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Tricks of the Trade
Alex refused to get dressed or brush his teeth for a while. You had to physically brush his teeth; you had to physically put his clothes on. Some days, you could do that, and other days, you couldn’t do that. Other days, you had to chase him around the house, and some days for your own sanity you just didn’t brush his teeth. And that’s okay. You just try to pick your battles for the things that are more important. Alex is hyper, very hyper. He has these ADHD symptoms where he’s just kind of, bouncing off the walls. Gum is an incredible stress-reliever, we’ve found. We actually worked with the school to allow him to chew gum, because it was a great stress reliever for him, and something to do. He’s allowed to draw in his classes, they actually let him doodle. If I thought that Stephanie’s body was too active for a situation, or if she was tapping or something that was possibly aggravating for other people in a group, then our little code word was “You need to do a body scan.” A body scan is she needs to look from her head to her toes, like look within, and try to modulate whatever was out of whack. So you could say it across the room, “Body scan!,” and nobody else would know what we were talking about, but she’d know that there was something that she was doing that she needed to address. As a younger child, when she was still very hyper, she would start her fidgeting or bumping around and it might aggravate somebody else who was a really quiet child sitting still, so I could just catch her eye and whisper to her, “Body Scan” and it would be like a game. And she liked that; it made sense to her. She could do it, and it was an internal adjustment, and it wasn’t anything that could be observed externally by anyone else. So that helped a lot. We’ve tried so many different things, with so many different behavior modifications: time-outs, sitting, quiet times for the homework, breaking up homework time, not having television on, not having computer or television before bedtime. Some of it is helpful. It does help to give Lindsay breaks in the homework time; it really does help if she does homework for a certain amount of time and then has a ten-minute break that she can have on the computer or on television, but we keep it within a certain limit. The break helps her to unwind a little bit, and defuse all her energy. I don’t leave the TV on before bedtime, because she’d never go to sleep. She’s not a kid that could fall asleep with the television on or something. She just would not be able to go to bed. Medicine so can behave differently if you want to With Andrew the one thing that I picked up on that I just thought was helpful to both him and to me and taking medicine is saying, “You know, you are not on this medicine to make you behave differently you are on the medicine so you can behave differently if you want to.” So I must have heard that from someone somewhere and that seemed to make some sense. Preteaching – tell ahead of time Preteaching helps. I always tell Jason a million times before an event or trip what is going to happen. If we are going somewhere that day, and we will be home late, I will tell him that he will be going to bed shortly after we get home. If we go to a store for a birthday present, I will tell him ahead of time that he will only be looking for his friend today. Whatever I know that will trigger a problem, I let him know ahead of time what to expect. He has to hear it several times and I make him look at me and tell me he understands. It works. Yelling does not work. Trying to make them do it the way you want does not work. Sometimes you have to give them the choice. My oldest son, Scott, will give himself a time table. He will finish what he is doing in 10 minutes and at a certain time he will start his homework. He will do certain things right after school and then certain after dinner. He will choose what day of the week he wants to mow the lawn, as long as he gets it done that week. We started to have Nick write stuff down. We put a whiteboard in his room. I would write on the whiteboard, “Put your dirty clothes in the hamper, put the clean clothes in the dryer,” and he would write underneath it, “band practice, blah, blah, blah.” He’s not as interested in being organized as we are in having him be organized. So we kind of have to reach a happy medium. You know, some things aren’t worth struggling over, and we kind of had to give up the things that weren’t terribly important. If he wants to have a disgusting room, it’s his choice. Close the door. It was about compromising. We told Nick, “You are not going to take your tutors to college with you, and we have to see that you are getting your assignments done.” So, if he’s not doing as well in school as he could be, because he’s not getting stuff in on time, we tell him “You’re not being responsible, so we have to help you do that. We need to look at your assignment book every week until you’re back on track.” And he hates that. But, too bad, essentially. We tell him, “You do what you’re supposed to do, and we’ll let you be grown-up. And if you don’t, then we’ll hold back.” And that’s worked with him, because it’s not a punishment. It’s to help him, you know? Other things that I want to do Nick will say to me, “I’m not Greg (Greg is Nick’s older brother). Greg gets straight A’s, and if I studied to get A’s, I can’t do all these other things that I want to do. B’s and an occasional C are okay.” And I said, “Mmm-you’re right.” That’s hard, but it’s sort of stepping back and looking at what’s important for him. He has really good self-esteem, and a part of that is because he does this other stuff. And he’s very successful at it. Alex and I have worked very hard. I would say one of the critical elements for Alex was recognizing that he had certain shortcomings, and having the ability to overcome them, by just simply baby steps. It wasn’t that he was going to just do what every other kid did; he was going to do things his own way. He’s smart enough. He can do it. It just doesn’t mean that he’s going to do it the way everyone else does. And once Alex recognized that, I think it was a whole different ballgame. |
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Copyright © 2007, Children's
Hospital Boston Department of Psychiatry. All Rights Reserved. The information on this website should not be taken as medical advice, which can only be given to you by your personal health care professional. Updated: February 12, 2007 |
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