Need people's views on what just happened in my home

[Spiderwoman123]

6 year old ASD son. He is currently in process of EHCP application. He struggles socially, has no friends, has weird things about food

H has always said im too soft. Letting him have pudding when hes only eaten cucumber. That kind of thing. H gets v frustrated at DS not eating as H is the house chef really. H always been pretty resistant to adapting parenting but accepts diagnosis and is kind and loving but can also be v inflexible and quick to anger.H much prefers younger DS (none of same challenges). H can get pretty grumpy

Right. So dinner time. DS refusing to eat chicken as he says different to normal stuff. H getting wound up. Me trying to reduce tension. DS says "stop looking at me" as H staring at him. H looks mad. DS getting mad too. Tension rising and both sniping at each other. DS goes to slap H. Its pretty half hearted. DS used to hit a lot when meltdown and we have worked on it a lot together but it still happens. DS barely touches H. H says this is because he moved out the way.

H in response raises his hand to hit DS. I think. Stops himself and then picks up DS chair off the ground and tips it over so that DS falls onto hard kitchen floor. Not from some great height but he definitely picked up the chair and tipped it fully so DS (who was curled up on chair crying) onto floor. Pur kitchen has a fake concrete floor thing

DS bawling. H saying he didn't mean to but he wanted DS to leave room. H saying im overreacting and started blaming me for my shitty parenting!

Currently putting two v upset boys to bed. I think it's fucking horrendous. H thinks DS went to hit him and H was just getting him to leave the room

Pls tell me what to do

Hope you are all OK this morning.

I think this is a reasonable response.

If your DH were saying 'this is awful I need help' maybe you could do it without involving school. But your first consideration needs to be your children, and it is much better if you flag up needing help rather than the children disclosing. It shows you are owning the problem and wanting to solve it.

But with early help he can learn how to respond and change, for the better. A bit of education and it can change. If he has to unlearn everything he's known before, it will take time. Look up non-violent resistance training. It is for parents of violent children who need to know how to respond so situations don't escalate.

Yes I agree. The fact people are advising this woman to leave & SS involved are telling her to throw a hand grenade into her life & her kids life. For what we seen as a snippet of their daily life. She’s angry & rightly so, id be furious & she was right to scoop her son up & take him away.

She is however undermining the dad at dinner times (she has said though it’s his way or the highway, but this doesn’t actually back her claim up when she gives in at meals) he was right about the ear defenders, he doesn’t need them but does she realise had they gone down the path of using them, he may be still using them & still have noise sensitivity that would be another daily hurdle to overcome that they would have actually held him back further. His dad instinct on that was correct.

i can’t defend the dads actions though. I really can’t the kid needs to be safe & he needs to control his temper. However, she did state he’s never done this before & he is a good if not impatient man. (That’s typical of stressed person). I think that counselling would be a better option for everyone & if he refuses this then maybe the other option is the most extreme

Calmly but confidently, tell your husband he should have had the sense to realise that he is the one who should have left the room as he’s supposed to be the mature adult setting a good example.

Ask him how he would have felt being deliberately tipped off his chair and onto the hard floor as that’s actually parental assault on a child with all the psychological problems that go with it.

Tell him what your son said later ….Is this how some daddies behave. Let that sink in

Ask him how he intends to avoid such damaging behaviour in the future. That is the escalation of food issues as well as his own violent reaction. Tell him you will never be on his side until he accepts your son’s problems and agrees and demonstrates a different approach to handling it.

Finally, ask him if he’s ready to explain himself and apologise to your son yet. And suggest ways to him to rebuild your son’s trust in him.

Completely agree and an autistic child will not "eat when they are hungry", they will just not eat.

It is very hard to get enough calories into my DS 3, he is very thin

@Peridoteage and @NoisyViewer did you miss the part where he is part time and she is full time. The solution to him being unable to handle this cannot be her taking more on

there is also no shame with social services early help we had it when DS was going through a difficult patch at 10/11 and it was useful

Have you understood properly? Op wasn't getting into a fight about food. Her husband was getting in a rage because ops son wouldn't eat one thing on his plate and instead of just encouraging the autistic child he actively chose to lose his temper.

I suspect that ND children - of whom we seem to have vast numbers here - are often mollycoddled by esp DM and take advantage by having things like 'safe foods'. Don't pander to any DC is a good strategy. Letting a child rule the home is never a good strategy.
I would probably serve up interesting food for eveyone else and serve the same safe foods to ND child forever. Easier (and can be batch cooked and frozen). One can't go round producing different meals for different people - and other DC get the message that they are not the favoured child and that they can make similar demands. ND DC have to learn to live in the world that is, not the one they want (just like the rest of us).

