Hi Michelle, and thanks so much for the conversation yesterday! Now I am reading your manual and trying to get to the root of my daughter’s problem behavior. I will, of course, keep track of it, as it is written in the manual, but I had a question about one of the most typical behaviors for my daughter. Namely, after reading about the reasons behind the behavior, you listed five things, among which attention seeking. You say: “Attention – the individual wants attention. This can be positive (wants social praise/someone to pay attention) or negative (reprimands or scolding for bad behaviors).” I was wondering what it means – could it be that a child could sometimes seek for negative attention? I think it is the direction to go to seek for the root of my daughter’s behavior, since, many times when she did something bad, she waited for the reaction, and, if it was shouting, scolding and similar, she would laugh loudly. What do you think about it?
Answer:
Negative attention to children is just as valuable as positive attentionz. In a child’s eyes any type of attention means I’m significant so yes, she could be exhibiting these behaviors just to get any type of attention. I like to attack attention seeking behaviors from a two prong approach, first attention seeking behavior tells me that she would like more of your attention so when she is a good girl, we wanna make sure we’re giving her a lot of positive praise for example if she’s sitting eating her dinner nice, if she’s sitting on the couch nice, if she’s doing her work, you want to make sure you give her a lot of praise during the times that she’s doing things correctly. When she’s not doing things correctly and she’s doing it on purpose for negative attention seeking we don’t want to reinforce it by giving her a lot of yelling or screaming what I would do in those instances is ignore her and if it’s something obviously That needs to be addressed, I address it with minimal eye contact, no words and then I escort her to her room if she needs a time out. Let me know if this is helpful and if you have any other questions.
Negative attention to children is just as valuable as positive attentionz. In a child’s eyes any type of attention means I’m significant so yes, she could be exhibiting these behaviors just to get any type of attention. I like to attack attention seeking behaviors from a two prong approach, first attention seeking behavior tells me that she would like more of your attention so when she is a good girl, we wanna make sure we’re giving her a lot of positive praise for example if she’s sitting eating her dinner nice, if she’s sitting on the couch nice, if she’s doing her work, you want to make sure you give her a lot of praise during the times that she’s doing things correctly. When she’s not doing things correctly and she’s doing it on purpose for negative attention seeking we don’t want to reinforce it by giving her a lot of yelling or screaming what I would do in those instances is ignore her and if it’s something obviously That needs to be addressed, I address it with minimal eye contact, no words and then I escort her to her room if she needs a time out. Let me know if this is helpful and if you have any other questions.
Dear Michelle, thanks so much, and sorry for the late reply! I was thinking about your answer. Some of it we already knew and used, and some parts are difficult in our home setting, like sending her to her room, since she does not have her own room, and, besides, she is quite fearful to stay in the parts of the flat where there is nobody. I was thinking more about this root of problem behavior and why would she want to attract negative comments and possible shouting, and then I thought it may be because she then sees the faces of people transformed, and since she does not understand them, she finds them funny. I do not know if this makes sense. Otherwise, today we also had a couple of situations, and we will try to keep a track of them. Sometimes we can figure their root cause, and sometimes not, and these can be all of those things that you list in your lectures. However, I was wondering the following: when we make an observation and note down a number of these cases, does the percentage of these different sub-categories decides which strategy we will apply? Thanks!
Our brains like to complicate things, Work with me to help you to figure out root causes, come back here and tell me:
THIS IS ALL I NEED EVERYTIME SHE HAS A BEHAVIOR
A – Antecedent what happened before the behavior
B – What was the Behavior she exhibited
C – Consequence – What happen after the behavior
Just practice giving me this info first and I’ll help you with the rest.
For the Attention Seeking Behavior don’t overthink why she might want negation attention lets just solve for that behavior. If she’s truly doing a thing for behavior you give it zero attention and then provide lots of love and GOOD ATTENTION when shes doing good things around the home.
There has to be consequence for some of the things you are seeing, I was just giving an example. We can dialog more around this on our call.
Just focus on providing me examples with the ABC data and we’ll work together to figure out function and game plan.
EXAMPLE.
