Learning Self-Regulation

I've heard over and over of parents who allow their toddlers to self regulate with food, claiming that if we leave them to it and don't interfere with 'on demand' feeding that children will learn to recognize their own hunger cues and equally know when they have had enough.

I like the principle - but I don't know anyone who has made it past about three years old.

photo credit

The reality is that society dictates we should eat at certain times, and it's kind of awkward if you refuse lunch whilst everyone is seated at the table and 20 minutes later you are hungry but mum has put everything away. So you either end up telling your kid when to eat - or feeding them junk because real food takes time and preparation.

Still, like I said, I like the principle.

It's something Cosmo's doctor told me about when he was very young and I was getting frustrated about him just wanting to watch the same DVD on loop, or when he just wanted to read the same book (or sometimes even the same page!) again and again. He said he's trying to puzzle something out. I assume that because he can read the words, he's got all the information, but particularly for children who learn to read early, being able to understand what they are reading may take more time.

He asked me to indulge him.
Read the same page 50 times if necessary, move on when he is ready.

Gosh, that took a lot of restraint from me, but it worked! He would watch the 20 minute DVD on loop (brilliant baby by the way if anyone is interested) but then he'd know everything on it and never choose to watch the same one again (at least not for a long time, and when revisiting an old DVD it was for comfort, watched once and then relegated to the 'I've seen that' pile).

We've been up against this battle again recently, only this time it's grated on me even more because his current obsession is Minecraft - and I am not a gamer.

Everything in me wanted to limit him to 20 minutes a day - or some other such rule - but having been through plenty of other past obsessions I let it play out properly.

My mum bought him the game for Christmas and for a couple of weeks I was convinced it was all he would do with all of his free time - and then we hit our breakthrough. He just turned around and said 'I think I'd like to take a break from minecraft for a little while'. He started playing legos with his sister again (boy, has she missed him!) and at the end of the day, it's only really been a two and a half week obsession.

He still enjoys playing minecraft, but he's also enjoying other things too and he doesn't play it for hours at a time.

So, here are my top tips for surviving obsession phases:

1) Try not to worry about making everything meaningful. I like to relax and read a magazine sometimes, or watch a movie. Not everything I do has value other than relaxation and not everything your child does needs to either.

2) Respect what they value. I don't love minecraft. I don't think it's awesome. But my son does and I wouldn't like it if he told me I couldn't look at pinterest because he doesn't think it's cool. Live and let live.

3) Find ways to work it into other things they might enjoy. Cosmo is currently working on a book of tips for his Dad so that he can learn how to play too. It's still Cosmo's favourite topic, but thankfully it's away from the computer screen!

Top tip for Minecraft... but also life in general...

4) If you really need to limit their time on something (eg. I don't want him sat at a PC all day) rather than saying no to it, find something else that will take up some of that time. If Cosmo wants to spend all his free time on the computer, but I don't want him to spend more than an hour, I need to find tasks that will take up all but an hour of his day, then he can play as long as he wants without a conflict. If you tell them they can't do something (or they can only do it for a limited time) it becomes the craved for 'forbidden thing'. I'd rather say 'of course you can play - right after we get back from the park and have picked up the groceries'.
We also have a rule where nobody has free time until they have completed their curriculum based activities for the day.

If you have anymore strategies, let me know. It might sound like I have it all sorted, but I really don't. It pains me to wait out an obsession, but it's totally worth it in the end. The result is a happier, less frustrated child, who learns how to self regulate their own time.

Growing in Compassion

We don't have a TV license, but we have always kept a television to watch movies on and use the Wii. Don't worry, it's totally legit. 

Initially we had a very small 15" TV which we kept up on a high shelf. I didn't want it to dominate the room and be a constant temptation to the children to ask for DVDs.

But then our TV broke, and being the frugal people that we are we got our next one off freecycle. It was quite a lot bigger, if I remember around 21", but it only lasted six months. The next freecycle offering we got so a whopping 44".

Yeah.

And it broke.

It lasted a good while, but finally a friend was selling his (huge) 72" flatscreen LCD TV, so we bought it from him for a great price.

Cosmos response: This is amazing!!! I can't wait until it breaks and we get a cinema!!

Wow.

The thing is, he had a really similar response to his pets. For his second birthday some friends bought him a pet fish, who we called Finley. Cosmo was devastated when Fin died (selfishly the same week Lychee was born!) but cheered up significantly when he got new fish - Ross and Franji. Interestingly, he didn't have the same response when Franji died within a week of getting home. In fact, his response was positive joy, because 'Now I get to go to the garden centre again and choose another fish!!'