I am confused you don’t think you should mollycoddle or pander but serve the same safe foods forever isn’t that exactly that

I mean it is what we do (DD veganism would freak DS out) and he always gets served the same safe foods and it works but it is pandering isn’t it a little

Seriously. So how many months did a young child spend being overwhelmed by noise when he could have been comfortable? I assume there are ways to wean them off using these things as they get older. I'm not convinced that bullying them out of it is the way.
It comes across that he is embarrassed by his sons diagnosis as he doesn't engage or agree with it. I know some nd kids have no filter what will happen when he starts answering back and the husband doesn't like it?

I'm not sure that you have anything useful to add if you have no experience of ND children.

I think you have it the wrong way round, I think there is a lot to be learned from ND people that would vastly improve society as a whole.

It really all comes down to bodily autonomy, you should never seek to override that in a child. Teaching children to shut up and comply with infringements on their bodies has caused untold trauma and generational abuse for all history.

People wanting to crow about the same old tropes, "my DC ate what I gave them." "We respected our father, all my mum had to say..." pale into insignificance when looking at the bigger picture.

...and yes, it is bloody annoying and soul destroying at times when you've cooked 3 meals and they're still not right, but with ND DC, you hace to give up on tge food and health fads and stick with balanced, plain and approved.

Having autistic children and raising them in a world far removed in parenting styles and info about children’s development compared with the past is difficult. It
sounds like your husband snapped.
The one thing that I have learnt recently that is changing my DH’s view about how to parent is understanding Polyvagal theory, child development and trauma.
Trauma happens when something frightening and confusing happens and the memory cannot be processed because the kid is in fight or flight mode (or freeze) - ie dysregulated. In my experience this happens much more frequently with autistic kids.

The best way to calm the kids down using polyvagal theory is to remain calm and kind even when they aren’t - and it is hard, because humans do ‘catch’ each others emotions (emerging evidence in neuroscience shows this - it’s part of how/why wecommunicate with each other). The basic idea is that the nervous system has three key responses - hyper arousal (fight/ flight) hypo arousal (withdrawal/ freeze) and the Social Care system. This last one helps people to calm down. People scan for safety in the environment and will assess cues like what their caregivers are looking at, tone of voice, breathing rate, body language, etc - all beyond conscious awareness. If you can activate this system instead of sending out threat cues, then the kid will calm down. (Completely different from scaring the kid into submission - this fear moves kids into freeze/withdrawal and can over time create really horrible problems in terms of feelings of emptiness, dissociative disorders - which may come up very obviously in adolescence. The worst thing is parents might think they’ve done the right thing if their kid goes quiet and then use it as a strategy for control, without realising their kid is frightened but masking it. This causes further changes in the brain over time, by the way).
The calmness has to come from within, because no one is fooled by signs of anger with a fake smile plastered over the top.
This has been the main way that I've managed to get my husband from stopping looking disapproving and tutting - all those kinds of things he was doing at the dinner table until he realised what he was doing was creating an environment threat instead of one of safety and then he was prepared to change his behaviour. He needed to understand the neurological impacts, scientifically
This might be more long-term help but I really recommend looking into it to help the adults in the family understand the importance of staying calm around autistic kids.
If your husband is doing the cooking, then of course it’s bloody annoying for him if your kids won’t eat it! I’d be sympathetic and appreciative to him - the polyvagal calming thing from you will work on him, too. He doesn’t sound horrendous. He sounds like an involved dad who is struggling with kids that he doesn’t understand and who he is trying - thanklessly from them if they are rejecting the food - to feed.
Also, he needs to apologise to your son so the kid can make sense of it, otherwise the fear might take hold.
My kids are teenagers with sensory issues and still avoid certain foods, it can be very demoralising as the chef. But at least family mealtimes are happier, which helps them with all the other battles that they have to fight.

Yes I don’t think SS will jump to the same conclusions as the people commenting on this post. They may well suggest counselling & parenting classes. That if it doesn’t break the family apart.

we have Asperger’s in our family & since the diagnosis & the advice given & followed I now have a 25yo nephew who had horrendous tummy issues (due to bad diet) with no social life or job that spends his day on a computer. Which he has 2 because if one breaks down the world would simply end if he couldn’t have it. The WiFi being down was quite the experience from what my SIL said. I do wonder if life would have been better for him without a diagnosis

I agree I think social services will offer help and support and parenting classes

the issue is that the OP says he won’t engage with it and that is the problem

I’m curious as to how life would be better for him without a diagnosis? Do you think he would be better off if there was no explanation for why he has difficulties with certain things?

