How we helped our son cope with his meltdowns. part one

by sharon
(uk)

Most parents of an autistic child experience some type of meltdown. Most of the time it is when you least expect it and in front of people which can be quite embarrasing because all they interperet is a child who is naughty. They can't see that this child is autistic and that they are in distress because autism is an invisable disability and the only people that would notice the difference would be people like ourselves who have an autistic child and live with this day in and day out and can probably pick up on the behaviour.

Our son was diagnosed with High functioning autism/ asperger syndrom and we are lucky in some ways that he can communicate with us. He use to have really bad meltdowns where he use to scream the place down and throw things at us, and we knew we had to help him manage his anger, frustrations and fears before he hurt someone.One of the biggest problems we had was his reluctance to go to school, it soon became aparrent that he was being bullied.The school didn't really want to know so we got a solicitor involved and they soon realized we mean't buisness. Even though the bulling stopped our son still had a fear of these children so we took him out of that school and took him to another.The new school was the fresh start that he needed and he soon settled and made new friends and he enjoyed going to school.
He also use to get frustrated whilst playing his x-box and would start screaming and hitting the furniture with the controls because he could not do the task in the game. We then use to turn the game off which use to make him worse, but we soon realized that while he was like this we couldn't reason with him or talk to him so by taking the thing that was causing his meltdown away he was getting time to calm down instead of getting more and more frustrated. Once he had calmed down we were then able to talk to him and ask him what was making him so angry. We would then let him back on his game and help him and because he was now a lot calmer he was able to concentrate better.He has now realized that when he starts to get frustrated or angry to turn the game off until he calms down.Once he goes back on that things seem a lot better.