Welcome to the world of teenagers and hormones. Mix that with the world of Autism and ADD and we have a recipe for some fairly complex behaviour patterns!
I am tremendously lucky according to friends. I have two amazing boys. Having been a teenage girl once long, long ago, I must admit, I am counting my lucky stars. But the complex period of adolescence takes on a whole nother twist when you are trying to ferrit out which behaviors are normal teenage "angst" things and which things are new hurdles to manage in terms of the spectrum.
One thing that has been a long standing issue for us is the destruction of personal property. I have done lots of online research and apparently it is pretty common in Aspergers, but that doesn't make it any less worrisome or frustrating. It started when he was little. Small things that would show up broken, ususally not things of any significance but broken none the less. At first we didn't put two and two together. It is like what the cat does when it is mad at you. You go to the door and the cat has pissed in your shoe. Not your husbands or the kids, just yours. Once we figured it out we could correlate what had been broken with frustration towards a certain person. We have addressed it out in the open, but often it is weeks or months before we find the object and by that point there is no correlation in his mind between the event and the damage.
The Apsie brain is an interesting road map, some areas have tons of wiring and others have none. I have blogged before about the seat belt issue. He can do 324 times 54 in his head, but he can't remember to put on a seat belt. There are a billion wires for math but none to connect the wires for seatbelt. There is no rhyme or reason for which are connected and which aren't. I only figure them out when they are not correctable. It is a slow imperfect, frustrating process.
Recently we had an incident where a toque was fed into a vaccum and quietly put away without discussion. We made him give up the money he earned for his report card to pay to fix the vaccuum cleaner.
We are trying to make the consequences significant for him to try to extinguish the behaviour. He is constantly trying to earn money so we figured that might make some impact. There are not many things that really seem to have an impact for him.
These things are frustrating and significant because to function in the world we must all use our communication skills. If I am mad at my boss and I feed his jacket through the shredder, that is considered vandalism and I will not only be charged I will be fired!!! I am trying to impress that words must be used to help others understand why and what you are frustrated about. That destruction of property is not an option. The price of doing this will be set high and hard. There is no other way to slam home this lesson.
I feel like I walk a minefield sometimes trying to figure out which are real and which are dummies, and even when I think I have it figured out, there is really no way to be sure. How do we accomodate the things they cannot change, without empowering them to use being on the spectrum as a crutch? How do I encourage them to be motivated and self reliant without losing my temper over having to repeat every instruction a thousand times before I lose it and decide to use a visual aid? I wish sometimes they came with a wiring map. A bit of an electrical blue print so that I wouldn't feel like I was on a brand new job site every day.
The risk I see as a parent is giving them a "pass" for something they can actually do that they are pretending they can't. And the only way I know is history. How long I have been trying to diligently modify that particular behaviour before I give in. From the outside to family, it looks very non scientific. I agree, it's not.
I simply haven't found any other way to cope. And cope each day I must.
I am certain that in many ways it is a similar if not the same process every parent must find to survive adolescence. And so, I carry on another day and hope not to find any other broken surprises at home.
In love and light,
Kathryn
I am tremendously lucky according to friends. I have two amazing boys. Having been a teenage girl once long, long ago, I must admit, I am counting my lucky stars. But the complex period of adolescence takes on a whole nother twist when you are trying to ferrit out which behaviors are normal teenage "angst" things and which things are new hurdles to manage in terms of the spectrum.
One thing that has been a long standing issue for us is the destruction of personal property. I have done lots of online research and apparently it is pretty common in Aspergers, but that doesn't make it any less worrisome or frustrating. It started when he was little. Small things that would show up broken, ususally not things of any significance but broken none the less. At first we didn't put two and two together. It is like what the cat does when it is mad at you. You go to the door and the cat has pissed in your shoe. Not your husbands or the kids, just yours. Once we figured it out we could correlate what had been broken with frustration towards a certain person. We have addressed it out in the open, but often it is weeks or months before we find the object and by that point there is no correlation in his mind between the event and the damage.
The Apsie brain is an interesting road map, some areas have tons of wiring and others have none. I have blogged before about the seat belt issue. He can do 324 times 54 in his head, but he can't remember to put on a seat belt. There are a billion wires for math but none to connect the wires for seatbelt. There is no rhyme or reason for which are connected and which aren't. I only figure them out when they are not correctable. It is a slow imperfect, frustrating process.
Recently we had an incident where a toque was fed into a vaccum and quietly put away without discussion. We made him give up the money he earned for his report card to pay to fix the vaccuum cleaner.
We are trying to make the consequences significant for him to try to extinguish the behaviour. He is constantly trying to earn money so we figured that might make some impact. There are not many things that really seem to have an impact for him.
These things are frustrating and significant because to function in the world we must all use our communication skills. If I am mad at my boss and I feed his jacket through the shredder, that is considered vandalism and I will not only be charged I will be fired!!! I am trying to impress that words must be used to help others understand why and what you are frustrated about. That destruction of property is not an option. The price of doing this will be set high and hard. There is no other way to slam home this lesson.
I feel like I walk a minefield sometimes trying to figure out which are real and which are dummies, and even when I think I have it figured out, there is really no way to be sure. How do we accomodate the things they cannot change, without empowering them to use being on the spectrum as a crutch? How do I encourage them to be motivated and self reliant without losing my temper over having to repeat every instruction a thousand times before I lose it and decide to use a visual aid? I wish sometimes they came with a wiring map. A bit of an electrical blue print so that I wouldn't feel like I was on a brand new job site every day.
The risk I see as a parent is giving them a "pass" for something they can actually do that they are pretending they can't. And the only way I know is history. How long I have been trying to diligently modify that particular behaviour before I give in. From the outside to family, it looks very non scientific. I agree, it's not.
I simply haven't found any other way to cope. And cope each day I must.
I am certain that in many ways it is a similar if not the same process every parent must find to survive adolescence. And so, I carry on another day and hope not to find any other broken surprises at home.
In love and light,
Kathryn
