Do you “let” your kids speak to you like shit

[Scootsville]

DS has ADHD and probably ASD. Yes I’ve looked up PDA parenting strategies etc.

He is 8, so wondering how much of this is down to age and how much to being ND.

He is the eldest and currently finding his brother SO ANNOYING so it really feels like living with a hormonal teen. The way he speaks to us his parents. He doesn’t swear or call us names (yet) but the tone, the lack of manners, telling us how annoying we are. To his friends’ parents and people in shops/cafes etc he is very polite.

He is pulled up every single time he speaks to us rudely or is unkind to his brother, he has screen bans left right and centre. I try and praise every little thing he does that isn’t a battle and offer to read or play a board game with him, but our relationship at the moment is rubbish with him being told off and given consequences 1000 a day. And I seriously worry about him developing a conduct disorder because of it, I know ND children are typically corrected much more than their peers as it is.

But I don’t think the answer is to let him speak to us like shit?

My DS 10 (Autism, ADHD and learning disability) is rude to me a lot of the time. His current faves are calling me an idiot, or an ugly turd. To be honest though as he is also physically aggressive towards me and threatens to kill me the name calling is not the most problematic behaviour. He often will say stuff like 'get me a drink, idiot' - in which case I just don't get him a drink until he asks me nicely. Other times I just ignore him or tell him I will not discuss the matter until he uses kind words. What is particularly galling is that he is often very charming to others.

He did swear at me for the first time recently which really shocked me (he told me to shut the fuck up). I was so taken aback that I couldn't think what to say and just had to walk away

Nothing is replied to without a please. If one says please can I do …. And I say yes you can. If they bugger off without a thank you - it is rescinded. I absolutely can’t abide it.

Absolutely not. Nip it in the bud age 5, or you’ll have major problems in their teen years

Just came to give you some hope. My DS2 has ADHD and was an absolute fucking nightmare from about 8 to 14. He’s 17 now and is a dream child. He’s polite, kind and thoughtful. He tells me he loves me daily and often texts me to tell me how amazing I am as a mum!
I really struggled to deal with his behaviour when he was younger and the best advice I was given was pick your battles and praise every good thing they do.
So any eye rolling or attitude would be completely ignored, my DM struggled with this as she felt it was letting him get away with murder but it worked for us.
We started a reward chart, he was included in choosing the rewards. With ADHD the rewards have to be almost immediate or they don’t work. Enough stickers today? You choose a film and we’ll watch together tonight. In the beginning we were giving stickers for everything just so he got the good feeling of the rewards and then wanted that feeling to continue. So I would use what he likes as a reward rather than take it away as a punishment IFYSWIM.

@Scootsville honestly there is very little evidence that the "low demand" parenting style is good for anyone, child or adult.
The demand avoidant/PDA profile is anxiety based and allowing the child to avoid everything that makes them anxious causes the anxious-making things to get worse and worse, making them more and more anxious about them.

Sorry, but I brought up my DC to be polite and they never spoke to me ‘like that’. DS once heard his cousin be extremely rude to their GF and he turned to me and said ‘ I wouldn’t have ever have even thought of that and I know if I’d said It I would never have lived’. I hasten to add, I never ever hit him.

I don’t actually think my DS has PDA, his defiance is transition based, and generally not wanting to do things, rather than anxiety.

This thread has been really helpful to me - thank you everyone. I don't have many friends with the same experiences of parenting as me, and its a relief to see that DS's behaviour is quite common/typical of ND 7/8yo. If anyone fancies teaming up for an ongoing support/check-in thread for our pre-teen ADHD/ASD kids I'd willing join that in the hope it might save my sanity!

@TerroristToddler yes please. If you start one would you post the link here?

I've found this post and especially the graphic attached to it really, really useful. I've printed it and DC sometimes uses it to tell me what the problem is as she can't communicate verbally when she's worked up into a state.

https://www.autball.com/post/not-everything-is-pda

Personally I don't allow it. Mine are 12 and 5. I have always been really clear that you can be angry, sad, frustrated and all of those things and it is fine to express those feelings. But we are not rude, or unkind to eachother. I am shocked at how some
children shout 'I hate you' etc. It might come my way too one day but not so far.

