Help - how the hell do you cope with relentless crying?

[vixen1]

Please help, I'm at the end of my tether, I really feel like I'm losing it some days.

My DS has confrimed Autistic traits but no diagnosis. One of his issues is that his first and immediate response to anything going wrong is to cry. If his train falls over, he cries; if his brother touches his toy, he cries; if he wants something else on telly, he cries... you get the picture.

He's totally capable of asking for things and will frequently ask while crying at the same time. We have tried EVERYTHING. All the strategies given to us by Portage and our OT and nothing works. Getting him to stop crying isn't really a problem - we find out want he wants, ask him to use his "big boy voice" and we sort it for him. The problem is that the crying starts in the first place. It is, without exaggeration, every 1-5 minutes. I was pathetically grateful this morning because at one point he managed 15 minutes without crying.

Help, help how do you deal with this? I guess I'm looking for coping strategies for myself this time. Should I hum a tune, count to ten, shut myself out in the garden?? Please, anything to help me cope would be appreciated....

Sorry, having a crappy day...

I don't know your ds but...

Assuming he is sufficiently high functioning and has the communication skills to ask, but crying is easier, the long term answer must be that he must learn that crying won't "work"
in short, it will be a hell of a battle that will go on for months and once you start you mustn't back down, but it is the only way to get out of this cycle.

In the short term, yes get out of there. This has the double benefit that he doesn't have an audience for his crying / you aren't dancing to his tune.

If I have got the wrong end of the stick and he doesn't have the language skills, please ignore all of the above and I would say, get out of there for 5 or 10mins until you feel strong enough to deal with it.

I can see why the OT and portage type advice won't really work though - as I'm guessin they say do a social story - and ignore him if he doesn't follow what is in the social story ?? Then they say only to tackle one issue at a time (fair enough but)... if he can't generalise, you have to do a social story for every possible scenario. In your case, you can't tell whether it is a "juice" cry or a "tv" cry - until you have responded

Can you get someone else to look after him / send him to nursery - even put him in a creche for a bit?

They had a baby creche at our shopping centre meant for people doing Christmas shopping - I dropped DS off there just for an hour once when he got too much. Best £4 I ever spent ;)

Thanks both for your advice.

DS does have the language skills to ask for things which is what we encourage. He gets much praise on the rare occaision that he asks for something sensibly.

We have tried ignoring him as far as possible in the past but it can descend into a meltdown during which he often throws things which have been known to hit his twin brother.

I guess I could try standing outside so I can't hear him but I can peer through the window so that I can intervene if things get out of hand.

We've tried a creche before but after 20 minutes a member of staff came and got me because he was beside himself. I've started taking both boys to gym tots and have been able to leave them on their own there recently, I'm hoping this is a step towards being able to leave them in the creche again.

We have a FANTASTIC childminder who he could go to but we're really short of cash at the moment so leaving him with her for any extra time is out of the question at the moment.

We tried a social story about "when my trains fall over" which had some success. Can you think of a more generalised version? I'm not sure he'd understand "when things go wrong" but maybe "when I want something"... Any ideas how I could structure that?

Other times it's just so frustrating because he'll say "Help please" and I respond "of course. Help with what?" and he'll just reply "help please". I asked him to show me but he couldn't/wouldn't. I tried re-phrasing but that made no difference. He ended up getting really upset and frustrated. He has the vocabulary skills to tell me but sometimes he just doesn't

oh the number of times I have heard from teachers "he can do it, he's perfectly capable, he just doesn't.."

Dd2 went through a crying stage, saying that i think dd1 was worse as she used to make herself vomit . With dd1 it was harder as i didn't want to leave her to vomit so ignoring her was tricky. I always found the more i tried to talk to her the worse she would get so i would try not to be verbal with her, comfort her if she wanted too or try and distract her. It does get easier, dd1 has now excepted that things sometimes go wrong and its not her fault (thats just life) and she cries a lot less 9but still more than most 6 year olds).

With dd2 i just try and distract her with something else, this morning she got upset with a game on the PC (which she could not do) and she was crying and repeating 'wrong one, try again' over and over, in the end i distracted her by singing her favorite song in a funny voice and within a few seconds she was fine and we left for school (its not always that easy). I often leave her crying,sit in another room to calm myself down and plan how i'm going to handle the situation (reminding myself that its not her fault its the Autism).

I think with a lot of ASD children there vocablary skills seem to go to pot when they get upset and they find it hard to foccus on being verbal.