Over the coming series of fish it became apparent that he did not have any attachment issues to a particular animal, he just liked being in charge of feeding it and checking on it regularly.

However, his current fish (Eugenie) killed Lychee's fish (Greg) yesterday. He'd been hassling him for as long as they'd shared a tank and poor Greg spent most of his time hiding in a toy volcano. When I told Cosmo that Greg had died, he had the predictable response of 'Will I get to choose Lychee's new fish? '

However, twenty-four hours on and it seems he's been considering it more than I'd given him credit for. Today he's been concerned that Eugenie was bullying Greg because 'I used to kiss Eugenie through the glass every morning and I started kissing Greg too. Maybe Eugenie was jealous and that's why he killed Greg. If we get another fish I'll try not to love it as much as Eugenie'.

Obviously I assured him that some fish are just bullies and nothing he could have done would have increased Greg's odds of survival, but the boy was welling up.

It seems he does care about his pet's after all.

You can do it!

Cannot believe my boy is really five years old!

As he is a really big boy now, we decided to get him his very own tool kit.

Not toys, but real tools made to fit a child's hands. I found a montessori seller on eBay who sources real quality tools that are just the right size, so that little hands can wield them without too much trouble.

I have some great wood work projects for him planned. He is really into gardening at the moment, so we HAVE to make a dibber like Martha Stewart's for easy, even, seed sowing.

It's simply achieved and will involve measuring, drilling, sawing and hammering practice.

Along the gardening theme we'd also make ourselves a veggie harvesting basket like this one that I discovered on Pinterest.

And finally I intend to help him make his own Geo board, which will involve measuring, drilling and screwing. He's so excited by these big 'man' tools (tools that aren't made of plastic) and cannot wait to get started at building something exciting. I love encouraging him to feel like he can achieve, as he is so fearful of trying things he thinks he might fail at (I believe it's an ASD trait of perfectionism).

Plus, every child should own some safety specs, whether it's for DIY or chemistry fun!

Developmental updates...

Well Lychee made some serious leaps in the last fortnight and is now putting together two words on a fairly regular basis (eg 'Nice teddy' or 'eggs hot!'), has learnt to say her brothers name (he'd previously just been known as 'brother'), can ride a scooter (slowly) and recognises, points to and reads the words for several shapes (circle, square, heart, diamond, oval and star - still struggling with rectangle and triangle).

Cosmo has also been doing well and his bike riding is getting better and better.

We watched a documentary on autism (well, I did - he walked in for ten minutes at the end) and he asked a few questions, most pointedly 'do I have autism?' and I answered him, 'yes'.

We had a chat and I explained that he didn't have it as severely as the little boy in the program, to which he responded that he probably did because he felt like doing all those things, but didn't because I would tell him off.

I pointed out that the little boy in the show was getting told off but he didn't mind because he couldn't help behaving that way. He's not convinced, but at least we can talk about it now. I'm not sure why I hadn't told him about the diagnosis before, but he seems to be okay with it, so I probably could have said something sooner.

He also did an amazing job with his memory verse today and taught it to the whole family at dinner time. I'm so proud of him!

The value of old school...

Sometimes I love showing my kids stuff that I enjoyed when I was little. In part, sometimes this is because the content just seems more appropriate than what's on tv for them today.

I'll take 'Hoppity Goes To Town' Over 'Waybalou' any day.

Then there's the whole Charlotte Mason crew, who'll tell you that books and show designed for children today are dumbed down to much and don't excite our children's interest. I was amazed to see how fascinated Cosmo was with the 'How My Body Works' 80's series vs something like 'Nina and the Neurones'.

Not that there's anything wrong with Nina, but he get's bored and leaves the room, whereas he asks me to keep rewinding bits of 'How My Body Works' because he wants to see the blood clotting again...etc...

But the most valuable thing I've noticed for my son is the fact that old school cartoons are in 2D, and the graphics aren't very good.

Does that sound like a bad thing?

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD, the paediatrician told me that he had trouble separating truth and fiction. That he thought everything he read was true, and everything he saw on tv was really happening.

This was certainly true with the pixar movies he loved. We watched 'Cars' over and over again and he would shout at lightning McQueen 'you have to change your tyres or they'll go bang' and I'd say 'sweetheart, he can't hear you, it's just a movie'.

