Things That Work #4: Uncomplicated Reconnect Time

It's so easy to get caught up in the moment-to-moment power struggles, and/or whatever humiliating episode the school needs you to know about THIS time. ("He what??? But he's NEVER bitten anyone at HOME... .")

Your child needs a parent who is involved, who teaches him/her appropriate behaviour, who keeps them accountable for their actions, who insists that everyone do the best they can on everything... but more than anything, they need to feel connected to. Like someone really SEES them, really GETS them.

Some days, that's harder than others.

What you need is some kind of ritual; some kind of place or event where, whatever failures or disagreements or power struggles or paint-peeling-tantrums-audible-three-counties-away the day held, you can just be together in an uncomplicated way. Your child needs it very badly, but you need it too. You need to feel like a good parent, in the face of all the evidence that the job is not going well (and the deep-seated, ever-present fear that worse is yet to come). And you need regular doses of the wonderful kid that your child is, no matter what was on today's rap sheet.

In our house, it's story time. We cuddle on the bed and I read Pippi Longstocking or the Wizard of Oz or Owls in the Family or The Great Brain, or whatever classic from my childhood I have chosen to inflict on my offspring before they develop their own literary tastes. Both my kids can read independently, but that's not stopping story time, and I don't plan that it should, for many years yet. We have J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchett and many, many others yet to come.

If story time is not your thing, well, see what is. My friend got through her three daughters' stormy but very individual trips through adolescence with chick flicks on the couch, side-by-side videogaming, and crafts at the kitchen table (she paints an AWESOME Ukrainian pysanka). Go biking together, make cookies together, paint their room whatever colour they choose together... just BE together. Talk is optional.

Things That Work #3: Gum

An Occupational Therapist can tell you all about the neurological regulating effects of the "suck-swallow-breathe" synchrony, and about the power of "oral stims", for helping even ordinary folks calm and focus themselves.

Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author of the fabulous Raising Your Spirited Child books maintains that passing out the gum is the best and fastest way to take the temperature of a heated situation down by a few oh-so-critical notches.

Other parents have found it aids focus during homework and other sustained-attention tasks.

Let's just say that it works.

Set aside your prejudices about the vulgarity of chewing gum, and about whether an oral self-calming mechanism is "infantile" or "a crutch" in any way. Think of it as a "brain hack"... a piece of circuitry that's installed in almost all of us, and that you can use to reach into the brain and bring it into a better and more productive state.

I know parents who (as mentioned above) use it for homework. I know parents who use it for difficult transition times (e.g. home to school) for a high-needs kid. T.K. gets to chew it when he's having one of his beaker-emptying breaks, with me or at the school. He likes two or even three pieces sometimes, to intensify the sensation, and with it the calming effect. He's quite good about getting rid of it in the garbage when the break is over, but I even know some teachers who permit it in class, as long as students do it quietly and appropriately.

Go ahead, try it. I don't know anyone it doesn't work for.

Things That Work #2: Breaks, not Blowouts

The Child and Parent Resource Institute (CPRI) in London, Ontario, runs a clinic called The Brake Shop. Periodically, they offer a free six-night "Leaky Brakes 101" course for parents and educators and social service and medical professionals. For those of you who dig the whole diagnosis-alphabet soup scene, they deal with OCD, ADHD, ODD, Tourette's, rage problems, and related stuff. For those of you who don't, they deal with kids who, for whatever reason, Have Trouble Stopping... whether that comes with a diagnosis or not.

If you live in southern Ontario and you can get to one of these, it's worth a million bucks. It completely turned my thinking inside out, about why my kid does what he does, and how I can help him do better. For those of you more than a couple of hours from London, Ontario, you can get on their website and take in a lot of the materials in printed and recorded form. Not quiiiite as good, but still very helpful. Check out http://www.cpri.thehealthline.ca/clinics.asp?page=1 .

Anyway, the section on rage and emotional explosiveness included the "frustration beaker" (available in the "Putting the Brakes on Rage" printout in the "Strategy Documents" section. See, we can all tolerate a certain amount of frustration (some more than others). But when the beaker is getting too full, it doesn't really matter what the "trigger" is that set off a full-blown meltdown. The point is that there was not room in the beaker for one more frustration/annoyance/too-hard challenge. Kaboom. And it's usually the kids who are vulnerable to can't-cope-any-more meltdowns who face more challenges in getting through an ordinary school day that's business-as-usual for everyone else.

