To voluntarily put my child into care

[Crumplesock]

We are at the point now where we think we may need to either put our eldest into the care system or seperate and live in 2 seperate homes to keep our children apart for fear that the eldest will seriously harm the younger two children. However, I'm not sure how we will actually finance two seperate homes (even 2 x 1bedroom flats).

Our son is autistic with a PDA profile. We are low demand parenting, and he does not attend school after being excluded and we are following his lead in Home Education. We followed the At Peace Parenting Course (which is amazing and so insightful, if not a little crazy on price!) but she told us we need to radically accept that this is our son's disability, this is part of it and we need to accommodate it. She shared how her family had to live sperately for a while. We are being advised by all the professionals that we are doing all we can for our son's needs and are accommodating and parenting him in line with his disabilities. But I just feel so broken at it.

As our son is getting bigger, his level of aggression is increasing and becoming harder to manage. We attempt to keep the children separated at all times but this is hard when there is only 1 parent at home and all 3 do need to be watched constantly.

Our other two children, and us parents too, are receiving multiple injuries daily.

Our son has taken to doing home workouts, which is absolutely brilliant and I want to encourage a healthy lifestyle but his strength is crazy. I've witnessed him do 20+ pull ups, he can now lift 1.5× his bodyweight in a Deadlift. I spoke to him about this passion of his and he said its so he can always make sure he is the strongest and to make people scared of him.

I know deep down there's a scared boy in there, whose doing this as a reaction to school trauma and being pushed around by school bullies (he had it quite bad). But it also terrifies me at how he is stronger than me and it won't be long before he levels with my husband.

I have spoke to Social Sevices today who has said they'll get a support package and stated that this is Child-on-parent (and sibling) abuse and that they do need to safe guard our other children

Actually this IS a derail.

Your opinions are still vile.

…annnnd you’re still going.

Okay 🤷🏻‍♀️

No that's you dear. Seemingly with no knowledge of the UK care system and a US based abelist mindset.

Thank goodness those awful things don't happen to vulnerable children in the UK.

Are you in the UK Intergnis? Or are you opining on care systems that don't apply to your continent?

She says, pressing reply. You’re the other half of the back and forth, dear.

I am most familiar with the UK care system, as it so happens. There are most certainly disabled children in residential care up and down the UK. Do social services volunteer to take children into residential care? No, they try to avoid it if at all possible. However, they have a duty to do so if a parent refuses to have a child at home because of the risk they pose.

So not actually answering my question.

Are YOU in the UK?

And this parent hasn't refused because , as a good parent, they haven't exhausted all options. Sigh.

Oh look, something else I didn’t say.

So are you in the UK?

What level of harm would it be acceptable, in your view, for siblings to suffer before care was considered?

Moderate physical harm?
Severe physical harm? Say a knife wound?
What about harm of a sexual nature. Would you still think The way forward is meeting the child's needs in the home?

Or are you of the belief that these things can always be prevented as long as a parent pursues all avenues available?

As if you’ve answered any of mine.

I completely agree with you.

The other siblings {the four year old especially} is extremely traumatised by the 8 year old- actually saying to his mother that his head hurt with fear, as his mother was trailing around a supermarket to keep the 4 year old away from the 8 year old's violence.

The father nearly had his ankle broken that night by the weight lifting 8 year old, who is strong enough to deadlift 1.5 times his body mass.

The baby is very vulnerable to being seriously hurt.

Unless one has a ''Safe room'' for the other children to be contained in, where the 8 year old cannot get access to them to hurt them, it's going to get worse and worse as the 8 year old gets bigger and stronger.

But that is no way to live.

Children suffer serious loss of a mother {Bereavement} and don't turn violent.
We don't even know if the violence was there before the tragic loss of the other child.

It's clear a very good experienced child psychiatrist is needed- Meds might take the rage away, or calm it down to manageable levels.

Commonsense I dont' think any level of harm is acceptable.

I do think, though, where the child who is inflicting harm also has care needs that it isn't a straightforward question.

When it happened in our family we had a 'team around the family' with the priority being that the safety of all children was paramount.

What didn't happen was that the child who was lashing out was immediately vilanised.

As parents if our younger child had remained in harm with strategies then we would have to have split the family or removed the child causing harm but, in the first instance you have to look at the whole scenario and to whether you can keep all children safe because, in that situation both children are actually considered vulnerable.

I don't think you can always prevent a child from being removed. Obviously you can't but you should as a parent, and as a professional try to avoid it if at all possible.