A – She was reading a book and then got up and hit me
B – She hit me in the face
C – I Yelled, she laughed and I was chasing her around the house
A – She asked to use the ipad / iphone and I said no
B – She started pushing me
C – I tried to resit but I gave her the phone
Let me know if this makes sense and is helpful. xo
Yes, okay, we have a couple of recent examples:
Situation one:
A – we went to a performance in her old school. She wanted to see the friends, and this performance was postponed from the days when she was still in the old school. We sat in the last row, just in case. The performance started, it was extremely loud, with kids singing, playing music, and shouting. My daughter had noise-canceling headphones, but it did not help much. After ten minutes, she started eating her nails. She also did not want to leave (this was the common situation in the old school – she always insisted to be around school mates no matter how hard it is for her). After an hour, we started getting in and out, just to have breaks. After 1.5 hours, when it was finally over, with large crowds getting out, she started taking the phone from my hand, and having some uncontrolled movements. I still kept the phone, but she insisted to grab it, and finally it fell on the floor.
B – She took the phone, while telling me something anxiously and loudly
C – I did not react because I knew that she must be overwhelmed due to sensory issues. I also felt I cannot react since we are in a large group
Situation two:
A – Her dad asked her if she wanted to play with our little neighbor when we saw him out in the yard (This boy is 4, and last year, he kept entering our apartment and grabbing her toys – this year she figured out that this situation traumatized her, and she does not want to open the door when she sees the boy out)
B – she got upset and started whining and squeaking
C – we did not like that she responds by these sounds and talked between us about it
Situation three:
A – I went with her to the indoor playground where there is a toy catcher machine. She is given her pocket money every month (to exercise using money), and she likes to spend it on this machine. She first, when we came, used 20+20 DKK to get two toys. When we were leaving, it seemed to me that she took another 40 DKK, and, when she came back with one item, I asked her where is another toy. She kept saying that she got three toys, but I tried to ask again whether she took money for two items on the second attempt or not. She probably did not understand me
B – she raised her voice, saying loudly that she got three toys, she hugged me strongly and pressed my neck (like in a light strangling)
C – I told her that next time she could say that she did not understand me rather than strangle me
Please, let us know what you think of these examples. There are many others that we can recover from the past, but these are the fresh ones. Thank you also for mentioning consequence. Before we moved to Denmark, we used what we called back then the “punishment,” every time she did something bad, like taking away her tablet, and similar. When we moved here, the entire crew around my daughter – school staff, head of school, and our entire home team were scandalized when I say the word “punishment,” because for them probably it implied some kind of physical violence, or similar. We never had this again, and my every attempt to introduce “discipline” failed within these teams. Many times I had thoughts that, if we continue like this, our daughter will end up breaking the law when she grows up, but, when we mention it to the team, they kept saying that she may not understand it (like she does not have a capacity to understand it, which is not true). Now I realize that they probably sabotaged me on two levels, one, where they underestimated my daughter, and another, where they allowed her to go unpunished for the misdeeds. So, we would very much like to reintroduce it, but I guess, for those things where we exclude other triggers.
I hope this explains the situation better,
Best, Marijana
Ok – Example 1 the show
1st thing I’d want to know is if you traveled to this event with noice cancelling headphones and you sat in the back this tells me you were aware there could be an issue going to this event. All of this is fine, and I don’t mind an intentional tripwire as long as you’re not using the outcome against yourself.
Because you and I both suspect the behaviors exhibited during this example were sensory, I would work on a “first then approach” in combination with planned controlled exposure in small doses. So for example I would prepare her for the event with a social story. A social story is something we can create, print out and it lets her know what is coming. I would also encourage a reward system. So instead of walking into the venue assuming to sit for the whole event, my game plan might be, social story out whats going to happen, set a time for our departure. And pick an amount of time she could win at and increase it systematically. So if the show is 1 hour, and I know she can do 15 mins, i dont push it.. i set a timer (on silent) once we sit and when it goes off i can take her out to the hallway for a break, little reward, for a few minutes then say ok we have to go back. I’d do this in a place where I could handle a meltdown and not care what others think, and increase over time. Let me know if this makes sense.
Playing with the neighbor:
The function is “escape/avoid” she had a bad experience with this boy so its understandable she’s not going to be thrilled at the idea of having a play date with him because he’s got a history of stealing her toys.
This is a tricky one because I wouldn’t force her to play with someone she didn’t like but what I would have said when asking was … The little boy wants to play with you and Daddy will be there the entire time so he does’t steal your toys. Do you want to play with him? If she starts making the noises, I tell her what she SHOULD say vs whinning.. “No Thank you Daddy… “. If the boy is harmless and she just put him in the NO box in her mind, then I would incentivize her for trying.
“If you play with the little boy for 5 mins, I will give you a treat, ipad time, etc”
I would also make sure the play date is STRUCTURED meaning I am fully involved directing the play because of the “history” they have.
Let me know if this is helpful.
