How to help my strange/angry ASD son socially, in a small village..?

[MoiraMama]

I'm looking for any advice or similar experiences. My 8 year old DS is just so, so dfficult, and I just feel spent after years of worrying and finding everything with him hard. I keep hoping that as he gets older, he will become more self-sufficient, but things actually get worse as people aren't so forgiving with older kids.. His anger is dreadful, he loses it multiple times a day, and reacts by shouting/ranting/raving at home/school/anywhere, and coming out with totally made up and inappropriate statements ("going to get my dad's gun and shoot you" at a kid who annoyed him), or screaming hysterically at a bollard he walked into that he was going to get a tank and mow it down. I hear him talking to other kids and he just isn't on their level at all, everything he says is frankly, bizarre, although he is trying to be friendly. Between the strangeness of the things he says, and his horrendous extreme reactions to things, he's not doing well for friends, and there are not many children in the village we live in. His best friend now wants nothing to do with him, but he simply doesn't get it. I don't know how to help him, I feel he could still have friendships depite either the weirdness, or the anger, but together he doesn't have a hope. Playdates are a non-starter, no one wants him playing with their kid anyway, and we're in the arse end of nowhere. He really doesn't get it. It breaks my heart when he sees his sister go on playdates, and he says he wants to go to one of his friends' houses - I don't know what to do to make things better for him!

Are there any autism groups nearby where he can meet other kids? Generally people who are neurodivergent ‘get’ other neurodivergent people better.
‘The Explosive Child’ by Ross Greene is supposed to be good. Your DS sounds like he may need anger management strategies as he grows. Is the school helping at all?

Can you move? Seriously?

Also, calling him strange isnt helping, op.

What have you tried so far to help him? How much do you know about Autism? It doesn't come across as if you understand him at all.

What strategies are you using to help your DS? Are you working with the school?

How small is the school op, and how equipped to help him? If he likes guns and tanks (only going off his threats), I’d try to pivot to get him into eg Lego and maybe a form of sport? If he isn’t sporty something.

Your own negative view of your child won't be helping here. Calling him weird or strange is a bit cruel really. The way he sees and interacts with the world will be different. Things will upset him that don't upset non-autistic kids. Your job is to understand the way he sees and experiences the world and advocate for him. Do the people in your community know he is autistic?

Can you do a course like Neurobears with him, something that will help you both understand autism better and learn regulation strategies, etc?

Also, if he is frequently walking into things, tripping over things, etc, and has poor coordination, advocate for a dyspraxia assessment with school/GP. Coordination difficulties can be a major source of frustration for autistic and ND children. Imagine how you'd feel if you were constantly getting bumps and bruises from impact and it's a shock every time it happens and you don't understand why you didn't see the thing or notice you were too close to it. I have dyspraxia and AuDHD and have absolutely lost it at both inanimate objects and my own brain, at times!

My son is similar but has calmed down a bit, now aged 16. He has learned strategies to manage his anger - like he goes off to take a break instead of shouting and crying.

He also uses dramatic inappropriate language at times - similar to your son. It can sound bad but he is not at all intending on hurting anyone but just expressing himself
when he is very stressed. As he has gotten older he has learned to control this - as we have constantly explained how other people might perceive it and it has sunk in. He will still use words like this at home if something really annoys him but wont use them at school.

Also, i get when you describe your son as ‘weird’. Its how he may be seen by other people - and means he cant easily fit in with the others. You can still love him and worry about him but be aware of these things. My son has very specific interests and opinions that he fixates on and his peers would perceive these as strange.

My son has a few friends at school who also have autism but does not see them outside school he is happy in his own company. I spent so many years really upset about the friends situation but have come to terms with it and just glad he is happy now. I do know many children with autism who have made friends though but often joining organisations that have social clubs for children with autism etc.

Your poor son.

Maybe learn about Autism and anxiety?
The language you use in your post is actually disgraceful and at best really ignorant at worse really unkind.

Remove screens and devices, where is he seeing this language?
Work on building family connections, boards game, drawing, going for walks together, cooking together. Read books about children who struggle with their emotions and discuss them. Then start building outside connections, join scouts and sports groups, find somewhere he can feel he belongs.