The tyres would go bang and he say 'aw man! Not again!'

No amount of explaining could convince him that the TV wasn't Skype. That these things weren't actually happening somewhere in the world.

Until we watched 'Muppet Babies'.

I wanted to show him an episode I'd watched when I was a kid about good things happening in the dark (we were going through a stage of wanting the lights on all night). I'm not sure quite when it happened, but he seemed to understand that it wasn't real. I introduced some more nostalgic cartoons, like 'wacky races' and the next thing I know he is telling me that 'despicable me' (another Pixar favourite) isn't really real. It's just pretend.

This is such a relief. Even bedtime stories, we were having to be so careful with the content, and explain over and over that it hadn't really happened. Now we are free to explore a world of fiction, without traumatising him everytime there is a negative storyline.

This post is linked up at no ordinary blog hop

Swimming Break Through!

This is not Cosmo swimming
It's a generic picture I stole off google because we're not allowed to take pictures at the swimming pool. :0(

Anyway, we had a major swimming breakthrough today. My initial frustration at him not staying through a whole lesson subsided when I spoke to some other parents of ASD children and realised that I had under appreciated how far he'd come.

I didn't have to remove him from the pool because he was having a melt down, he calmly told his teacher he'd had enough and got out of the pool. Those were some great communication skills that he hasn't always been so great at using.

Anyway, this week was the real breakthrough, because he stayed in the pool for the entire lesson. Not only that, he swam across the pool four times without holding on to his teacher.

The pool is a really challenging place for Will, sensory perception issues mean he finds the echoey sounds stressful. He is fairly confident in the water, but the class environment is stressing him to the point that he clings to his teacher the entire time he's in the pool, until today.

One of the things that really helped was that his teacher took the time to send all the other children across the pool (at least half way) until she set him off. Seeing this made me think that some of the other parents had been right; ASD children learn to swim much more easily in a 1:1 tutor session.

But isn't that true of most children? And most subjects?
And how important is it, really, that he learns to swim quickly?

He will learn eventually, and right now in really happy to see him interacting with the other children and getting more comfortable in a class environment.

Another little boy gave him a hand on the last metre or so when he started paddling backwards by mistake, and he was so happy about it. I really love seeing him so excited and making connections with new kids.

It's totally fine if it takes years instead of months to learn to swim.

We're just going to enjoy the process.

Not the royal wedding...

It's hard enough to get my kids to sit through a real wedding, of people they actually know. Let alone one on TV.

 

My sister's kids, now they are a different breed. They were so excited that the princess (?) was going to marry the prince. They wanted to watch the entire thing in absolute awe.

 

The thing is, we suspect Cosmo is ASD and he thinks everything he sees on TV is real anyway at the moment, even if it's just a cartoon. As far as he's concerned, it's just another prince marrying another princess which is really something that happens every time he's at his cousins house (they enjoy watching disney).

 

So we decided to take advantage of the fact that everyone else would be otherwise engaged, and spend the morning at the somewhat empty museum of natural history and the pitt rivers museum in oxford. I'd never been, but my sisters kids have and they absolutely adored it. The best part? It's free.

 

Cosmo was super excited because we got to ride on a train and he really loves trains. What I hadn't banked on was how much Lychee would love trains too. I have never seen her as excited as she was grinning out the window and flapping her arms madly. They really are like two peas in a pod!

 

So we got to the museum of natural history and it was brilliant. Giant dinosaur skeletons, glow in the dark mineral caves and bugs galore. Cosmo's favourite was a giant Katydid which he went back to over and over again.

and kept telling us 'I like bugs!!' which is the title of a book he got out of the library last week. It's obviously done the trick, because he has gone from being super scared of them to thinking they are really 'cute', so definitely worth looking for if you have a toddler who has a little phobia.

 



The crocodile was also a big hit.

 

Now remember how I said my sisters children were of a different breed? And how they loved the Pitt Rivers museum? Well, those two statements couldn't have been truer as we entered the exhibition.

 

Not only was it too dark and crowded for his liking, he thought all the ceremonial masks and shrunken heads were terrifying. So we didn't end up staying very long at all! Instead we met up with his aunty Caitlin who is studying at the university and went for dinner and a walk around some of the colleges with her instead.

 

It was a lovely family day out but summed up well when we got home and I asked Cosmo what he had learned today. His reply:

'When there are two bits of road together it's called a dual carriageway and you can drive on it really fast'.

 

So much for educational objectives!!