to think that a child with SEN should not be exempt from some attempt at behaviour control.

[NaccetyMac]

Today at a fete, a small child took a toy from my DS1 and was playing with it. I told him (pleasantly) that it was DS1's toy and asked for it back. His mother turned around from her (clearly very important) convo to at me and say "he's disabled, he don't understand." And make no attempt to take the toy from the child.
So I explained to him again that it was not his toy, found him another toy to replace it with, gave it to him and took DS1's toy away out of sight. Mother turns around and says (again) "HE'S DISABLED, HE DON'T UNDERSTAND."

OK. SO get off your bum, stop ignorning him and HELP him to understand.

Really angers me, that some people appear to think that an additional need gives them carte blanche to ignore behaviour and totally fail to apply boundaries!

Well I did adress that in my post but what makes you think both kids would have ended up happy?

I'd have done it, but OP would then have witnessed the mother of allmeltdowns, often kids find that just as upsetting.

maybe beacause the child had sn.

Well the mother swapped the toys and there was no fuss... so why couldn't the other mother have done that? Surely she knows her DS well enough to know that he would't have fussed... because he didn't. By the sounds of things, anyway.

But i think people lie having SN in AIBU because it causes a barney. It also annoys me because it allows all sorts of uninformed tosh to be thrown around with impunity.

I personally know very very few parents with DCs like mine who don't treat encounters withthe general public like a D-Day landing.
I think the general public are reluctant to give credit and swift as fuck to criticise.
We do everything we can think of and a huge result is going out and passing unnoticed - which is pretty sad when you think about it.

Of course that actually is exactly what we should do.

But the assumption seems to be that SN or LDs mean that a child just needs a bit more time to learn basic rules when the truth is that actually you can turn blue in the face and there are something which some children will never understand. DS2 is 13 now and still doesn't understand that he can't justy walk into the road. Does anyone doubt how hard I have tried to teach him?

And I hate the slightly smug judgement that goes with this outsiders view - as if we have to be super parents.

Every other parent is allowed a shit day. You can post on here that your child had a meltdown, or was runing in a cafe or refused to get dressed -whatever - and you will get loads of "well you can't be perfect all the time" style support.

But there seems to be a perfection, a sort of sanitly martyrdom that gets allocated to you when you have a child with SN. I was an average parent. I was going to have a couple of average kids who I would parent to the best of my ability. I am just like you. I do beans on toast and watch the clock to see if it is early enough for a drink . I swear too much and I like fancy shoes. Just ordinary - not born with the holy glow and viewing parenthood as a mission.
Truth is there are good parents and shit parents. And there are great parents who have a totally shit day when they do everything wrong and go to bed feeling awful. And the wearying, sometimes exhausting nature of dealing with SN and the emotional difficulties of having a child with SN that means that depression etc is likely to be more common initially. And of course huge numbers of fathers fuck off so most mums are alone.

Astonishing to me that I regularly read threads on here where posters argue vociferously that they would struggle to parent a child with SN . They find it so impossible to contemplate that they would chose termination.
Yet they then meet mums who are doing that job - the one they consider too hard to contemplate and they get sniffy about whether they are doing it properly.

I don't mean the OP here btw - I am talking in general term...

The OP is not being unreasonable.
But parents of NT children will perform as poorly in similar circumstances.
And personally I tend to be more inclined to give the mum of a child with SN the benefit of the doubt.

like having SN in AIBU

bloddy good post pagwatch

why thank you shoesie

I agree that SN should be saved for the SN boards- there's too many emotions around it and those who have never come up against it can't be expected to know every little thing. People are bringing in their experiences of SN rather than sticking to the OP. Which is fine, of course, but prob better for the SN topic.

the whole op was about people using sn as an excuse to allow bad behaviour,of course it's about SN.

Actually Totally whilst I am annoyed when people obviously deliberately put SN on the AIBU in order to post dodgy views I don't think they should be stopped or pulled.

It is difficult to read uninformed views at times. But I think the more these issues are discussed the more people learn to understand each other.

I don't think giving another mother a bit of a break is the same as people being "expected to knw every little thing". I think it is about having a small amount of empathy.
And most people posting have agreed that usually parents of a child with SN would have acted and if they hadn't would probably have explained or done more that the woman in the OP.

Very good point re parenting, pag.

