to ask about the general attitude to children with behavioural differences

[Francoitalialan]

Inspired by another thread, if you have ordinary non-special needs kids, especially of primary age, and there's a child at school displaying behaviour that's different to the norm, what conclusion do you reach?

Options may include

Not nice
Nasty
Product of crap parents
Rude
Spiteful
Dim
Annoying
Irritating
And also
Autistic spectrum disorder
Attention deficit disorder
Hyperactivity
Anxiety disorder
Dyspraxia
Sensory processing disorder
Auditory processing Disorder
Misphonia
Tourette's

Ad Infinitum.

Where do you generally place your opinion and why?

Not patronising at all Stay. I'm doing this on my own, dd's dad died. I used to brush off any kind of praise but what you said was lovely.

At the risk of making this a love-in, well done to you, you're doing a great thing too.

Good post Maryz.

Sometimes schools can organise things like “circle of friends” where a group of children volunteer to take turns in a rota to play with a child who has social or behaviour problems. It takes the pressure off individual kids. Children don’t need to be “forced” to take part (and shouldn’t be), usually several want to help and with the teacher for support if need be they enjoy it. At one stage in primary my DS had a rota of kids to sit with him at lunchtime. DS could be very controlling and they wouldn’t have wanted to sit with him every day and he wasn’t flexible enough to cope with people coming and going. As things were they were happy, he was happy.

However that's really for children who have obvious / diagnosed problems as my DS did. It would be overkill for a child who is just a bit awkward and isolated.

I would be surprised by anyone who, given a decent amount of time with a child, couldn't tell the difference between additional needs and 'normal' naughtiness. Even if the needs aren't diagnosed or specified it's fairly clear that they're there.

If you're talking about fleeting glimpses and passing acquaintances then I would think the behaviour I saw could be due to any or all of the things in your OP

I live in Norway with dc at nursery there which they go to until they are 6 and they start school. She has a very very best friend who she says is her best all the time :-)

However when I ask her who her friends are in the rest of the class she says 'everybody is friends with everybody' and you can hear that the staff really work with trying to make the kids understanding of each other and inclusive. It is expected that unless you only invite one kid you invite all kids or all of the same sex to birthdays etc and that it is unacceptable not to include children who want to play. They have very early hands on intervention (one on one help) for sen but in the normal school environment

Obviously they all fall out, swap friends, put down kids like kids always do but with the background that this is not respecting other people and the adults will intervene

It really impresses me now but I guess I'll only conclude in 15 years

"But so long as a socially able child isn't "forced" to do something, that's ok right?"

It wasn't as simple as that though. The child chosen TK assist had her own additional needs, and it was proposed that she be taken out of key lessons (child with dyslexia being forced out of literacy lessons).

That is wrong.

I don't want my dyslexic DC being labelled dim, or nor would I want them to miss lessons that are vital to their needs.

A good thing about DS being a naughty git who doesn't do as he's told...

Whole school assembly to explain that new kid (Adam) is autistic but doesn't like being touched. Soon as possible, DS trundled up to touch Adam, see what might happen (predictable outburst).

Few yrs later DS was paired off with Adam for activities because DS was unafraid to touch Adam; most other kids were too scared, conditioned to think they shouldn't touch. Oblivious loves-to-provoke DS didn't hesitate to touch. The school was trying hard to integrate Adam into normal school life so Adam had to get used to appropriate physical contact.

DS went to Adam's birthday party recently. Sometimes being an ill-disciplined brat gets you different things in life.

ps: and luckily Adam's mum is obviously in a neuro-social space of her own, or she'd be part of the Coven of Moms who loathed DS for all these yrs past and that birthday party invite would not have been forthcoming.

We are in the process of getting dd aged 10 diagnosed/assessed

Answering the op.
I'm open minded and sympathetic but I don't want a dangerous child near mine.

I don't judge the child or the parents, I judge the school on how they manage difficult situations, I make judgements on how they support all the children.

My ds displayed behavioural difficulties at a very young age but at 18 months old his speech was that of a child twice his age, by the time he went to school his speech was still at least 4yrs ahead however his behaviour was exactly the same, he would lash out at anyone who got too near, he would scream, cover his ears and shake from head to foot when the school bells went off, he was the same when anyone shouted, he had meltdowns of epic proportions if someone touched him unexpectedly or did something unexpected, but because he could talk, dress himself and go to the toilet he was deemed to be too clever to warrant a statement.

He was diagnosed at 6 with Asperger Syndrome after scoring in the clinically significant range on all 3 parts of the triad of impairments a year later he was diagnosed with excessive hypermobility of all joints and sensory processing difficulties.

He did get a statement in year 4 but it was based on behaviour not academic ability because the school always denied any academic difficulties despite the fact that he could barely write, having a statement really didn't matter because the statement wasn't adhered to, he was discriminated against, illegally excluded, isolated.

He was essentially permanently excluded from juniors because I can't call what they did a managed move.

When he started at an independent special school he was found to be at least 4yrs behind academically, he is still at least 4years behind in all subjects.

