Please come and talk to me, I feel broken

[KentuckyFriedChildren]

My son (5) has asd. The past 10 days or so have been hell with him. Every little thing results in screaming, kicking, biting, punching, refusal to move... I am trying my best to stay calm and not rise to it but it is so hard. He has been the same at school. We have tried to talk to him and find out what is wrong but he doesn't seem to know himself. I just want to help him and make it all better. I feel dangerously close to breaking point now and would appreciate any advice or even just mindless chatter to keep me sane

Hi kentucky sorry you and you little boy are having such a hard time at the moment.

It is really difficult when our children cant tell us what is upsetting them isnt it
I often have to play a guessing game with Dd3 to work out what is wrong.

Has something changed at school or at home it can be something really tiny that no one has thought about.

Good luck and keep coming on here

Thanks for the reply. Not really, dh has started a new job but the hours haven't changed really so he is still not around much and he started it 6 weeks ago so I don't know why it would make a difference now. Ds is in mainstream and is under constant supervision so I know at least that he isn't getting bullied or anything as he has someone keeping an eye all the time. There doesn't seem to be a reason behind it at all. It's little things like this morning we got off at the bus stop we usually go to and he started screaming and hitting me because he wanted to get off at a different one. He hadn't told me this before of course and the stop he wanted had already passed. It would've added 10 mins to our journey to get off there but I wouldn't have minded if it kept the peace. Sadly I'm not psychic. Yesterday he picked the wrong lunch by mistake and then "couldn't" eat it. They get 2 choices which are either "blue choice" or "orange choice" and he chooses his meal according to which colour he had the day before. He accidentally chose orange after having orange on thursday and then realised once he had sat down to his lunch and couldn't eat it. After that they couldn't get him back into the classroom and he hid under a table in the corridor for the rest of the day. The school and his teacher especially are amazing but they have no clue what to do with him either.

What a shame
The expecting you to know what he is thinking is common with Asd, it is to do with poor theory of mind and there is really not much you can do if something like a bus stop change comes out of the blue. I suppose you could start asking him from now on which stop he wants to get off at.

The lunch time one I can help with though. Because the kitchen staff (who are lovely btw) cant always stick to the menu precisely Dd3 goes at break time to the kitchen to find out what is for lunch. She then has an hour to decide. This has really helped us and has enabled her to have school dinners instead of packed lunch. Before we did this she couldnt cope if the menu changed and she had chosen at home off the sheet.

Hope that might help.

Good luck.

Oh he doesn't care what the actual meal is, he just wanted blue dinner not orange, bless him. He'll eat anything so long as he doesn't have the same colour 2 days in a row, in fact i don't think he pays much attention to the actual menu I'll tell his teacher to double check which colour he had the day before though and that should stop it happening again. He was starving when he got home poor kid. It was definitely nothing to do with the food on his plate, it was actually one of his favourite meals he had, but the fact that he had the wrong colour! We have had several more tantrums since the bus one today and tbh I don't think he has a clue why he is upset. And neither do I. I'm feeling alot calmer though. I've just left him to it and sat on the couch with a coffee. It's hard to get the balance between giving in to his demands to keep the peace and keeping clear boundaries to stop the chaos. It's hard to keep going with the rules when he's screaming that I'm hurting him (which I'm not of course) in the street and I'm getting dirty looks from people who have no idea what they are looking at

PolterGoose we have a chat at bedtime everyday where he tells me about his day and if there is anything worrying him or anything he just wants to say really. It works well for us, after school he won't talk to me at all about school- he HAS to go home, hang his jacket and put his shoes in his spot before he can concentrate on anything else. The school dinners have been working fine for months and it's better than packed lunch which was quite frankly getting complicated. He had to have 5 boxes of 5 different foods each box containing 5 pieces of whatever food was in it. He wasn't bothered what foods etc just that there had to be 5. I could just see that once he turned 6 it would be 6 boxes etc (he turned 5 in november and before that insisted on 4 boxes of 4 pieces of 4 things) and I didn't want to end up still doing it when he was 16

DS has been awful for the last 2 weeks,hitting spitting and generally unhappy...school and ourselves have been puzzled as he's usually happy and there has been no changes to routines ect..
He's woken up this morning with the most horrendous cold and sore ears so I think he might have been feeling run down and a bit unwell for the last week or so,I'm hoping once he's better he will be back to being my loveable rogue and drop the rocky act :)
Maybe you son is just feeling poorly .

