Just spoken to the Principal Ed Psych about DD2

[lougle]

She thinks ASD, although their service deals with issues not labels. She's encouraged me to get school to refer. She said that if they can't do that, they have a community boookable service - a 1 hour appointment that I can go to with DD2 and someone from school (pref. SENCO) to discuss concerns, etc -which I can book directly.

but you are doing all the right things, Lougle and making real headway. Private assessments were only useful for SALT, the ASD assessment was 'borderline' for us and not really worthwhile. It does make you feel helpless, though, the whole thing I mean.

perhaps the snack pot is more to cope with rather than less? Can some things in the classroom be made more constant? (lessen the baseline anxiety) e.g. dd2 always sits in the same chair at the front of the class while the rest of the class change seats every Friday. Can CT make visual planners for written tasks? Ear defenders? I know they are out of fashion nowadays, but my dd2 sometimes chooses these for when she feels the pressure is on with written tasks still writes very little though.

I think until we have a clearer picture of what's going wrong for DD2, it's impossible to say what will work. I had no idea she was conscious of being 'different' at any point until the snack pot was mentioned.

I am very concerned that she will mask at school when profs. are there, but I have alerted them to this possibility.

I have also discovered a voice recording app on my phone, so I now have a clear recording of DD2 discussing her anxiety over school.

Gosh her words are so sad. Says a million things. Hang in there, it's all you can do. Your doing fantastic at what is a very hard job.

The snack/lunch thing. I bet she's only just started to notice 'differences' and although that's a good sign of progress, she'll now be a bit freaked out by having some self-awareness. Like a 3y old when they suddenly get shy.

School food is a problem for ds (asd) and dd (i think quirky NT). I've sort of given up: and like polter says, just try for a big breakfast, with whatever rubbish in the lunchbox. And bring something for pickup time.

You can sneak quite a lot of lunchtime calories in via a milkshake or a smoothie. Cutting a small sandwich into 'fairy bites' might help.

After a number of failed pilot studies, my latest research indicates that raspberries, blueberries are best; de-pipped, little-white-bits-removed satsuma-segments are far too much hassle to prepare daily.

The main advantage of pre-diagnosis private assessments (imho) is that someone 'professional' (ie who isn't 'mum') has made detailed observations and written them down. You don't need to shell out thousands on private SLT/EP etc to do this. Hiring a suitable babysitter might do the job, especially if you can send them along to a school event, Christmas concert, birthday party or similar social occasion.

A moonlighting LSA or a psychology/childcare student maybe?

One of the things that ss are trying to work on with DS1 has been to try to help him articulate his concerns. One of the reasons he melts down is because he literally can't find the words. So, not pleasant to experience, but DS1 actually saying 'you make me so angry that I want to smash your face to a bloody pulp' represented progress.

DD2 is expressing her concerns in a very articulate way and it is really important that she is listened to now so that she does not learn that nobody can help her and develop coping mechanisms of her own that may bring their own problems. Part of problem now that DS1 is in a setting that can help him, is that he still puts huge effort into passing for normal. He has told me he does not raise any problems and does not answer questions so that people leave him alone because nobody can help him.

I was chatting to the SENCO today, saying that I need to strike a careful balance between communicating 'yes, you have worries. They are legitimate worries. We need to make things better for you.' without her thinking 'Mummy will tell my teachers what to do and if I'm finding something tricky she'll make it go away.'

For example, being the first one out at play time may be a useful adjustment. Or it may not. It's for the teacher to decide.

Her teacher has read her note and suggested that dd2 leaves her snack pot next to the teacher's, so that she can just grab it on the way out at play time.

Last night DD2 wouldn't go to bed. She couldn't possibly go to sleep, she said, but couldn't/wouldn't tell us what was bothering her. We got her to bed at around 11.15pm.

Today, she went into complete panic in the car, begging me not to take her to school. It turns out that her teacher is away on a 2 day course and she's got a teacher she hadn't met before in replacement.

I had to take her into the office because she wouldn't walk around to the classroom (even though you pass her classroom to get to the office). A TA came and collected her.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the SENCO looking for me this afternoon - DD2 is off the pending list (I suspect prompted by CAMHS) and has had her introductory ELSA session. She was in a very happy (if a little hyper) mood on the way home from school because "every Wednesday afternoon I will go to Mr X's room (the HT) not for any trouble but just to play games with Mrs Y (ELSA)." It also coincides with assembly, which she finds very tricky, so she's happy with that.

The SENCO said that they should have warned me about the change in teacher. I said 'oh DD2 was told.' and she said 'But we should have warned you too.'

They seem to have embraced the fact that DD2 is going to struggle with things like that. Which is a big relief. To be honest though, I didn't realise how much she struggled until today. She's normally just more 'stressy' - now she's actually verbalising it I can see why.