Oakleaffy I agree all of the children are going to be traumatised and the younger children are vulnerable.

But the 8 year old is ALSO vulnerable and with careful care and management the family can find a way forward without removing and isolating the 8 year old.

The priority MUST be the physical safety of the younger 2 children but the mental health of the older child should also be a priority.

From personal experience meds plus a LOT of therapy will go a long way.

You are right that children suffer bereavement without turning violent but this child has additional needs. From my experience he can have a good outcome, time will tell.

My gripe on this thread has been where I have felt that a struggling 8 year old has been written off. Yes he's done wrong but he is a child. A grieving disabled child.

I hope you find peace and help to process what you have been through. Trying to vilify disabled, traumatised young children is not the answer. They are as deserving of support and understanding as anyone else. That fact does not detract from siblings' need for support and understanding. There is not a hierarchy of need - all childrens' needs need to be met.

100%

@lifeturnsonadime The comments that it would be awful for the OP to “abandon” the 8 year old are really unhelpful because she is indeed looking at residential care. She is not abandoning him. There are residential and specialist foster placements and hopefully social services can assist there. Doctors will not medicate him either presumably because they don’t believe medication will help his condition. So the only option does seem to be removal of him or removing the younger kids.

You seem to be very insistent that there needs to be a solution for all the kids - sorry but any such solution where they all remains in the home involves one being sacrificed for the other. They cannot live together - seriously. Minimise the terror a 4 year old feels all you like with the talks of ableism but at the end of the day you have a four year old suffering daily violence and he doesn’t have the ability to understand special needs or disability. He just knows he is being attacked daily. As is the one year old - a baby. Being beaten. The ONLY solution until things drastically improve is that they don’t live together and it’s scary that you can’t acknowledge that.

Your views are clearly clouded by the fact that you kept your own family together in this type of situation. You are the parent and your views id say are not as important as the views of someone who was in the position of the younger children. You were and are an adult. So I’d rather listen to the posters who talk about the huge MH impacts of living with a sibling who behaved like this. I’m glad your situation worked out and that your children say that they understand your actions. What would you say if they told you they could never forgive you due to how their childhood turned out? Because that is a real possibility too.

I know you feel sympathy for the disabled child and we all do but there is not a solution, bar a miracle change in behaviour, that involves the younger two not being subjected to violence AND the older remaining in the home. There just isn’t.

Also placing a child into foster care is not abandoning them and it’s so unhelpful to suggest it is. Sometimes it’s by far the kindest solution.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

@Crumplesock If you're still there?
DH says do you know that there is crisis line at the PDA society?
Opportunity to talk to informed people.

No one here is minimising the impact on the other children.
.
The 8 year old who was locked in a cupboard at school and whose brother has died has had no treatment at all for his mental health. No medication.

Therefore, others on this thread have suggested that the first step would be for him to see a psychiatrist who can actually treat him.

Perhaps at some point a specialist school with a waking hour curriculum might be the best option. Or perhaps with treatment and as he matures, he will find ways to manage his emotions.

Understandably, his mother doesn't want to send him away before she had explored all the options

So much projection on this thread

So much hurt on this thread.

We all need to try to see it from the others viewpoint.

Siblings have had their childhoods ruined because of sibling abuse. There is help for this kind of trauma and I would encourage them to reach out to someone.

And for the dysregulated child, lashing out because they don’t know any other way. I think that it is shocking that people are given autism diagnoses, some information leaflets and then left to get on with it. The OP’s child was only diagnosed recently. She had tried in vain to get help for him but cannot get an appointment even though he has a diagnosis and their family is being torn apart by the situation. That is scandalous and merits discussion. We should all be writing to our MPs it is worth noting that our prisons are full of criminals on the spectrum. They were once 8 year olds feeling lost in a world that didn’t make sense to them, lashing out at all around them. They too were failed but back then our knowledge of neurodiversity was limited.

There is hope for all of OP’s children because they are growing up in an age when we understand so much more about autism. And because they have a mum who wants the best for each and every one of them.

A serious risk for the OP is injury to herself from her son as he gets bigger. I know someone whose wife was hospitalized when their preteen with profound ASD caused a head injury. It may have been out of his control during a meltdown, but it still does not mean the risk is not there and gets more difficult to manage as the child gets older.

Best wishes to the OP, it is a terrible dilemma as she is obviously a brilliant mum who cares a lot about all of her children. The family is already torn apart by the extreme challenges and lack of support.

I would absolutely split our family into two households before I would institutionalise my child. The children deserve equal consideration, not sacrificing one for the others.