Mid-Summer Update

July 25, 2011 · 5 comments

I’ve been posting mostly about books lately, but I thought it would be good to write an update on how things are going with Michael so far this summer.

Michael with his Lego Creation

He has been on .2 mg of risperidone since mid-May, and we have continued to see a huge improvement in his mood, as well as more flexibility and organized thinking.

During his two weeks at the babysitter’s he only had 2 or 3 outbursts, and only one of those included aggression. And he has only had 3 aggressive incidents during the first four weeks of his summer program. This is a huge improvement over how school was going and is even better than he did last year at the same sitter and program.

As the summer progresses, I have seen a bit more whining and emotional outbursts, and he seems to be nervous about going back to school in a few weeks, but at least we are able to have conversations about it and talk about ways that he could handle how he is feeling. I was just sent a book to review from Future Horizons called Exploring Feelings: Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Manage Anxiety. It is by Dr. Tony Attwood and includes a workbook section that I am planning to do with Michael.

His summer program goes for one more week, and then he and I are going to the autism conference in State College the first week of August. It will be great for Michael to participate in their children’s institute, and then he will have two more weeks at the babysitter’s. Bob got off work the week before school starts, so we will have a short family trip and then they will go down to help with Bob’s mom for a couple of days, and somewhere in there we will schedule a visit to the school to meet the teacher and see his classroom for third grade.

I’m not sure what happened to all of my goals for the summer – we are only a third of the way through the summer packet and haven’t made any progress on keyboarding skills or even on tying his shoes. I’m not complaining, though, a relatively peaceful summer is a wonderful thing and I am truly thankful for it.

You should be more strict with Michael. You treat him as though he is a baby. Autism can slow children’s social abilities, but you have the job of helping him through it. Simply giving him medicine and monitoring how he acts is, in my opinion, not sufficient. He should be disciplined for his actions. For example, if he has an outburst take away video-games for the next couple days, threatening is not enough with situations like autism. At the same time let the kid grow-up and expand his reaches. Thank you for reading this, and I apologize if I have offended you.

Reply

Trish August 3, 2011 at 10:28 pm: I find that I cannot really respond to the details of your comment without knowing who you are. I am also not sure why you left it on two different posts, so I have removed it from the other one.

Do you know me in real life? Do you have a blog or some other identifying information by which I would know you? Without having a context for this, I don’t feel this type of personal discussion will be useful for either of us. I don’t know specifically why you think I treat him like a baby or why you think I am not letting him grow up.

I also don’t see how you can deem my parenting insufficient based on what I have shared here. The fact that I mention what types and frequency of behaviors we have been seeing in a blog post does not reflect in any way the presence or absence of consequences for those behaviors, and I’m not sure why you would assume that he is not receiving any negative consequences for his outbursts simply because they are not being reported to you.

At this point, I am choosing not to be offended because I don’t know who you are and where you are coming from. If you wish to identify yourself clearly, we can continue the conversation. Otherwise, I will choose to hope that you are someone who wishes to be helpful and doesn’t realize he or she is making unfounded judgments based on limited information.

Reply

Teddy August 5, 2011 at 9:43 am