Hasn't gone to bed again tonight. Too anxious. Don't know what to do with her. I can't just let her scream upstairs - DDs 1&3 need to sleep and DD3 shares with DD2.

In the last three months or so she has finally attached to 'Ellie', a comforter that I gave her as a baby and she's never shown any interest in. Now she can't sleep without Ellie and she's lost him Fantastic.

Will sleeping in your bed help?

DH is Not.Keen.

He has swapped beds a few times lately, but he really dislikes it (he has his own quirks).

I meant until she was asleep? Ds takes comfort sometimes if allowed to sleep I our bed, but doesn't much like us being in it with him though

Hi lougle, it sounds like you are going through a lot of things that we went through a few years ago, anxiety (leading to unacceptable behaviour) was a major part of the reason why ds ended up in a ss, identifying the reasons for the anxiety is a must and mainstream schools often don't have enough experience, knowledge and understanding of ASD strategies or ASD theory of mind.

You have already identified some of the things that make your dd anxious, ie being stared at, being in a crowd, not being able to see her friends through a sea of blue uniforms, different teacher.Some of the strategies for alleviating anxiety are fairly easy to put in place and don't take a lot of time,effort or money to do

Sorry having trouble with my tablet, it keeps freezing so I'll have to post in short bursts.

Re being hungry, I was told that being in a state of high anxiety expends more energy than being calm, so the need for food is greater, in our sons case fiddly wrappers or packets also caused more anxiety as did eating with the whole class/school, so he was allowed to eat in a quiet room with just a member of staff and 1or2 other children, the member of staff would open fiddly packets. Allowing him to eat a snack more often throughout the day helped as well.

Re not being able to find friends in the playground, does she always play with the same friends? If the answer is yes what about asking the school if she and her friends can wear high vis vests, so she can spot them easier and they can spot her.

Thank you - I see what you mean Star...I'll investigate with DH

capticorn1, thanks for those thoughts. We're in the very early stages with school, who are so far being quite fantastic. I think DD2 is struggling to move from 'friends = I wave at them and say hi' to 'friends = they actually want to play with me as much as I want to play with them' so she doesn't have a regular group of friends....I suspect she is 'nomadic'.

Re not being able to go to sleep, a Clinical Psychologist told us that our son was worrying about things that had happened during the day and was replaying them in his head and trying to understand why/how things happened and was also worried about what would happen the next day, it was so bad that he had nightmares/ night terrors over it, he was also anxious about the dark (even with a light on) noises in the house, noises outside the house etc.

What I do is sit in his room until he goes to sleep (not ideal but prevents everyone else being disturbed) turn off the central heating and emersion tank before he goes to bed, if he wants to talk about things that happened during the day then I let him, if he heard a noise I would explain what it was, and in fact the thing that has helped most has been a small desktop fan because it drowns out normal household noises but makes a consistent calming noise.

The best advice I had with regards to finding out what things created anxiety was

Ask questions that that only require a yes or no answer, you can learn a lot from a yes or no without creating a stressful situation.
Ask the questions when doing something fun so that so that it doesn't feel like an interrogation and only a few questions at a time. Repeat the same questions a couple of weeks later and then a couple of weeks after that purely to see if the answers are consistent.

Types of questions you could ask

Is your classroom big? is your classroom small?
Is your teacher loud? Is your teacher quiet?
Is your classroom noisy? Is your classroom quiet?
Are assemblies loud? Are assemblies quiet?

Ask similar questions about other situations, like playtimes/lunchtimes, PE lessons, music lessons.

The answers to these types of questions could indicate sensory difficulties which can have a major impact on Anxiety and could warrant further investigation by an OT.
HTH

Yay SENCO.

about the anxiety / sleeplessness.

In the end, it was melatonin that helped ds. He was still anxious, but he could get to sleep despite it. Which took away the "I can't sleep' Anxiety, and, since that one plus the sleep deprivation was making the other anxieties worse, it did really make a difference.

That's really useful, Cap.

Maria, you've no idea how I've been tempted to give Dd2 a dose of DD1's melatonin. I can't do that though.

I did phone the doctors' surgery to ask to speak to a doctor for advice, but there was not a single doctor there! They had ALL gone to a regional conference. The pharmacist said he couldn't recommend anything because she was too young.

Isn't dd2 heading to the same paediatrician? Could you call and ask if they'd be prepared to do a short trial?

DD2's Paed (same Paed as DD1) isn't prepared to do anything more with her until he sees evidence of concern from school, etc., because when I first went to him she was at the other school who were saying they had no concerns.

Having said that he did refer to OT because he detected some physical hesitation, etc., so he's wondering about dyspraxia, tentatively.

He only referred to SALT because I emailed him after the appointment and said 'on reflection we want you to refer, please.'

To clarify, he said no to SALT at the appointment. We said ok, then emailed him after we left saying 'please DO refer.'