound out. Her pleasure reading is also limited and repetitive. She's going through Harry Potter and the Warriers books for the umpteenth time. For me, though, she's read Because of Winn Dixie and Shiloh, and has started Julie of the Wolves. Working memory and processing speed are ok, and the CTOPP was average. I have wondered about tracking problems, and may get to a COVD screening, but given what I know about the rigors of vision therapy and her frustration tolerance, that's not an avenue I've gone down yet. The thing about reading is, it doesn't matter except socially if she doesn't pronounce the names of Harry Potter characters properly because she wouldn't slow down and figure them out. (Though social things are really a big deal, especially for a kid with ASD.) But then you get to history and science content and over the long term, if not right now, I feel like she needs to be able to deal with the terminology she comes across. But I don't know what her life will hold, in terms of future education. You're probably right that we'll see who she'll be more clearly in a few years. Puberty may be here. She's been sleeping an awful lot lately. But I'm also concerned that her SSRI may not be working any longer. It was like a miracle drug when it was prescribed in the spring, but her developmental ped had to increase the dose about two months ago, and now she seems to be heading downhill again. We've had major meltdowns each of the last two days. And the elephant in the room is that last winter, after we got her ASD diagnosis, we went through the SN process with the local school hoping they had some suitable program for her. They approved her for special education, but did not really have a good situation to put her in. So she's still home, but with an ISP rather than an IEP, and the school is (very loosely) overseeing her progress. They don't *do* anything with her, but we have goals she is supposed to meet. That just adds another layer of pressure without giving any assistance. They were very nice, and try to offer suggestions, but that's it. I think I may try going with her interests more. It would be interesting to see where that would take us. I appreciate all the food for thought here. I'll be mulling it over.

Yes, we have used both carrot and stick today.

"Upcoming biological changes": oh, you have just chilled me to the marrow of my bones, lol! Talk about scary thoughts! Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately. ;-) ;-) ;-)

OhElizabeth, the charts are not really that much help. I think we've overdone them, actually. Most important are the sheets of data for ABA on her behavior, both positive and negative. We track how often things happen, the BCBA plots it all on a graph, and hopefully the negative behaviors diminish over time, though they haven't really done so yet. Then there's a chart that shows how many school subjects we've gotten through each day, with a small reward for days when we get everything done. There's also a chart for days she gets through while avoiding the worst behaviors we're hoping to extinguish. Good days earn more rewards at the end of the week. The trouble is we're experiencing chart fatigue, I think. There's too much to keep track of, and too many rewards getting handed out. Dd wants too many rewards that I'm not willing to give her, like lots of sodas for example, so she gets mad every time that comes up. We're already relying on chocolate chips for math, and $0.25/word she sounds out (maybe 4 to 8 words a day). It all just gets to be too much, but this is the only way we've found to motivate her. She gets to play games during ABA as a reward for getting through her Zones activity or whatever else they're doing. Unfortunately the BCBA did not go to the Zones workshop after all, so she is probably less familiar with that than you are now. She does say she likes the program, but it's all brand new to her. Anyway, thanks for the sympathetic ears, everyone. This has been a tough day. I know we just have to keep on going and do what we can, and slowly we'll make progress.

Dd is 11, which largely accounts for my frustration. I wish we'd been able to get a diagnosis when we first started trying, years ago, but that ship has sailed. So now, yes, I know intellectually that we have to do the work on emotional regulation and executive function before other things will happen very effectively. I do have that as the first priority, and I think everyone who deals with her closely can see the need. But at the same time she's in fifth grade, logic stage, almost middle school, and I have a hard time not freaking out over where we are. I *know* this is counterproductive, but-- my gosh, on bad days she can still get mixed up and forget that she shouldn't subtract the top number from the bottom. On good days, no problem. And then there's reading, and spelling, and writing. Yes, we have done phonics until she is sick of it, but she's never *cared*, and it hasn't stuck very well. She thinks her reading is just fine. She's perfectly happy to read for pleasure (which she does, a lot), and just skip or guess at words. She gets very frustrated with me for asking her to slow down, work at separating the syllables, and sound out the word. I've started literally paying her for each word she sounds out, and we're having our best luck yet because it motivates her to put in the necessary work. Her bank account is getting pretty healthy, lol, but it helps. Kbutton, I have ordered Apples and Pears, we're starting spelling over from the beginning, so I hope that will carry over and help with reading too. And like you said, once she knows a word, she does remember it pretty well.

Thanks, Lecka. Yes, we use all sorts of little rewards. Some are immediate, like chocolate chips after a certain set of math problems, some are more long-term. I've been aware of the Just Give Him the Whale! Book, but I need to order it. We do use that basic idea as much as possible, and there's undoubtedly more I could do. I'll order it today. I find myself getting frustrated because we seem to get so little done. Any little obstacle means we have to take a break, calm down, and lose time. There is so much to do and so little time. We have worked on school during ABA to some extent, but lately they've been doing Zones. A lot of ABA time is also spent on fun activities and games as a reward for getting through the "business" of the day, like the Zones of Regulation. So if the BCBA is here for two hours, they check dd's charts, do a Zones activity, play a game, and that's about it.

