Don't know how to help dd right now

[MeltedFlumps]

Aged 6 she has suddenly gone into total meltdown. anything we say she does the exact opposite, is deliberately mean and naughty, at home and at school, won't eat properly and now just refuses to go to bed. she can have tantrums for hours, kciking and screaming, at school and at home and nothing we can do or say will make her listen. Doesn't show any remorse afterwards and just gets even madder when she is punished.

No obvious trigger BUT she has definitely suddenly developed an awareness that she is differend and we just think it is her frustration with what she knows she can't do bubbling up.

All of which makes her behaviour understandable I guess as it is a lot for her to have to deal with, but what do we do?

When she mentions her disability we talke about it gently and honestly and answer all her questions and stay as encouraging as we can and focus on the positivies. But when she goes off on one we think we should be punishing her for being naughty, even if we think we know there is a "good reason" behind it.

Has anyone else been through this? Surely all SN kids must hit this problem at some stage, when it dawns on them that they are different? What else can we do? She is so unhappy and so cross and it is heartbreaking.

Bump

Both mine have gone through this stage. I still have the scars where dd sank her teeth into me aged 9. And she went through a dreadful stage around age 6 where she was cutting up books and scribbling on the wallpaper.

We have tried to distinguish between naughty behaviour (like scribbling on wallpaper), which got standard punishment, and meltdowns, which we just tried to restrain for their own and our safety. My take was that going through a meltdown was scary enough in itself and they didn't really need any other punishment.

When dd was once able to speak about it, she told me that when she was in meltdown she couldn't recognise me, she didn't seem to know I was her mum, it was as if I had turned into some alien monster that she had to fight. So I suppose showing remorse would have been one step too far: she wasn't really responsible for what went on in meltdown.

My parents also had to deal with bad tantrums (traumatised child, though no SN), and they also felt instinctively that meltdowns took him into a place where he wasn't really responsible for his actions so punishment taken out on him when he was conscious again seemed a bit unfair and counter-productive; it just made him focus on being different. Instead they got good at avoiding meltdowns, and if that didn't help, at sitting them out.

Thanks for the reply Cory - I do find it odd punishing her for being naughty once she has calmed down because she seems to be a different person, back to her normal self again. but any punishemtn etc mentioned when she is having a tantrum is pointless because she isn't listening and it just makes her more cross anyway.

Totally agree that avoidance is the best thing, so we just refuse to bite when she is goading us, but the one thing we are destined to keep clashing on is bedtime - she has to go to bed because she is knackered, so how do we avoid that argument?