ASD teen threw and broke her phone

[WhatsitWiggle]

DD 16 has been dysregulated for last 3 days - period is due so she's more susceptible to other triggers. She had a meltdown on Monday and it took 2 hours to get her settled but yesterday and today she was a lot better.

I went out to the gym at 7pm, she has a routine between 7 and 9 so I try to stay out of her way. I got back and she was shouting how her routine was ruined, she couldn't eat her snack now, burst into tears. I managed to calm her down, thought she was OK. We went into the kitchen together because she asked for help. Suddenly, she screamed, threw her phone to the floor and stormed out. I don't know what the trigger was.

The phone screen is now totally frozen, rendering the phone useless. It's a year old, Samsung S20. A new screen will be £220 and I will have to take time off work tomorrow to go and get it fixed.

My question is, would you expect her to pay towards this? If she wasn't autistic, and had thrown the phone in temper, I'd 100% apply consequences - you broke it, you fix it.

But I don't know if that's fair given I know she can't control her temper. And yet, even taking into account the autism, she needs to learn to deal with upsets better.

She was only diagnosed 14 months ago, following burn out and school 'refusal', so this is quite new in terms of me not disciplining as I would expect. Thoughts on best approach?

The phone needs to be fixed as a priority as it's her lifeline.

Assuming DD is in receipt of PIP (or DLA if PIP has not be decided yet), I would use that. The broken phone is a result of DD’s disability and PIP/DLA is to help with the extra costs associated with her disability.

If she has access to cash and the cost was not easily affordable then yes I would be getting her to pay for it or part of it. Yes she has difficulty with her emotions due to her asd but this does not mean things can be broken in this way. I wouldn't frame it as a sanction but more as if you would like this to be fixed then you need to help pay for it as it's too expensive for me to pay this amount out of the blue.

Thank you. She came to me in the morning, really apologetic and offering to pay. She was really upset with herself for breaking it and had been awake searching for ways to fix it 😔

Anyway, I drove to the phone shop and the guy managed to fix it just by doing a hard restart! We couldn't get the thing to do that but he had the magic touch. Bless him, I could have hugged him.

DD was over the moon to get her phone back, is contrite about her behaviour and grateful that I went out to sort it for her (luckily I have a very understanding manager!).

She does get DLA and it goes on therapy but there's some left over, so I could put it towards physical things. For some reason, I hadn't thought of that - it's a relatively new diagnosis and I'm still navigating everything.