explosive/inflexible children – part 2

I’ve been meaning to recap our events after our visit to the psychologist with our daughter.  Things went very well.  Great therapist, great with kids – she even has 4 young adult children of her own.  Our daughter really warmed up to her, which we were worried about.  We need to make a few more appointments with her, but she suggested a few things that we are now honing in on.  One thing she said was: 

 Children do well if they can -  meaning that some skills may not yet be developed in order for certain children to fall in line with society’s idea of good behavior.  Skills such as cognitive and emotional developmental skills.

Also, she suggested a book call Parenting with Love & Logic.  We purchased it and are now listening to it on CD.  It gives a lot of great parenting tips.  But, we are also doing a little reading on our own from a book called The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene.  This book is more in line as to what we need to be reading right now, to understand what point our little girl is at in her development.  Basically, we’re learning that some kids are delayed developmentally in certain areas and some of those missing developmental skills can be frustration tolerance and coginitive flexibility skills.  These are not things that can be taught by sticker charts or any kind of extrinsic rewards systems or even time-outs.  This books suggests explosive/inflexible children know they are not supposed to scream, rant and say horrible things or hit their siblings, but often times when they are exploding – they can’t control it.  Often times our daughter will come down from a meltdown and not even realize what she was so angry about.  This is typical of children with this type of developmental delay.

We are learning.  But how do you explain to someone, like a soccer coach or a Sunday school teacher that may be in the room when your 6.5 year old is having a meltdown and they look at you as though they are thinking “wow, what a spoiled rotten child”.  How do you explain that you are doing the absolute best as a parent and your other child falls more in line with society’s expectations of children’s emotions at certain stages of their life?  How does that explain the emotional immaturity of your 6.5 year olds skills?  I haven’t met another child like my daughter even though I know they are out there.  I even discovered that there’s a support group not far from where we live for parents of explosive/inflexible kids.  I guess I need to try and have thicker skin and not worry about other parents and what they may be thinking.

My main worry is that eventually if we can’t get this under control that she may have a really hard time keeping friends in the future.  She is very social and makes friends easily now, but she is still young.  I have hope that things will get better.  I need to have hope, otherwise what else is there?

She had a much better week last week.  We were able to keep a really good bedtime schedule for the kids and it’s amazing how much that can help/hinder the meltdowns.

Also, we’ve learned from the Love and Logic books not to “hover” so much and let the kids work out their own little sibling battles.  We do keep an eye open in case things escalate too much, but my little guy has been better about sticking up for himself.  The last few days that we have backed off, both my husband and I were more calm and the kids seemed to be more calm too.  weird.