My kids are by no means perfect. We are a pretty flawed family at times. We disagree and fall out like everyone else. But they do not speak disrespectfully to me, and I don't do it to them. I think my (soon to be ex) dh has played a very important role here. He has since they were tiny always reinforced manners. 'Do not speak to your mum like that, apologise' or 'That is not how you answer your mum, try again' type of thing.

I really like this approach but how do you manage it with a "time blind" child who just can't seem to connect that if she doesn't do X then there won't be time for Y? Or that choice X leads to consequence Y? I can say "You chose not to do your spellings, you chose not to have time left over for screens this evening"and she'll be distraught - but at the point that she is refusing to do the spellings time seems to stand still for her and she is completely unable to understand that time continued to pass and was running out while she dicked around. So the next day it just repeats. I do think it is can't not won't and it's such a sticking point.

My DS 14, autistic can be really rude but we try to separate the general swearing and being rude to or about someone. So he can say a game or food is shit but he can't then tell his brother to f off.

He knows though he has a choice he can say them but there are consequences if he does so if he complains he knows he has made the choice and he has decided to take the consequence - off computer for a given time. He will stomp and huff but he knows he he then 'chooses' to throw a chair there is a further consequence. I say to him he has to be in charge of his actions and every action has a consequence. So if he doesn't swear at his brother he knows that his brother is likely to want to play a game with him later.
Am not pretending it's easy and some days I want to 'not hear' what he has said. He knows though I won't let him off. It is a bit easier now and he has calmed down a lot but when we started it it was really difficult, we did have a few broken chairs. I kept saying to him if you are choosing to carry on you are choosing the consequence.

Think it's important for them to know where they stand, if thry think its ok then go out and do it to the 'wrong' person the consequences could be awful and that some behaviours are not acceptable.

I suppose this is where a visual timer could be useful? Could draw a clock or maybe there's something available that counts down in an obvious way - I've been meaning to look for this as the sand timers don't seem to work with mine. "This is the time available to do your spellings (e.g. half hour) and this is how much time will be left for YouTube (or whatever, second half hour) if you manage to do them within that time. If you choose to go over the first half hour to get your spellings done, you'll shorten the time left for YouTube".

There's also a lot of advice on how to improve time management - and how to help children to feel the passage of time. We are just starting to use this but it is helping for "getting off screens" especially as our DS thinks if you pause the video time stands still! It is also supposed to be good for "I can't do X because it will take for AGES" as our DD says because often a chore will take a lot less time than the child thinks.

We have so many visual timers that we look like we're running Dumbledore's office with the hourglasses and sand timers and counters-downers 😁unfortunately she hates them as they make her panic. It's an area where I can see the friction between the ASD and the ADHD.

I do like that ADHD Dude clip @drspouse thanks. Do you find the membership good value?

To posters saying you just “don’t allow it” (reinforcing with “do not speak to your mum like that, apologise”): this is exactly what we do.
But for one of our children this makes no difference when they’re in a certain state (Our other child has never been close to rude or defiant).
It’s not like parents of ND/challenging children are blithely allowing their kids to speak to them like crap. If a stern “do not speak to your mother like that” worked we’d all have no issues!

I have used every approach described on this thread: verbal tellings off, consequences/sanctions, a firm but non-reactive “do not speak to me like that, let’s try again when you can be polite.”
And often it works, often we go for months and months with no rudeness (albeit some low level defiance).
But when DD is a dysregulated mess and struggling to get to school let alone anything else, we do get rudeness at times. That’s why this thread has been really helpful in ways parents have approached it.

Assuming you “don’t allow it” just because temperamentally it seems enough for your child to be told “we don’t do this” isn’t particularly helpful in this context. The OP isn’t allowing it either but looking into what’s the most effective strategy, in the context of a child who has behaviours that can induce almost constant “don’t do that” responses.

Extremely good value. There are live office hours and he answers questions on the message boards too. There are quite a few UK families on the message board too (though it's usually him or his assistant answering questions, occasionally e.g. a UK parent will answer a question for a UK family).

He says anything digital is useless (and we also found things like those red/green timers where they don't actually count down to be useless too). DS had one TA that used to give him 2 minutes screen time and use a timer that had no numbers and of course he went bananas when it got to zero!

(Be warned though, he's very no nonsense, you won't get any "oh just don't make demands on them").