The indoor playground incident
I am not sure what happen here either. So if its not clear to you and me, its definitely not clear to her, lets talk about this one on our next group call, also you can bring it to BCBA Call
With regard to the prior team and their beliefs on punishment. Consequence can have many meanings.. it can be what happens after the behavior, it could be what happens IN RESPONSE to the behavior. I always prefer to get bees with honey but I also have a duty as a mother to raise my child to have respect for myself and her elders, respect for rules, respect for other human beings, and respect just for the order of things. We have to balance decoding her language of behavior with the steps we need to take as parents, and sometimes we have to teach the hard lessons. I think what happens to us as Autism Parents is the identity we thought we’d be before the diagnosis leaves us because we think “professionals” are more equipped and we ignore our parental insticts and defer to them blindly. I AM GLAD YOU ARE REGAINING YOUR SIGHT 😉 xo. There is a harmony that can happen with their knowledge and your WISDOM as no one knows your daughter better then you. xo
Dear Michelle,
Thanks so much for your replies! I will just add a few things to your comments:
Example 1: The event we attended, the show, was her own choice; I was accompanying her since she was really eager to see the old friends. We did not know anything about the performance, and that all of these children will be included in the show. We also did not know how loud it will be (however, it is usually loud there, which is one of the reasons why she left the school). But, I think she would feel better if I had some kind of reward system, since she was managing really well until some point. Possibly, I could use your strategy when we attend the events she does not like? I am also a bit uncertain about the reward – my daughter is on gluten free sugar free diet for a year, and giving her a candy would really help as a reinforcer, but I can’t do that because of the diet rules.
PS What do you mean by saying that I use the outcome against myself?
Example 2: Playing with the neighbor
Her father was actually trying to tease her, and he did not mean that she should play for real. On the other hand, she would never accept playing with him even if we beg her due to this experience from last year. When she sees him out (we have a common yard), she instantly closes the door. The question here is whether she actually understood the joke, and got offended (probably not) or she became concerned that her dad thinks seriously…
As for the money thing, I can explain in the call.
AS for the last comment – thanks so much! I would also ideally like to raise my daughter to respect people, this is my biggest wish. The thing about living in Scandinavia is the following: It is not that I blindly trust the specialists – I did have some strange feeling all this time about cutting on the “punishment” thing. However, literally everybody around us were saying that we should drop it. And when they say it here, you are in doubt that, if you do not listen to them, you may end up with the social service on your back (they take away a lot of kids from parents). When my daughter was in the third grade, there was this speech pathologist from the school, who told me with concern that my daughter is really frightened what would I say when she does something bad in school. And she said it with such a tone that I became really concerned, thinking about the social service. The whole time they are sending me the message that my daughter is not capable of understanding respect, which I do not buy. She behaves quite fine with those who set the clear limits, but she seems to become quite difficult for those who do not, giving them a hard time (this is why we contacted you in the first place). In the situations when we do not have much influence on her relationship with the school staff, and we do not have much information either, which was the case with her previous school, how do we influence her respect towards those who let her do whatever?
So if she wants to go to this show, we would tell her what is expected of her before we attend and at any time she doesn’t comply then we leave the show. Whether she choose the show or not, I would call in advance and find out the details.. is it loud, how long is it etc. The more prepared you are the better to handle the situation.
The reward can be ipad time, a balloon, maybe a little extra money for her toy game at the indoor park, You can get creative if you don’t want to use food snacks.
What I mean when I say “I can go on these outings whether we are prepared or not but if it doesn’t go as I hoped and we have to leave, she has a meltdown etc, just make sure your brain doesn’t use it against yourself. You were really flying blind with going to this show because you knew it could be loud, it could be she didn’t make it, you just dont want your brain to say “see we cant go do stuf like this”. You choose to give it a spin and however it lands, we are always experimenting :-).
About dad teasing about playing with the neighbor, I didn’t know it was a joke so lets just assume she didn’t either. We have to start with calming her overreactions first before we can dip a toe in being playful with her on a sensitive topic. You can be playful with her when its a neutral or postive for practice but I’d steer clear of this till her behaviors are more under control.
You get to decide if you want to work on improving the relationship with her and this boy, not her. We can strategize out a process but it would have to be supervised, etc.
for the worry about social service, I think we should talk about it on the call. Anytime a family “thinks” that was the intention, its going to send you into fight or flight. This is what the mindset calls are all about, this is a great example to bring up there as well.
Keep collecting that data, she’s gonna change right before your eyes! xoo