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Jan. 15th, 2022 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn-So the big thing I'm doing right now is watching Bablyon 5 for the first time via the rewatch on selenak's DW, which went from "I'm mildly interested, guess I'll watch further since ase and selenak really seem to like it" ("Midnight on the Firing Line") to "Yeah, I'm vaguely invested now" ("Mind War") to "OMG WHAT EVEN IS THIS SHOW MUST FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON" ("Signs and Portents"). Still in S1, it would be easy to join the watch if you wanted to!
-I realized over winter break that E.'s social skills are... well, they're probably reasonably okay for a first grader. (Note that E. is in sixth grade.) Anyway, they need a lot of work and we haven't been working on them explicitly. So we've started doing ten minutes every day of social skills work, scripting out conversations and responses to things, and techniques like mirroring (I'm not sure if there's a technical term for this, but basically, if someone asks you how your winter break was, asking them how theirs was), and troubleshooting responses I hear when she plays virtual Minecraft with friends. She reported that a kid in her class asked her how her break was, and she said fine, and then she asked them how theirs was, and they said fine, which she said was better than she would have done before :P
I am now running into the issue that she doesn't want to try practicing conversational work with kids her own age, which, fair, they are on a whole different playing field than she is, so I'm asking her to try short conversations with younger kids at her school. It's a good thing her school is tiny. I have no idea how high school is going to work.
I know I should probably get her into therapy, but therapy is... really hard to find right now, and also I think honestly I've done so much analyzing of socialization myself that I can provide a fair amount of that; what I think she really needs is practice, and that's the thing that's hard because unlike most kids (including the other ASD kid whose parents I'm friends with) she doesn't seem to get a whole lot of intrinsic enjoyment out of socialization. I think she does enjoy being with other people, but it's more of a... second-order effect? Like, she likes the kinds of things she can do with other kids, like Minecraft, but actually talking to the other people (other than exchange of information about their Minecraft missions, or whatever) is sort of a necessary evil for her (and yes, we've talked about how socialization will make it easier for her to get the things she actually does want, like friends to play Minecraft with -- but it's another layer to have to deal with). But she does really like playing with A., and they have a lot of hilarious fun times together, it's just that I think she needs to be very very close to someone to have that kind of relationship, and there's no one else who really fits that for her right now.
I think she is progressing, though! This year was the first year we have had zero reports of blowups at school (down from about weekly last year) -- which is partially better regulation, but also seems to be in large part because she has finally internalized that she should maybe care what other people think. Which is funny because I feel like everyone else who's a parent of an almost-teenager daughter is trying to get their kid not to care as much what everyone else thinks, and I'm like, "no, care more! Care enough not to throw loud obnoxious tantrums in front of them, at least!"
-A. is expressing displeasure with the extracurriculars he is either doing or trying out right now, that is, karate (which he begged me to sign him up for last year) and math circle (which he was super engaged with and fascinated by during the zoom meeting, and then declared he didn't want to do it). He says he wants to do basketball, but unfortunately by the time I signed him up, we were on the wait list. The neighbor girl did get into basketball (girls' basketball isn't quite as full up), but judging from how A. behaves when they play together, I don't know how much he would actually like it.
On the other hand, we have come to an agreement that he doesn't have to go to karate on Wednesdays (it's supposed to be 2-3x a week; he goes on Fridays about once every other week *sigh*) if he takes a walk with me, and these are lovely and hilarious and we have great conversations where we talk about what animals have only two legs, and he tells me his big plans for building a combination see-saw/slide, and we see parts of the neighborhood we've driven through but never walked through, so that's been lovely :D
Besides his inexplicable hatred of extracurriculars, he is just... it's like he got parceled all of the emotional intelligence, both his own fair share and E's as well. In first grade, the age at which his classmates totally spazz out a lot, he's a total pro at meeting E's often-extremely-emotional outbursts with a calm, non-confrontational, patient response, which is just crazy to me. I mean, yes, he is also a total pro at winding her up, don't get me wrong, and I'm betting that a bit of his patience is him figuring out that if she's the one who blows up that she's more likely to get in trouble -- he's not 100% an angel. But kind of amazing for a first grader!
