Having to Remind Myself

About an hour after my post on Floortime went up yesterday, the psychologist who coaches us on Floortime gave us a call. She didn’t see the post; rather, she called because she had just observed our son at school and then spoken to the school’s program coordinator afterward.

In speaking with the coordinator, she said that she realized how difficult it must be for us parents to hear so many varied thoughts about our son. The school uses one approach, various therapists advocate others, and some of those may be different from our personal philosophy.

She said that she understood how confusing it must be for parents to get so many distinct, and at times conflicting advice from professionals.

Hah, it was like she had read my mind, or at least my blog.

She wanted us to know that it’s okay to adapt the different approaches to fit our personal beliefs. And that certain approaches may be more appropriate for one situation and not another.

Then we talked about one particular example of where Kai had difficulty in school. The situation was that after eating his lunch, Kai threw the plastic food container in the garbage. A teaching assistant (TA) reminded him that it can be reused and that he should put it back in his lunchbox to take home. Kai reacted by hitting the staff member.

The psychologist said that she might have used a more positive approach. So, in this instance, she would first thank Kai for cleaning up and then remind him how important it is to recycle his containers. She said that Kai is quick to anger when he feels that he has done something wrong, so a more positive approach may help.

At home, I could see myself in that same situation, reacting with impatience. I might have raised my voice that he threw away his container when he should know that he shouldn’t.

But I have to keep reminding myself that parenting a child with special needs is often much more complicated than parenting a typical child. I think a lot of my frustrations come when I forget that, and don’t remember that I need to react differently than I would with another child to situations like the one I described. A simple thing like being more positive may make a world of difference.

And so I welcomed the thoughts of the psychologist. Her timing was perfect.

I learn, grow, and adapt.

Is it Floortime, or Is It Me?

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

How many of you have heard that before? When you hear it at the end of a relationship, it sounds like a bad excuse for breaking up with someone. But, sometimes, there’s truth to the statement. Sometimes two people are just not meant to be together.

Now, as we are having increasingly frequent behavior challenges with our son, I wonder if it is time to say, “It’s not you, Floortime, it’s me.”

The principles of Floortime have never come easily to me.

I was raised the “Asian” way, meaning that I didn’t have a lot of playful interactions with my parents. My upbringing was more the polar opposite of the Floortime model: stern parents, little room for discussion, obeying what you are told to do.

On the other hand, the way that I was raised was not exactly according to the ABA model either. When it came to positive reinforcement, well, let’s just say that the only carrots I saw were on my dinner plate. Good behavior was expected. It was the norm. There were no carrots/rewards for doing well. But, for bad deeds, well, there was a price to be paid.

With my son, however, we have used elements of both philosophies. We use the positive reinforcement aspects of ABA quite a bit. And though I didn’t personally experience much of that in my own childhood, I understand the reasoning behind it. It makes empirical sense to me. And I see how it works with my son.

On the other hand, the Floortime philosophy is a lot harder for me to grasp. I do understand the idea of following the child’s lead and building relationships, showing that we understand him and encouraging interactions. But I’m unsure about what to do when our son misbehaves, as he has more often these days.

Some of the psychologists who espouse the Floortime approach have said that when our son does not respond to a request to begin homework, for example, that means that he is communicating that he is not ready to work and may need to be given more time. My natural reaction, on the other hand, would be to give him some type of punishment for not complying.

If he gets angry and uses unsafe words, their counsel may be to use humor to get him to laugh and break the tension. My natural reaction is to give him a timeout for using those unsafe words.

The past few weeks, my son seems more defiant. He laughs it off when I tell him that he has made a bad choice. He is more disrespectful to my wife and me. In my gut, it feels wrong to laugh off those situations with humor. It feels like we are failing to teach our child discipline when we just go with his desires not to do something he doesn’t want to do.

I don’t doubt that Floortime has been a huge benefit in many respects. We turned to it in the hopes of improving our son’s skills for natural and spontaneous communication. And he has improved remarkably in those areas. So, maybe this is a case of having to take the bad with the good. Perhaps as my son speaks much more freely, we may not like everything that he says.

I’m also well aware that the problem may be that I just don’t understand the principles of Floortime well enough to execute it correctly. And that is why the problem may be more me than anything.

Still, as my son gets further and further away from respectful person I want him to be, I wonder if we are doing right by him by continuing to do what we have been doing.

It’s time to give critical thought as to whether it is our approach, our execution, or something else that needs to change.

No Escape for Uncomfortable Feelings

My wife and son have a session with a child psychologist every Thursday. The primary purpose of these sessions is for my wife to play with Kai while receiving coaching on the DIR®/Floortime method of play therapy so that she can better engage with him and help foster social interactions.

Lately, every session has had the same pattern. Kai would pick a toy, play for a little while, but then, invariably, something would cause him to get upset. He might get frustrated that he can’t do something, or be told that he is making too much of a mess, or just run out of time. After awhile, he would try to hurt the therapist, my wife, or himself, and would need to be physically restrained while the therapist tried to peacefully get him calmed down.

As this continued week after week, my wife has grown frustrated. What good is all this? What progress is he making? When he gets upset and tries to hurt someone, why don’t we just yell at him? At least threatening him gets him to stop trying to hurt us; why do we need to do all of this therapy instead?

We met with the therapist the other day to address our concerns and gain a better understanding of the direction she was headed.

As she explained it, many kids with autism, like our son, have certain feelings that are uncomfortable for them and they just want to make these feelings stop. Kai’s tendency is to avoid feelings of disappointment and sadness. Before, when those feelings arose in a session, he would play with the numbers on the toy or real telephone in the room, or draw numbers on a sheet of paper. Withdrawing into his own world, particularly one filled with his beloved numbers, was a form of escape for him.

However, rather than letting him continue to escape from his uncomfortable feelings, his therapist has been trying to get him to actually feel the disappointment or sadness. Toward that, she moves the telephones and everything else with numbers out of the room before Kai gets there. Now, he has to face his feelings. But, because they are so uncomfortable for him, rather than feel sad, he will often go straight to anger instead. I think there is a fine line between anger and sadness. Anger is easy. Sadness is hard. And so, he seems to explode every week.

But, where is this going?

The thought is that as Kai gets more familiar with these feelings that he has been avoiding for so long, he will become desensitized toward them. Eventually, he will not go straight to anger. He will learn to tolerate sadness and disappointment.

To help build his tolerance, the therapist wants us to empathize with his feelings and express them in an appropriate way. So, for instance, we may say, “I know you wanted to finish that project. Oh, it’s so disappointing that we ran out of time.” He may not be able to express these feelings himself, but is comforted by knowing that we can relate and are expressing his feelings for him. Over time, he will be able to do more of this on his own. And, as he does so, he will stay in a regulated state rather than immediately getting angry.

She also explained that while yelling and threatening him may have a short-term effect of stopping his immediate bad behavior, it does not have the longer-term benefits of teaching him how to cope. Instead, what he learns is that loud voices and threats are used to get someone to do something you want them to do. And that is certainly not the lesson we want him to learn.

This method that we are trying works slowly. It takes patience. Sometimes it is hard to tell if we are making progress. But, a quick fix usually isn’t best for the long term. We’re looking to build a strong foundation for our son’s future. And so, we will stick with this.