One strategy we tried with my son was catagorising problems into glitches (tiny things which went wrong that he could fix himself); small problems (things he could fix), medium problems (might need some adult help); big problems (definitely need adult help); giant problems (hospital injuries, house on fire, call the police).

It took quite a while, and a lot of humour and patience, to stop everything being catagorised as a giant problem. But once it did, it reduced the number of daily meltdowns quite a bit.

In terms of friendships, I would reduce the pressure on one-to-one play if other children are struggling to build connections with DS. And instead make sure that he is in some clubs and after school activities so that he’s still getting the social interaction, even if that means driving to another town. Martial arts, Lego club, Pokémon, dungeons and dragons, cubs will all have other neurodiverse children in them so something like that, but fitted to his interests, is likely to have supportive parents.

Hi OP, my son is 5 with ASD and also sounds similar to your son. I'd recommend seeing a nutritionist as there is a strong link between brain and gut health issues in ASD kids - not sure if you have a picky eater. We are only just at the beginning of working with nutrionist but she is running blood tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies and stool test for gut health - we have seen a huge improvement in DS behaviour since taking magnesium and saffron. Also I think if he has a niche interest try to find friends who also share the same interest. If you can get him to join a sports club/team sport that might help but I know how hard it is to convince them of they don't want to.

I joined an asd youth club with DS which helped massively as he finally had a place where he fits in.
How’s school? Are they meeting his needs?

The OP was clearly using a summary for the title and was quite obviously referring to his behaviour as strange, not him personally.

It’s OK to be honest. It is strange and it will be alarming for other kids and put them off being friends with him. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him 🙄

She literally labelled him strange and angry in the thread title and said he is "so difficult". She didn't say "strange/angry/difficult behaviour".

Of course it doesn't mean she doesn't love him and that you don't have to be honest about the impact of dysregulated behaviour. But that's what she's describing - autistic dysregulation, not a "strange, angry" child.

It's also not unkind to be honest about the fact that parental attitude to autism matters hugely - I'm a former ed psych and autism/ADHD/SPLD assessor in CAMHS, and I did see the differences where there was high acceptance, high support, willingness to self educate and realistic (as opppsed to low or high) expectations of autistic children based on age, stage and profile of support need. You cannot expect most autistic 8 year olds to "do" neuronormative socialising with neurotypical kids. The more parents expect their autistic children to "perform normal" and therefore perceive them as falling short, the more dissatisfaction and friction there is in family relationships.

Autistic children grow up with these messages about being weird, strange, too much, angry, etc constantly from everywhere and if that's how their parents see them, of course they are going to pick up on it. This is not rocket science.

Parents are often coping with little support/education around autism and parenting, which makes it hard. But in that situation it's important to take some responsibility and find your own sources if the state isn't stepping into the breach. I absolutely believe it should be, and one of the reasons I am no longer in CAMHS is because I couldn't watch families and children being catastrophically failed any more. But the reality is, the state and the NHS won't offer much.

Does it make such a drastic difference? I’m not sure it does. We don’t say ‘he behaves like a thief’ after all.

I do understand and am not being purposefully contentious. I know labelling the behaviour not the child is important but we all lapse into it especially when the child isn’t there - I might say to one of mine ‘well that was silly behaviour wasn’t it; how can we put it right?’ But later I might say to DH ‘ds was really silly today and broke a toy at James’ house.’ It doesn’t mean that I have intrinsically labelled him for life!

Thank you for your replies, some of those are really helpful. Of course I don't use language like strange/weird around my son - but used it here to describe our situation. And I am sure he is perceived that way, I couldn't care less how people perceive him or if he grows up to be an odd or quirky adult, as long as he is happy. The main problem with coping with my son's quirks/anger is the fact that we live in an isolated community. We have no specific ASD support from the school (his teacher is wonderful though), there are no autism groups, there are no groups of any kind for kids, because there are not many kids.

I love him to bits, and actually, I like him very much - he's funny, interesting and brilliant company, when he can stay calm. And I would say that I do understand him well, but the rest of this community doesn't, which means he is going to miss out on friendships. We haven't been vocal in sharing the fact that he is autistic, because we think it would do more harm than good.