I dont let things slide, but I don't always shout. I've had some sass from my kids and some of the things i do to respond are:

"Try again"

"What's a better way to say that?"

look around dramatically behind furniture etc then ask "who are you talking to? Who are you speaking to like that? I know you aren't speaking to me like that"

Copy their tone of voice/volume/attitude and say something like "IS THIS YOUR NEW VOICE? DO WE ALL HAVE TO TALK LIKE THIS?"

@BreakingAndBroke you are my new role model. Borrowing those!!

I have a tip OP.

Praise your DS when he can't hear you (but actually he can).

DS: wanders off to watch TV.

You: DH did I tell you, this morning DS was really helpful with...

My DD cannot deal with being praised to her face.

Dd is 7 and the same. But with her, she's basically a good girl, knows how to behave, is polite and loving etc unless she's stressed. It's like an impulsivity tic and is closely tied to how she's feeling and whether she's having sensory overload as a result. Because I understand her and know the signs, I'm beginning to let a lot of it go in the heat of the moment. So when she calls me dickhead, idiot or some other insult, I simply walk away. When she's in a calm state we talk about how she felt, how it made her react, how it made me feel, what she could have done differently when she noticed herself feeling uptight (a challenge, as she often doesn't recognise it until it's too late).

Dd is also time blind. Loads of visual aids - calendars, countdown clocks etc. She totally gets 'first this, then this' - she just doesn't always grasp how long 'this' takes and that causes her time management issues, then she gets stressed about the time pressure.

This.

We 'didn't allow it' with ds. Typical behaviour management techniques worked well.

A whole other story for dd. She's currently pretty well regulated and a delight to be around. But she transitions to Y3 in Sept and I'm expecting all hell to break loose, so we have to plan for the worst (school avoidance, clothing sensitivity, lots of swearing furious shouting from her). It was our insistence on 'not allowing it' in the early days that resulted in repeated escalations and incendiary responses. Until we worked out that our neurotypical response strategy would not/ could not work with her.

Sorry, I started writing this this morning and then haven't got back to it until now, so some of this might be irrelevant/thread may have moved on but I wanted to finish it anyway.

YY to not everything is PDA - according to MN so much is which was making me feel a bit frustrated, but recently listened to a couple of podcasts (SENDCast) with Clare Truman as a guest and she explained PDA really really well and I do think a lot of what gets touted as PDA online isn't really PDA - it could be demand avoidance, which everyone experiences to some extent, but demand avoidance by itself is not necessarily PDA. I think sometimes people do use "demand avoidance" and PDA interchangeably online, which doesn't help.

I think the logical consequences argument is interesting because I can absolutely see - it sort of "feels" intuitively right, and I used to be quite a fan of this idea, but lately I've come around to thinking that actually, the point of a logical consequence is not usually repair or education, it's supposed to be at least mildly aversive, similar to time out/loss of privilege etc. (e.g. logical consequence of not coming off game console at pre-agreed time = lose access to console for the next day). So the point of it is still to be something DC wish to avoid, and essentially they are going to experience it the same, and it's going to have the same effect, as a generic punishment. Yes, it might be that DC are slightly more agreeable to it because they see it as fairer than e.g. not coming off console = loss of pocket money/extra chore, but that's about it in terms of benefits. (And you can achieve this in other ways anyway).

Logical consequences also have one really big flaw which is that in theory you are supposed to tailor them to each individual incident, which means, a lot of the time, making up a consequence on the fly. This can be a problem because in the heat of the moment, most people go too harsh, or too long. In order to be effective, you actually want consequences to be fairly minor because the effectiveness of them doesn't increase with how harsh they are, (except that if the child is genuinely afraid then you will tend to get immediate compliance in that moment - this however has no ongoing effect to change behaviour, and has a lot of negative effects, so not recommended.)

And if you take it out of the moment and say OK, you're getting a consequence but I need to decide what it is, that's not ideal either, because you're taking the consequence away from the moment which hugely loosens the link that it has to reinforce that behaviour. It can also be scary for a child because they don't know if you're going to impose something very harsh or not. And I think it's confusing for parents - there is a thread every week asking "What's the logical consequence for X?"

So there is an argument for saying actually, it makes a lot more sense to have a generic, decided-in-advance minor and token punishment which can be used if you're going to use consequences, because it allows a parent who might be under quite some strain against a child who is really pushing their buttons to calmly and rationally respond with something that isn't going to be totally OTT and therefore be interpreted as raising the stakes/further conflict.