The poem 'the misunderstood child' reminds me of my son.

Hit send too soon!

We are in the process of getting dd aged 10 assessed/diagnosed. She struggles socially and misreads social cues. She bottles things up at school and explodes when she gets home. I dumped a friend who sent a pm to another friend saying dd is a fucking little brat. The other friend sent me a screen shot. I know dd has issues, I do my best to deal with it and defuse things but sometimes others try to talk to her or tell her off which makes things worse and going at her in an antagonizing manner really doesn't help.

Another friend has also made comments about her which upsets me as her son has a diagnosis of autism but does nothing to stop his bad behaviour. I have had to remove him from my car on several occasions where he's been playing with the handbrAke. You tell her and she's just "oh he likes cars"'

I hope I wouldn't judge and would encourage my DCs to be kind.

Mmmm. I wouldn't jump to conclusions as that would be very wrong and I assume this may be linked into my post perhaps? A boy in the class has Aspergers his parents have made no secret of this fact and why should they. He is a lovely boy and sometimes has communication difficulties. But I guess he has Aspergers if his parents say he has been diagnosed with this and he has a TA to himself. Another child has dysgraphia (messy illegible handwriting) but she also has very bad behavioural issues. The family aren't poor she is not deprived of material things but she has no boundaries at all at home. I have witnessed her parents in action with her out shopping and I have seen her in action on school trips in the school yard and lots of tales have come home. She is not like this every minute of everyday but her mother has openly said '...oh (so & so) doesn't like authority we gave up trying to tell her what to do along time before she started school haha!' Another example half heartedly in a feeble tone without getting up 'oh don't do that (so and so)'. Or carrying on drinking tea whilst her daughter try's to ruin another child's birthday in year one and has absolutely no reaction or response etc etc etc.

I supported the school with any consequences, didn't make a blind bit of difference to the behaviour though.

The current school manage the Asperger's, meet his academic needs and the behaviour is more like that of his NT peers.

It was the thread about being "forced" to socialise with a child with behavioural problems which made me start this thread - there was an overwhelming cry of "you should be able to choose your friends" which sadly flies straight in the face of kids who struggle socially, and the interventions put in place to help them. But the posters I suspect hadn't thought of that, or hadn't considered the wider implications of not encouraging their children to be friends with children presenting different behaviour.

You can believe your child shouldn't be forced to socialise with children they don't want to be around, and I think for those of us who have girls that's particularly important, whilst also trying to encourage them in the way you mention francoitalian. They're not mutually exclusive. I should say here than SN has been part of my life since the day I was born, so this is an issue I'm extremely familiar with. Very much agree with PPs about the need for encouragement and normalisation at an early age. My DD has palled up with a boy in her nursery who has various developmental delays and possible FAS (I'm friendly with his nana). It doesn't seem to be of particular interest or importance to them at that age. And yet they do notice, I think, because she's treated my SN adult sibling differently to other adults from very young. I can't quite articulate it but all the children in the family seem to have done.

Brigteyes, not that it sounds like his the case in your situation, but if you saw us out and about with ds, you might think the same. He has PDA and cannot cope with too much direction and authority.
We have some rules that we stick to rigidly, but if we have too many, he goes to pieces.
Many people don't understand PDA, or think it's made up. Lucky, lucky people being able to have that opinion :)

Ds has usually used up his quota of doing-as-he's-told during a school day .

Omg Maryz's post of 15:04:23 has completely summed it up for me.

This is it, in a nutshell.

My reaction would be that for some reason the child is finding school very stressful.

If they were kicking off.

I reach the conclusion that regardless of the reason for their behavior, my timid child isn't their punching bag while they learn. If my child is outgoing, confident, and capable of standing up for herself instead of shrinking away from this child while simultaneously not resorting to hitting, awesome.

I have adhd, my cousin has adhd/asd. We grew up being very rough and tumble with each other. That was fine. He'd hit me, I'd hit him right back. He wouldn't share his toys with me, so I ate the last handful of M&Ms right in front of him. I just learned to be blunt with him if I wanted/expected something (ie: I shared this, so you need to give me that, or he'd tell me what I needed to buy him for his birthday), we don't really think much of it but from the outside looking in we did look a bit rude/bossy with each other. We grew up very close to each other, and still are and we present quite normal together as adults.

My gentle brother was not ok with rough play and would always get melodramatic go crying to our parents. My aunt would get upset that my mother wouldn't let my cousin play with DB alone. One day, mom went out, auntie left them alone. DB finally had enough of cousin's shit and whacked him as hard as he could on the top of the head with the game controller. My aunt got upset, but it's hard to tell one child you can control hitting while the other "can't". He got frustrated with cousin's antics and was too gentle to really hit back except when he did.

Neither of us understood until we were much older the difficulties my cousin actually had. We just dealt with him differently, and one of our personalities was more compatible with him than the other's.

You can't pair gentle or passive children with SN kids who are aggressive (be it verbally or physically) by nature. They need to be paired with confident and assertive children.

The social groups are not for "SN kids" ( horrible phrase) to use other kids as "punching bags."