Screens etc - we're very careful with what he watches. He immediately latches on to dramatic language, always has done, so anything comic-y/slapstick he immediately repeats. I think he gets some of it just from school, everything is a pretend gun/grenade. He's not overly-interested in violence, it's just the stuff he comes out with when having an outburst.

He is very friendly, extroverted, and not at all anxious. We are extremely accepting of his quirks, and I think we do a good job of making him feel confident and listened to. The anger is more difficult: we try to project "calmness" around him as much as we can, and a generally positive outlook, because he flies off the handle so massively at the tiniest thing. We encourage him to do deep breaths, count to ten etc., use language to describe your emotions.. it doesn't look like it has much effect but then maybe things would be worse if we didn't.. The main strategy we have is we keep him busy, and to try as much as possible to keep him socialising in a supervised way, the result is he doesn't benefit from the same freedom as other children here do.

He is the eldest of my 4 kids, and he does dominate our attention most of our time. It's difficult to get the balance right of attending to his needs and caring for our others. There are a few really good suggestions/ideas here, thank you.

I have a friendly extroverted but angry son too. Stopping chasing the dream of normal peer relationships is hard but necessary. If he doesn’t have the skills they can’t be learned through repeated failure.

one thing which helped us is deliberately hanging out in group settings like the park, the swimming pool, cafes, church groups, camp sites etc where he would strike up a connection which gave him a sense of social success.

This is a fantastic post!

I'd add possibly Stagecoach or some other form.of theatre. Make use of that drama.

I had a real light bulb moment when I saw my AuDHD DD run onto stage to storm the barricades. She was very good at it!

I actually think your best bet OP is to be completely honest with him when he is calm. 'If you tell children when you're angry that you're going to shoot them then they are not going to want to be friends with you'. Then perhaps try role playing with him what he could do instead.

There a good chance that he won't realise the impact of his words on others and he needs someone to be very clear about the consequences and practice with him what he could do/say instead. Don't expect instant results of course, and there might be quite a long time of him knowing what he should do but not being able to do it when he gets angry.

I often found I needed to be very blunt with DS for him to understand. He also loved slapstick, after he went to the circus and watched the clowns he then thought tripping other kids up and watching them go flying was a really fun game. Getting cross and telling him it was really not a nice thing to do and not to do it again didn't cut it. I had to talk about how someone could get really hurt, have to go to hospital and if they hit their head on the tarmac they could even die and it would be his fault. I had to be very clear and quite blunt about it to have an impact.

Do you get much chance to spend time playing with him? Modelling how to play might really help him. That could be playing with a train set, playing chase, playing football. It could really help him for you to be clear about the 'rules' of play and make sure he is aware of them as he probably isn't, again being very blunt and point out the obvious. The amount of things that I thought were blatantly obvious and DS had no idea about was quite astounding. Perhaps sometimes play his way, however strange his game or rules are and sometimes play 'your' game where there are rules that other children would expect to play by.

If he is going to have a friend round at any point then I would suggest having structured activities for them to do together with you joining in with them as well. DS always found one to one play much easier than trying to fit in with a group. Don't worry about him not having the same freedom as other kids, just see it as him needing more support.

I would also be open about him being autistic. Right now he is potentially being labelled as aggressive, mean, strange and who knows what else, knowing he is autistic is more likely to be a positive IME, people then understand he has a diagnosis rather than giving him their own labels.

I would also say, whatever he is into, lean into it. If he loves My Little Pony or Road signs or whatever else then make the most of it and get books, toys, print off pictures, colour in pictures or make biscuits with him in the shape of whatever he loves. Take advantage of it - I used to be able to get DS out for a walk by suggesting we could talk about Thomas the Tank Engine on the way. He had a TTTE toy for the car and TTTE audio books to help him with car journeys,

The other thing is DS really benefitted from a lot of time to decompress. After school he needed drink, snacks and story and then time on his own to decompress. Does yours have his own room? That is something that is likely to be really important and helpful to him. DS would have really struggled with 3 siblings and is very glad to be an only child.

I agree with possible dyspraxia if he bumps into things a lot, especially if he also struggles with using a knife and fork, riding a bike, hand writing or any other coordination issues.

Goodluck OP! You sound like a great mum, just keep working on it and things will get easier as he gets older and gets better at handling his emotions. Enjoy his quirkiness!