There just aren't enough hours in the day. We finally found a source of help with ABA expenses, for which I'm enormously grateful, so dd will get 10 hours per week instead of just 5. Everyone agrees that is necessary. Actually part of the time will be more mental-health than ABA, but in any case, if she can't learn some emotional regulation, she'll have major problems functioning in life. This is her biggest challenge and greatest need. She also has an OT evaluation scheduled next week to rule out sensory issues. This is something I should have done a year ago, but we had to get the ABA in place first, and other things have intervened as well. So now, we'll see about the sensory stuff. That may be another appointment each week. And when do we do school? This is a kid who has very little frustration tolerance and shuts down repeatedly in the course of daily work. So, reading yesterday, the word "necessity" stopped us for over half an hour. She's been tested for dyslexia, has average phonemic awareness, nobody sees any *reason* for reading problems, but the school taught her to read using whole-language method, and she tries to guess at words based on the first letter. When guessing doesn't work she gets frustrated, and she can't handle frustration. Grrrrr!!! And as you see I'm getting frustrated too. It's like this in everything. The essence of some (maybe a lot) of the trouble is that she just doesn't care. She has her special interests, and beyond that, she's really not very interested in the world. No curiosity about the French and Indian War, lol, let alone long division. So there's no frustration tolerance, there's no basic interest or curiosity, she's a slow learner in general unless she's engaged in a topic, and there is *not enough time in the day* to do all the remediation she needs. We have to demonstrate adequate yearly progress. I'm thinking we find an evaluator who understands special needs situations? Have you all found that people understand that, despite an IQ within (broadly speaking) average range, progress may be justifiably slow? How do you find the time to do what you must, or triage without losing too much sleep over what you can't do?

Thank you; that was fascinating! I wish we had one of the groups focused on helping girls with social issues near us.

That sounds so difficult; I'm sorry. I hope you can find an alternative which helps.

No, I need to look at the Social Thinking stuff. Oddly enough, the neuropsych said her theory of mind is largely intact. Not perfect, but not so bad. But I suspect under stress that may change, at least in practical terms.

As for the matter of punishing kids for things which are essentially beyond their control, that resonates so strongly with me. I think Ross Green and Kuypers have jointly given me the language and mental framework to process what we've been seeing all along. So, kids do well when they can, and punishments send dd straight to the red zone. She can. not. learn when she is in the red zone, so punishments are not only useless, they are counterproductive. And, as you say, why on earth would we punish kids for a developmental delay? But punishment ("consequences") is exactly what my personal candidate for worst psychologist in the world told us dd needed more of a few years back. The thought of that man sends me into the red zone. Dd sat in his office mute, avoiding his gaze, we brought lengthy documentation about her meltdowns which he didn't read, and he told us there was nothing organic going on. It was just a matter of consistent discipline. So those people are out there, and heaven help the kids whose lives they influence. I really wonder where we'd be in this process if we hadn't wasted time trying to follow his advice. And I worry about the long-term effects of being pushed into the red zone over and over in the name of discipline. We've learned better, and done a complete turnaround, and we are seeing progress, so thank goodness for that.

OhE, my dd is almost 11. I need to go back and read everything you've just written really carefully. I wish I'd signed up for the workshop near me, but couldn't do it this time. I think our BCBA was going: hope she did or will or whatever and gets a lot out of it. I don't think she's been working much on tools; need to check on that. Definitely not checking zones twice/day. She'll be here tomorrow, so I'll find out about that.

We're doing Zones with dd's ABA provider. The jury is still out on effectiveness for us. Dd doesn't have much trouble identifying what zone she's in, but often lacks motivation or probably ability to shift to a more appropriate zone. I hope that may come with time and practice. We're only a few chapters and weeks into the book.

ETA disclaimer: I haven't taken in a child or teen, but I do have a child with multiple diagnoses. I have no experience with what you'd need legally, and much would depend on the diagnoses, but I think I'd want to know that the teen himself was in favor of the plan. I also think I'd need his and his parents' agreement that he would begin counselling immediately if the diagnoses include any sort of mental health concerns. It might be appropriate for family counselling to be included for all of you to help support everyone as he settles in and inevitable stresses occur.

Are you comfortable talking with the teacher and explaining that you're pursuing evaluations? Is she open to trying some other activities which aren't focused on winning and losing? Since physical activity isn't the problem, perhaps she could include fewer win/lose games and more activities which would let kids exercise in other ways if she understands that there are real reasons your ds is having trouble. And, you know, these kids are six, right? I'm not sure perfect compliance is to be expected at that age, special needs or not. I think perhaps the fact that this teacher is new has significance here. She may need to learn to expect a few outliers in a class. I'm trying to remember when my kids were that age... Seems like there were often a few kids with their own agendas/ ideas/ needs.

But regarding the congratulatory ice cream: that would be a surprise, not something to anticipate and possibly fail to achieve.