Your tips on dealing with meltdowns please!

[Sahkoora]

This is going to sound awful, but sometimes I wish i had a big padded cell to put DS in when he has a meltdown.

We live in a smallish flat and stopping everyone getting hurt during DS's meltdowns is really becoming a problem. he's undergone a lot of stress this year after being excluded from school, our battle to get him a place at an SS, and now with home tuition from someone he doesn't like.

He's very frustrated and anxious, and this means that the slightest upset sends him into red mist mode. He's into punching, kicking, throwing furniture and wrecking his room.

He also won't stay anywhere I put him, like his sensory room. He runs straight out again and continues hitting etc. I've been operating a no tolerance policy on violence, taking him out of the main room if he's violent, but the problem is he can't calm down very easily by himself, and being alone really scares him. If I go with him, I just get beaten up, and I also have a 2yr old who I can't leave alone for long.

The past few days, things have been really bad, and I've ended up holding the door shut to keep him from hitting his little brother, while DS screams and punches and kicks it on the other side. This doesn't feel right to me, but I can't let him hurt anyone. He really doesn't hold back, and I feel as though we need to get a proper meltdown plan in place before he gets any bigger.

Any tips would be gratefully received.

Avoidance is the best approach - once a child is in full meltdown nothing will work and you'll just have to ride it out. In time you'll learn to recognise triggers and have management strategies in place for him to avoid losing control altogether. Listen to Polter, she talks a lot of sense and has some good strategies.

I found it useful to talk to my son about consequences, but at a calm time, not when the incident was happening. It was important for him to know that aggressive and violent behaviour towards others wasn't acceptable and wouldn't be tolerated, and that there would be some consequence if he chose to behave that way. I still recognised and supported the distress he was in but this approach helped him to realise that he was making choices in how he behaved when under stress, and gave him the motivation to choose differently.

For us, the key was to find his comfort zone by pulling back from all the situations in his life that caused him stress, and stay there for a few months before introducing challenges to develop his tolerance. That approach might not be possible for you but I would advise minimising as much as possible. It was far from easy and it took years, but we did get there in the end and now, at 15, it's a good four years since he had anything like a meltdown and he can cope quite well with most anxiety and stress.