ase and selenak really seem to like it" ("Midnight on the Firing Line") to "Yeah, I'm vaguely invested now" ("Mind War") to "OMG WHAT EVEN IS THIS SHOW MUST FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON" ("Signs and Portents"). Still in S1, it would be easy to join the watch if you wanted to!-I realized over winter break that E.'s social skills are... well, they're probably reasonably okay for a first grader. (Note that E. is in sixth grade.) Anyway, they need a lot of work and we haven't been working on them explicitly. So we've started doing ten minutes every day of social skills work, scripting out conversations and responses to things, and techniques like mirroring (I'm not sure if there's a technical term for this, but basically, if someone asks you how your winter break was, asking them how theirs was), and troubleshooting responses I hear when she plays virtual Minecraft with friends. She reported that a kid in her class asked her how her break was, and she said fine, and then she asked them how theirs was, and they said fine, which she said was better than she would have done before :P
I am now running into the issue that she doesn't want to try practicing conversational work with kids her own age, which, fair, they are on a whole different playing field than she is, so I'm asking her to try short conversations with younger kids at her school. It's a good thing her school is tiny. I have no idea how high school is going to work.
I know I should probably get her into therapy, but therapy is... really hard to find right now, and also I think honestly I've done so much analyzing of socialization myself that I can provide a fair amount of that; what I think she really needs is practice, and that's the thing that's hard because unlike most kids (including the other ASD kid whose parents I'm friends with) she doesn't seem to get a whole lot of intrinsic enjoyment out of socialization. I think she does enjoy being with other people, but it's more of a... second-order effect? Like, she likes the kinds of things she can do with other kids, like Minecraft, but actually talking to the other people (other than exchange of information about their Minecraft missions, or whatever) is sort of a necessary evil for her (and yes, we've talked about how socialization will make it easier for her to get the things she actually does want, like friends to play Minecraft with -- but it's another layer to have to deal with). But she does really like playing with A., and they have a lot of hilarious fun times together, it's just that I think she needs to be very very close to someone to have that kind of relationship, and there's no one else who really fits that for her right now.
I think she is progressing, though! This year was the first year we have had zero reports of blowups at school (down from about weekly last year) -- which is partially better regulation, but also seems to be in large part because she has finally internalized that she should maybe care what other people think. Which is funny because I feel like everyone else who's a parent of an almost-teenager daughter is trying to get their kid not to care as much what everyone else thinks, and I'm like, "no, care more! Care enough not to throw loud obnoxious tantrums in front of them, at least!"
-A. is expressing displeasure with the extracurriculars he is either doing or trying out right now, that is, karate (which he begged me to sign him up for last year) and math circle (which he was super engaged with and fascinated by during the zoom meeting, and then declared he didn't want to do it). He says he wants to do basketball, but unfortunately by the time I signed him up, we were on the wait list. The neighbor girl did get into basketball (girls' basketball isn't quite as full up), but judging from how A. behaves when they play together, I don't know how much he would actually like it.
On the other hand, we have come to an agreement that he doesn't have to go to karate on Wednesdays (it's supposed to be 2-3x a week; he goes on Fridays about once every other week *sigh*) if he takes a walk with me, and these are lovely and hilarious and we have great conversations where we talk about what animals have only two legs, and he tells me his big plans for building a combination see-saw/slide, and we see parts of the neighborhood we've driven through but never walked through, so that's been lovely :D
Besides his inexplicable hatred of extracurriculars, he is just... it's like he got parceled all of the emotional intelligence, both his own fair share and E's as well. In first grade, the age at which his classmates totally spazz out a lot, he's a total pro at meeting E's often-extremely-emotional outbursts with a calm, non-confrontational, patient response, which is just crazy to me. I mean, yes, he is also a total pro at winding her up, don't get me wrong, and I'm betting that a bit of his patience is him figuring out that if she's the one who blows up that she's more likely to get in trouble -- he's not 100% an angel. But kind of amazing for a first grader!
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Date: 2022-01-17 08:54 am (UTC)And he definitely realized, and even tried to explain to her, that reacting calmly lessened the amount of trouble they'd get into
Oh man, wow, yeah, this is very familiar to me. I had forgotten until you said that that A. has tried to do the same, but with similarly ineffective results.
Though in E's case it's really not a question of choice -- she does this to everyone, not just me, although as I said she's making an effort to restrain it more outside the family. It does seem to be tied to being comfortable with people -- we've had the situation a couple of times with new music teachers where she's great for them for the first couple of months, and then once she gets to know them better, boom, out come the outbursts.