Do you not think Women’s Aid or NCDV would call SS? Your post is contradictory.

If a safeguarding issue is raised, ANY professional has a duty to report it.

OP, I am a 3rd year social worker student. I have worked in safeguarding for many, many years.

Your gut is telling you this is really bad because it is.

If you try to cover this up and fix it from within, you are complicit in the abuse of your child by your husband. From what your son has said, this isn’t the first time something has happened.

You need to be seen to be protecting your child above your husband. Anything else is classed as failure to protect and your parenting will be called into question too.

Therapy is not recommended with an abuser. Your husband is showing no initiative to want to change. If he was a decent man who had reached the end of his tether, he would have been devastated by what he had done tonight, and left the family home without being asked because he would recognise he wasn’t safe to be around your children and would want to seek help. He hasn’t, has he?

I hope you do the right thing and speak to school today. Social services are likely to offer support in the first instance.

Your problem is your husband, as you are aware, not your son. You have a husband who has tunnel vision, and believes his way is the correct and only way. He refuses to listen to you, won't cooperate with the school/professionals and is completely inflexible. I agree with others, I believe he's likely ND too, but that doesn't excuse his behaviour, he's the adult. Your husband is minimising his behaviour, making excuses and blaming you, rather than taking responsibility for his actions. If SS are brought into your family through your request, I can't see your husband cooperating with them on any level. How that will be viewed by them, I don't know? Probably not well. You both need to work together to parent and be on the same page, but essentially to do that, you'd need to adopt his parenting style! I'm sure there are aspects of his that work, but equally some of yours too. Splitting up means your children will have two different parenting styles in two different houses, nothing will change. If you do decide to ask for intervention from the school, and SS are brought in, you are going to have to be 100% honest, and tell them how inflexible, rigid and uncooperative your husband is, and he will resist any help. In some ways your husband needs a short sharp shock - work with us or you will need to leave the family home due to safeguarding concerns.

Not defending it. But DC was obnoxious. Just because you are ND does not absolve you from proper behaviour. What was wrong with the bloody chicken? Chicken is chicken. If DC does not like it tell DC to eat the rest of the food and feed chicken to cat, or something. No pudding - can't eat main. Thereafter batch cook acceptable chicken for DC and feed it at every meal. One cannot cook separate food for one member of a family all the time.

As a 3rd year SW student, I think you know that it really isn't as simple as that. By now, as a SW student, you'd have seen lots and lots of homes where things like this situation are minor yet the threshold for actually doing anything isn't met.

I work in a position where I make at least one referral a week because I am mandated to. Most don't make their threshold for a in person visit, let alone on going involvement.

SS in my area would refer to their SEND services for parenting support. They wouldn't be assigned a social worker or anything like that.

But if you are right, these are steps to work through. SC will address his refusal to engage or learn to parent appropriately and provide the support to OP to leave if needed. They will also know more about the risk he poses, which may well be greater than OP has shared.

It sounds like you're a married single mother OP and you have my deepest sympathy. I think it might be ultimatum time. H works on his temper and learns to be more supportive and less reactive or leaves. I have experience of ASD and know that consistency and calm are essential for a harmonious household. A 45 year old man being offended by and attacking a 6 year old boy in crisis is absolutely not acceptable, in any circumstances.

You don't know this. Physical violence presents the greatest and most immediate risk because the child could be injured or killed. Surely you know this, even as a student.

You've misread the post.

Which is exactly what I just said - social services are likely to offer support at this stage. Early help intervention, signposting to parenting classes etc.

However, from one of the OP’s updates it doesn’t sound like this is the first incident between DH and DS. If DS makes a disclosure to school, particularly if there have been further incidents and mum was aware, then yes it does call her parenting into question and would be far more concerning than if mum had gone in and asked for help.

We can all sit and make assumptions about what SS should or would do, but the fact remains that this is a safeguarding concern and should be raised.

Apologies if I am going over the same ground, but can you reach out for family support from the school? Is the SENCO someone you can speak to and voice your suspicions that your H is ASD but in denial about it and is refusing to adapt his parenting to fit your DS' needs. What about the course you went on? Is there anyone there that could help? I think you should make the first move rather than wait for your son to mention it at school. Good luck with it. You sound like a brilliant mum to your DS.