the “stern” look

belle and i have been working on why she feels the staff get frustrated with her and i drew her a chart that showed

belle + “yes” +”ok”= staff 

She seemed to respond well to that, but i also explained that the staff can also get frustrated about things unrelated to her and that if they ask her to do her work they are not always frustrated. Then we reviewed the nanny 911 concepts of communication and respect.

Hard concepts…… i wrote to her teachers to explain what Belle and I had talked about so we could send similar messages.

Her teacher wrote back:   Belle talked with me this morning about “stern” looks and what that means.  We explored that sometimes people don’t look happy or sad or angry while they are giving her time (ie: to engage in tasks, check her schedule, make a choice, etc.).  She ended up calling that the “blank” face.  it was a good discussion.

If that’s not communication and respect I don’t know what is.

analyzing behavior

Behavior has always been intriguing and challenging to me as a Mom. I have a nursing background so when my boys were young I often did somewhat of a nursing care plan in order to chart behaviors and strategize ways to eliminate or replace the behavior. My husband and i even took parenting classes so that we would have the same goals and parenting techniques, understood consequences and how to apply them, both natural and logical. If all else failed we would turn to a reward system and some appropriate reinforcers and whala! three happy, loving, respectful, mature young men developed.

…and then I was blessed with a little girl with autism. Consequences didn’t make sense, communication was a huge roadblock, reasons for behaviors became allusive, and reinforcers took a lot of creativity to figure out and usually needed to be changed frequently. Along with that was the curious delema of my daughter exhibiting defiant behaviors at school that she never does at home and loving, trusting, mature behaviors at home that she doesn’t exhibit at school. Mix that with middle school,depression, lack of confidence, inconsistent communication (and academic) skills and extreme passions and you have a pretty miserable child (and school personal)

For years I’ve been asking for staff familiar with behavior analysis- looking beyond the specific behavior to what the function of the behavior is (usually power, fear of failure, to make a demand, to escape or refuse, or for self- gratification) and then finding replacement behaviors that are appropriate.

From what i can tell my daughter’s having 2-3 meltdowns a day in school where she picks some arbitrary reason for not complying with their requests (you need a snake, or my friend is mad at me), then ends up in the office on the floor and gets the aide on the verge of tears.  Three staff members take turns dealing with her (she sure knows how to get attention and control) usually without success in compliance, but some deescalation of the behavior. I’m trying to guide the team to figure out the function of the behaviors and to identify, teach and reinforce replacement behaviors, but i don’t really know how to do that myself and I know they don’t, so it goes into it’s negative cycle.

my goal- find the help we need, find the environment that has what she needs and avoids what she doesn’t 9sensory overload), find experienced staff that has seen this before, learn as much as i can about behavior, it’s function and teaching replacement behaviors, and doing what i can at home to teach the skills my daughter needs to succeed in a more uncomfortable, scary environment (how to refuse, how to request, how to compromise)

action- we have a behavioral therapist coming over next week. Continue to work with the school team, request a behavior plan update at school overseen by an autism behavior expert. Get a message and then meditate.

We have to do this for our future, for her future!