Frustrated Friday

It's Frustrated Friday and yes, I have an infatuation with alliteration. Thank you for noticing! With any luck and a little prayer, "Frustrated Friday" will not be a recurring feature on this blog.

This morning, we did our usual Friday morning thing of going to a playgroup at a local church. Reiss had a pretty good day yesterday. Today, not so much. Yesterday, not a single timeout or "break," as he prefers to call them. Today, he was in a break nearly every seven seconds.

Today's "fun" for him was taking toys from other children, pushing children much smaller than he is, and taking all the little girls' pretty girls from their hair. When Milla started wearing decorative hair bands and tiny bows in her hair a few months ago, we started calling her a "pretty girl." Reiss clued in immediately on the correlation between Milla wearing bows in her hair and my husband and I calling her Pretty Girl. In his world, we were referring to the actual bows as "pretty girls" and so the name stuck. Now, whenever we have bows in Milla's hair and Reiss takes on the look that he can't resist pulling them out, we have to remind him not to pull out her pretty girls.

Oh, how I wish we could find an effective means of discipline for Reiss. I don't want to confuse him any more than his puzzling world may already be but timeouts do not work for him which, by the way, is echoed so incredibly often when I talk to other parents of autistic children. Having said that, timeouts are the disciplinary method used at the developmental preschool Reiss attends, as well as the Parent's Day Out (PDO) program he attends one day per week.

If I switch things up a bit at home with discipline and deviate even a tiny bit, my fear is that he will suffer regressions from the inconsistencies between home, school, and PDO. And that is indeed what it seems like happens when we have tried other disciplinary methods such as taking things away, having him sit in his room, or talking through things. One of the major issues with Reiss - with many autistic children - is that he does not place a value on very many things, so taking an item away usually makes no difference to him.

As for why it's Frustrated Friday, I'm not sure which pains me more: Feeling like we have tried everything and not being able to figure out an effective disciplinary method for Reiss OR when others who do not have autistic children make me feel like the worst parent in the world because of how frustrated I get sometimes. I am aware that Eleanor Roosevelt said something along the lines of, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." or something like that and to that, I would have to say that Eleanor obviously didn't have any autistic children.

The things people say to me sometimes make me so angry because they have absolutely no idea what I go through in an average day. This is not meant to make people feel sorry for me or pity our situation of living life with an autistic child, but I do wish people would think more and talk less. Until a person has had to deal with the on-going stress of having an autistic child or any otherwise similar high level of stress in rearing a special needs child, my gut tells me to smack the person silly who is passing judgement on me. Being the ever-so-nice person I am though, my head and my heart tell me to take their comment with a grain of salt and take a mental note to say a prayer for their ignorance later.