Is this normal?

[hatetheheat2]

DS (3) has been under paediatrics for over a year due to severe speech delay. Also has help from SALT etc. originally they thought he may be on the spectrum as well because his speech regressed and he had some other sensory issues. These seem to have mostly disappeared but I'm wondering if his behaviour seems 'normal' for a 3 year old and if so any tips to help!

He still can't speak very much at all (he tries to say a lot but nobody other than me can understand the words) so he does get frustrated easily. However my main concern is the anger and violence. He seems to have no idea that something will hurt somebody, or worse sometimes he does seem to understand but does it anyway. This mainly happens with his sister (6). He will just be playing nicely and then randomly pick up one of his biggest toys and smack her round the head with it, if she cries he just stares at her. He will then be put in a timeout but as soon as he comes out of that he will just do it again.

He also smacks, bites & pinches her. The curveball is that he doesn't show any of this type of behaviour at nursery at all. Everybody always comments on what a sweet and well behaved little boy he is (apart from being stubborn).

The only other thing I can think to add is that he also does not listen to any instructions, or he will the first time but then ignore after that. He really is such a funny loveable little boy but his behaviour is getting worse despite the timeouts etc and I'm struggling with how to make things better!

The anger / violence is simply frustration. All you can do is remove him from the situation every time he does it, and say ‘no, name that is not kind, you have made sister very sad’. Repeat repeat repeat.

It must be really tough. Could he pick up another form of communication, does he show interest in sign?

He has picked up sign through nursery but as soon as he started trying to say lots of words he lost all interest in signing. He thinks that he's saying things correctly so obviously gets really frustrated that people don't understand him.

There are other forms of communication, maybe PECS would be better
Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but I'm assuming he's had his hearing tested?

It's sort of normal.

Every 3yo will try this. A 3yo who isn't being appropriately disciplined will do it again and again and again. If he's not doing it at nursery then that increases the likelihood it's either a lack of discipline at home or a form of discipline that's not working that results in repeated violent outbursts. Have you asked nursery what disciplinary system they use? Every 3yo misbehaves at least once so he will have been disciplined at nursery and clearly their message is getting through (although 3yo also have a habit of being far more angelic for anyone who isn't a parent). Timeouts just don't work for some children - some children don't mind sitting and staring at the walls for a minute and if he doesn't mind the timeout then it won't work as a form of discipline. Is your timeout long enough? Ours didn't work with our 3yo when we weren't timing it, we'd leave him about a minute and he'd apologise and then five minutes later he'd be back to misbehaving. When we actually timed for 3 minutes it felt far longer than we thought - but it works so, so, so well.

I can't see anything from your post that would indicate ND or SEN with respect to the hitting/biting/pinching. Is there a pattern with when he does this to his sister (i.e. when you're playing with her or when you're not looking or when she succeeds at something etc)? If so, it might indicate a motive (like jealousy or boredom or attention seeking).

With respect to his speech delay, does he appear to understand what you're communicating to him but not respond or does he fail to comprehend what you're communicating?

@x2boys he had it tested when he was 1 and it came back fine. However we are requesting another one because since then he has burst his eardrum 3 times and the dr said that ear is constantly full of wax so we think there could be an issue with that ear. He gets the syllables right in the words but none of the sounds if that makes sense. He was completely non verbal until last September and then his speech came on really quickly in terms of what he was trying to say but there has been no improvement in the sounds he can pronounce at all in over 9 months

Oh, also, have you had his hearing properly assessed? DS has awful hearing and we didn't realise because his speech and language development was where it should be - turns out he was lip reading, which explains why certain words were coming out wrong no matter how much we'd tried to correct him. Try to speak to him when he's not looking at you and see how loud you need to be for him to react/respond? Does he respond to whispering? What about if you mouth things to him when he's looking at you - does he notice the difference?

Sorry, cross-posted with the hearing test.

@Rapples nursery use time outs which is why we started them at home. He has the sand timer things and we have different times depending on what he has done. He does fully understand this and is very good at waiting for his timeout to be over and then we have a chat about what he did wrong etc. his behaviour has improved massively from where we were 12 months ago. He used to just slam his head in to the walls constantly or bite, scratch etc anybody all the time, this resulted in him having to wear a padded helmet almost all the time. This behaviour wasn't just at home it was anytime we went anywhere but since his speech improved a little this behaviour became much better. I'm a SEN TA so I think (hope) that my parenting style is fairly good when it comes to discipline. This is new territory to me though as I work with slightly older children

I'm no expert of course, but my 12 year old son has severe autism and learning disabilities and he's non verbal
It sounds to me like it might be more of a hearing issue with your son.

If he fully understands and is very good at doing his timeout then it sounds like he just doesn't mind doing it to be honest. Something is clearly different between the nursery timeouts (which work) and your timeouts (which don't). It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, just to be clear. It could be something like that, at nursery, other children see him being put on timeout and he doesn't like that - whereas at home, he doesn't care. Or it might be that the timeout at nursery is in a place he doesn't like being because it's colder/hotter/brighter/dimmer/louder/quieter/etc but he doesn't mind the position he's placed in at home. So the nursery timeout is a deterrant for hitting but the home timeout isn't. It sounds like it did work if he's shown improvement but he's grown a bit immune to it now. I'd strongly recommend trying a different disciplinary technique.

@Rapples that a really good point. I will try and change his timeout or look at other methods to change things up a bit. Thanks

DD2 didn’t speak until she was nearly 4. She was very frustrated but tried very hard to communicate. She had SALT input from the age of 2, various ASD assessments, hearing assessments & a lot of speech therapy. She was meant to go to a specialist language unit for nursery & reception but by the time a space came up she had progressed so far that she didn’t need to go. She was diagnosed with Speech dyspraxia/apraxia of speech at 3 & saw a SALT every week, 6 weeks on & 6 weeks off until she was 5 as well as a SALT every week at school & interventions with a TA. We had lots of work to do with her at home as well & it took a long time, often not seeming as if anything was working, although it clearly was.

She still struggles with her speech now (she’s 9) but is NT in every other way, apart from sensory processing issues, but these don’t really impact much. Good luck with everything & definitely keep pushing for SALT involvement.

As a few others have suggested have you had his hearing checked recently? This is what ended up being the cause of my sons speech delay and him not listening to instructions.

As you say it sounds like your son is frustrated and this might be why he is acting this way to get his point across. As another person has said I would recommend looking in to using a form of PECS at home.

You haven't really said how you are getting on with speech therapy and whether you are seeing any progress? My son was/is under NHS speech therapy and I have found we made the most progress when we started adding speech activities in to our daily routine (except on nursery days because there was enough time before or after nursery). It took me ages to research different ideas of games I could play with him at home which encouraged speech. We now have a set of games which we rotate through over the weeks.

There is a new app which has just been released for speech delay called Pippin. It has loads of ideas for speech games to play at home. I wish it existed 18 months ago since it would have saved me so much time researching! I would recommend giving it a try and in particular the speech course.

pippinspeech.com/