The strategy that flows naturally from that is to find ways to empty out the beaker, through the day -- because once a meltdown has started, there's really no way to divert it before it's run its course. Better not to have it at all.

Right now, thanks to my flexible home-based business (as in, I understand how freakily unusual my situation is) I go to the school twice a day and take T.K. out for recess/nutrition break (we're doing that "balanced day" nonsense). We ride bikes. We climb trees. We scooter. He has a snack. For him, exercise and fresh air and physical space and an absence of hectoring classmates and commanding teachers is a fabulous beaker-emptier. His teacher reports that he returns to class relaxed, refreshed and ready to learn.

I am sure that the readers who can implement this same solution exactly as I have... well, if there's more than four or five of you, I'll be surprised. But start giving thought to the things that empty your kid's beaker, and how they can, somehow, even in very small ways, be worked into his/her day.

I'll give some more beaker-emptying suggestions on future posts.

Junior Mad Scientists

T.K. and his sister brought me their latest invention the other night. It's a Lego contraption which "plugs into the brain of an animal without hurting it at all, and records all the behaviours in its behaviour centre. Then it downloads them to a robotic copy of the animal that's controlled by this remote control. The remote control has a video screen where you can see the pictures it takes as it moves around."

So... brush and braid My Little Pony's mane and tail... and then plug it into a neural-control device. That's my kids. So sweet to see them making their first forays into mad science! Well, there WAS the assemble-your-own-human-brain experiment ("You're putting it in upside down!!"), but that was last year.

And they wonder why T.K.'s not so interested in the plant-a-bean experiment they're doing in Grade 1 science.

Things That Work #1: Not Going Away

Lindsay Moir came to speak at our local children's developmental-services agency a few years ago. Lindsay's got some serious cred. He's been a special-needs teacher, principal, superintendent, governmental bureaucrat, professional advocate... AND, parent to a special-needs daughter. (I believe I have all those positions right.)

The Ontario Association of Children's Rehabilitation Services (OACRS) features a regular "Ask Lindsay Moirs" column on their website at www.oacrs.com/resource-familynet.php , where Lindsay fields questions from parents of children of all ages, and facing a wild diversity of challenges. It's well worth a browse. Odds are you'll find someone like you, with a child like yours.

Anyway, Lindsay spoke about structuring an IEP that would be useful AND used, about navigating the various levels of educational bureaucracy, and about the underlying concerns and psychology of the school-system people you'll be dealing with, which makes it easier for you to speak their language and jump over the hurdles that get placed in your way. Loads and loads of great stuff.

But the first, best thing he said was this (Lindsay, forgive me if I mess up your delivery):

"There have been studies done on the factors that contribute the most to the success of children with special needs. Whatever the special need, and however "success" is defined for that child, there is one factor that the successful cases have in common. It isn't education level or income or socioeconomic status of the parents. It isn't the geographic district you live in, or the educational philosophy of the school. It isn't the size of the class. It isn't any of those things."

"It's Parents Who Will Not Go Away. Notice that I don't say parents who are pushy or obnoxious, but... parents who calmly, firmly won't go away until their child has what they need to succeed."

I sat in the audience that night, and all my anxieties about knowing what to do and how to do it fell away in a moment of wonderful clarity. "Not Going Away," I thought. "I can DO that!!"

This principle will carry you through those days when the administration informs you that you didn't get the teacher you were hoping for, or you lost the disagreement about how to handle your kid's stress meltdowns at school, or they withdrew the funding for the social skills class he was loving so much. I had a principal for a while who liked to make sure that the parent walked out of her office knowing just WHO in that room had "won" that day (her) and WHO had "lost" (the parent). "Yeah," I'd think. "You won this round. But what you don't understand is that I'm. Not. Going. Away."

So... take a deep breath, have a cup of coffee, plaster a calm, confident smile on your face, and KEEP COMING BACK. It's amazing how much gets done, sooner or later, when you do.

Okay, time to quit whining

It's been an extremely rough year. Thanks to the miracle of operant conditioning, I now get a stomach ache every time I approach the school, for fear of what I will be told that my kid's done wrong THIS time.

But whining palls quickly. Probably already has. And that's not why I'm here anyway.

Time to get started on The Stuff That Works. Things that have made our lives better -- sometimes by design, sometimes by happy accident. That's what we special needs (however you define special needs) parents do best. We brainstorm, we problem-solve, we pass around tips and resources and techniques and anything someone else might find useful.

Do with it whatever you will!!