With the school meal bit I would say two things went on there bless him.

One: he was beside himself that HE made the wrong choice.

Two: It will have been out of pattern, routine, sync with the colour choice and this would drive any ASD child potty.

Three: If he is like DS the problem solving may be an issue. DS broke his pencil and therefore as far as he was concerned his drawing days were over. He couldnt see beyond the broken pencil. Of course the simple thing is to sharpen it but there wasnt a sharpener on the table, or go and get another pencil from the teacher. But at that moment in time, he was drawing, it broke, he couldnt carry on.

If school perhaps just made allowances for it and just commented "oh! wrong colour choice well we shall have to set that straight" and just gave him the blue one or whatever I suspect that would have eased the anxiety.

Bus wise well I know DS thinks I am psychic lol because quite often he has planned his route, day or plans in his mind and is convinced he has told me or I should already know!

This is hard. Especially when the problem solving issue comes to a head.

Example: DS has decided today he will play computer, draw, use paint and go outside on his roller skates in that order.

Storm blows up and of course he cannot go outside in it. Cue anxiety because his plans have not been completed and he is unable to solve the issue by just finding something else to do because a) its not the same b) he cannot see beyond the fact that his day is over.

I send you a hug and a cup of and sympathise greatly x

10 days sounds like it's the return to school after Easter that's sent him into a spiral.

I can sympathise with the school dinner crap. DS1 has been through so many phases, one of which was a complete refusal to have the blue option - he would go mad if it was the only choice he liked and end up hungry because he wasn't going to eat it. At 9, we still have control issues over food. He's back on packed lunches, as there were too many incidents such as no buns served with the burger in a bun, but yesterday I managed to send him in with the wrong shaped sandwich and serve him the wrong shaped pasta at dinner time that also didn't have a red enough sauce

Offering more and plenty of emergency

Thanks guys They are funny creatures aren't they. I do love alot of his quirks- he speaks in the most hilarious way, all up and down like an australian with a scottish accent and very matter of fact; he wears swimming goggles to school which he is convinced gives his special powers (I think its an insecurity thing and he wears them to make himself feel better, also he is scared of water so we don't go swimming which makes this so much sweeter); he makes lists of things, people or whatever is in his head and illustrates them (I have a drawer full of random papers with lists on that I just have to keep); he can't wear a jumper over a tshirt it must go under unless its his school one which must be worn over. Just reminding myself that he is in fact very special and not the raging monster that he seems to be just now

Flyingboy did thid (still does to some extent). Just after a major revolting bout he either was ill (so had been brewing in) or had grown or could do something he hadn't done before. He would be perfect for a week, up and down the next week. Utterly vile for a week then up and down then perfect. As he got older and his speech better, the gaps widened in the time periods.

I often find a change in behaviour comes with a new skill or progress in another area.
Is making his own choices & decisions (bus stop, lunch) something new for him? Maybe he is starting to understand it all a bit more but not quite IYKWIM?
Either way its not much fun for you, it will pass, or maybe be replaced by something else

Could he do blue week then orange week? The whole making-a-daily-forced-choice thing might be the last straw.

Yy to lurgie, back-to-school and/or developmental leap as likely triggers.

And I am that you manage the bus at all on a school day.
We used to do the 'puppet' chats (soft toys, but same principle).
The 'psychic mum' thing is a pita, and I have no easy answers for it

When ds gets all control-freak-y, I try to give him more predictability, allow extra time so meltdowns can just happen, and we dust off the dreaded visual timetables etc .