Apropos of this, I am trying to get a student diagnosed with ASD at the moment. His home life has been horrendous from day one- neglect, in and out of foster care, residential homes; the EP therefore attributes all of his ASD tendencies (and there are many) to attachment disorder.

She simply cannot conceive that he may have ASD and poor parenting, as if the two are mutually exclusive. It's crazy. This boy cannot access the support he needs and has the wrong school placement (EBD) because of this attitude. It makes me very angry.

And pag is right, you do not have to become a perfect parent because your child has SN.

Hmmm. One the one hand I think maybe the mum should have tried a bit harder. And I also have heard a friend who is mother of an ASD child complaining about the behaviour of ADHD children at a SN playgroup they go to and I think hmmmm, is it so easy to distinguish between different special needs? Is there even a class bias here - my middle class child has disabilities but should not be put in a classroom with those working class ADHD children who are badly behaved?

But then I think - well am I the only mother of NT children on here who has sometimes been in a situation where (eg when they went into their nth two year old temper tantrum of the day) quite frankly I didn't apologise enough, didn't react quickly enough and didn't actually give a stuff any longer what anybody thought because i'd just had ENOUGH and desperately wanted to be home and not in a public forum? So God knows how desperate I would be if it was a twenty-four hour a day years and years thing.

I have almost been in this situation from the other side.

My DD took another childs drink off the table (the child was not even near it) and this man waded in and told DD off saying "that's not your drink" blah blah..

I didn't say DD was autistic (didn't feel able to tell people at this toddler group, just don't go now) and felt compelled to tell her off and explain to her about not taking other people's drinks.

I KNEW she would not understand and it just felt like some really stupid fake acting to appease the other dad.

That's really what this is all about. If your child doesn't understand we must pretend to teach them to appease other parents? Pigletmania said they make a severely autistic man apologise for his actions even though he doesn't understand, merely to appease the offended person. It didn't sound like he will learn anything.

Perhaps we need to stop applying NT standards of parenting to kids with SN and just be a little more understanding!! If someone with severe ASD was aggressive to my DD I would be cringing if they were "made to apologise" tbh, and would understand.

I don't think that was all that bothered the OP though.

I think the OP was extremely nastily worded and sneering, and it actually made me cry last night (OK I am sensitive as we are going through the diagnosis). It was all about "carte blanche to be lazy parents and allow bad behaviour".

There is no way IMO that the OP just innocently meant that the mum should have taken the toy away.

Someone else said it worries them that she teaches kids with SN, it worries me too and I hope for more understanding for my DD when she goes to school/nursery.

TotallyAndUtterlyPaninied don't gte your post. are you saying that sn should be shut away in in it's own topic?
why?
if the op teaches children with sn good grief, she obviously hasn't got a clue.

just realise i said 'appease the other dad', i don't have a manjo,honestly!

just realise i said 'appease the other dad', i don't have a manjo,honestly!

oops, i protest too much!

Fanjo has a manjo

Pag joins in singing "Fanjo has a manjo" .......

Santa- I'm not saying it should be 'shut in it's own topic' I'm saying everyone on here is getting all angry and emotional about SN when the OP isn't saying anything bad about it (in the OP, I haven't read the whole lot, it's too long), she's simply saying the woman made no effort to help the situation and then she shouted at her when she sorted it out. The woman should be taking some kind of responsibility and she could so easily have done what the OP did herself. I'm not saying that's true of every child. I'm simply saying the OP managed to give the child another toy and give her DS his toy back without much fuss. Simple. Surely his own mum could have tried to do that.

So unless I said "poor dear, she must have been having a bad day, gosh, it's so hard for her, let the poppet have the toy," I am an evil unsympatheic person who shouldn't be teaching Special Needs? LMAO. Must let all the parents know at once.

FWIW, I didn't expect or want an apology. I wanted DS1's toy before all hell broke loose. (for me. I am one of the lucky people whose child doesn't hit, kick or snatch, he'll just stand like a zombie with his hands in his mouth drooling and howling loudly, and then will need to be held tightly until he calms down. Which is fun.)

I have an issue with the particular type of parenting displayed in the OP - and one which is depressingly common in the big bad world. That does not extrapolate to the wider SN community, but think what you like!

call me Dave..

TAUP: no, she actually said this:

"Really angers me, that some people appear to think that an additional need gives them carte blanche to ignore behaviour and totally fail to apply boundaries! "

not that the mum didn't return the toy, but that the mum didn't apply boundaries to her child, who didn't actually understand.