Hi, my 7 year old goes to special education classroom. The teacher never responds to the emails and the program co-ordinator is rude too. What am I suppose to do? My son has recently been showing a lot of anxiety towards going to school. I don’t know why. After trying to contact school for days, I got a response that nothing significant has happened.
My son recently started hitting us too. This behaviour is only directed towards family. He does not exhibit this behavior at school.
Please help how can I deal with these situations.
Answer:
Please confirm if this is a placement in a school designated on your child’s IEP. If so first thing I would want to make sure is any requests for information you request in writing/email. Leaving phone messages leaves you no “paper trail” and if things continue to become problematic you want to show you’ve attempted to have a dialogue with the school first.
At this point I would then contact the school principal/director.
Finally if this is a placement associated with the IEP you can request an emergency meeting and express concerns there. Bring this to my call (Michelle) tomorrow and we can kick around next steps. Reply back here with any questions.
Please confirm if this is a placement in a school designated on your child’s IEP. If so first thing I would want to make sure is any requests for information you request in writing/email. Leaving phone messages leaves you no “paper trail” and if things continue to become problematic you want to show you’ve attempted to have a dialogue with the school first.
At this point I would then contact the school principal/director.
Finally if this is a placement associated with the IEP you can request an emergency meeting and express concerns there. Bring this to my call (Michelle) tomorrow and we can kick around next steps. Reply back here with any questions.
How can I deal with the hitting part? How can I stop him? I can see he is thinking about something and then ends up hitting us.
Apologies – make sure you separate out your questions out so we can organize this under the right category.
For hitting we have to understand the function before we can create the solve.
MEATS is the acronym for the reasons children exhibit any type of problem behaviors:
M – Medical – they are in pain or discomfort
E – Escape and/or Avoidance
A – attention seeking
T – access to a tangible
S – sensory – it feels good.
To figure this out you have to take data each time problem behaviors like hitting comes up. Our brains want to say he hits as this blanket problem vs investigating WHY he hits each time. Knowing the WHY is crucial to how we solve for it. To do this, you need to take ABC data:
A – Antecedent – what happen before the hitting
B – the Behavior itself (in this case hitting)
C – Consequence – what happened after the hitting
If you can recall a specific example and reply with the ABC data I can advise how to solve.
I go deep on all of this in my Autism Moms Survival Guide to Problem Behaviors. You can check that out here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/125fWReRJ_XAEMzI27PTsWTZSikMT7c7c/view?usp=drive_link
Reply back or bring it to the call tomorrow 🙂
Thank you for your prompt response.
A- he was running and vocal stimming
B- hitting
C- ran away.
Was he in the room with you when he did it ?
What was your response to the hitting?
What happen after he ran away ?
Did he look back?
the more details the better.
No he was jumping in the other room and I was able to see him.
I responded saying, safe hands please.
He kept jumping.
No he did not look back.
Could he see you could see him? My gut is saying this is attention seeking behavior. The way the process works is we have to get really granular on what happened.
Negative attention to a child is just as valuable as positive attention – even though this was a drive by hit – it got engagement. What are your thoughts knowing the 5 options?
Are you coming to my call tomorrow morning – I want to dialog on this.
Sure. Let’s do this tomorrow. See you then.