Raspberry blowing out of control - please help

[sleepyhorse]

Hi there

Really can't cope with 5 yr old ds who has severe language and communication disorder and very likely ASD. He has been blowing rasberries for last couple of years but it's getting worse and worse. He will literally come right up to your face and do it and know matter how much I tell him off or try and do positive reinforcement nothing works. It's getting to the point where I just don't want to be in the same room as him and starting to resent him as it's just so irrating, I know that's an awful thing to say about your child but can't help how I feel. Feeling exhausted, frustrated and angry. His language has really come on now so you would expect the raspberry blowing to have calmed down a bit. The OT seems to think its a sensory thing. Any one else going through the same thing? Would appreciate any advice. Thanks

I really sympathise sleepyhorse and understand your frustration. Raspberry blowing recently became a big problem for us too (DS is 5, ASD] and it was causing big problems in school as he was just blowing them in the assistant’s face every time she tried to work with him! I made a sort of mind map game with him, and, to my surprise, he stopped doing it that day and hasn’t done it since. However, it had not been a very long-term thing (it had been a problem for a couple of weeks] so I don’t think it was deeply ingrained.

Basically there was words/picture in centre of page for the behaviour – blowing raspberries in people’s faces – and in thought bubbles all around the centre on the rest of the page I put different things the behaviour might make other people think and feel, negative and positive, using words and images. I went through it all with him calmly and nicely and his job was to link up the centre with the bubbles we chose. We talked about all the different thoughts and feelings, what they meant and what they felt like. For him it seems when I make something visual, especially into a sort of diagram or map with images, symbols and words, then he processes it so much better then when he listens to someone talking. But I don’t know how common that is and how lucky I was that day that he actually sat and paid attention.

I tried to make it clear it was just blowing them in people’s faces that was the problem, that he could still blow them away from people’s faces (in case it was something he couldn’t really control and felt the need to do]. One of the things we addressed was germs and how people thought it was ‘yucky’ if spit gets onto their faces, and how and why it made them worry.