Kids Like Mine

When my oldest was 8 months old, I heard a blurb on the radio to the effect that 80% of what most kids hear is “no” or some variation thereof (“stop that”, “quit that”, etc).  I swore to myself right then and there that at least 50% of what my kids would hear would be what they could do, not what they couldn’t do.  (Think about that for a minute:  Most kids hear something negative at least four times more often than both positive and neutral things combined. And we wonder why we can’t achieve world peace.) My sons both fit the profile for ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and are often very ‘duh’ about social stuff.  But I have been told by waiters, waitresses, store managers and the like on two continents how amazingly polite and well behaved my kids are.

Why is that? Because I rarely said things like “Shut up and sit still.”  Instead, from a very early age I offered them options for how to keep themselves quietly entertained.  When my oldest was the aforementioned 8 months old, I was listening to the radio in my truck because I was basically living out of my truck all day so he could breathe and spend less time in the ER.  I would get up early with my husband, who was in the military, and go in with him in the morning.  We were in Germany in a little town called “Dampfach” (try telling the minister where you live when that’s its name) and it was like a 20 minute drive by autobahn.  We would get to the kasern — which is an odd little word I probably can’t spell and it’s what they call the little American military bases in Germany which take up as little as a city block and don’t look anything at all like what Americans think of as a military base — and it was dark and there was nothing to do.  After my husband went to his first roll call and probably did PT (“exercise” for y’all civilians), we would get together and have breakfast at some little eatery on the kasern.  

So here I am with a sick 8 month old, living out of my car and eating breakfast at some godawful early hour of the morning with a sick child who is doped to the gills.  Why was he ‘remarkably well behaved’ under such circumstances?  Because mom would reach into her purse every five minutes and hand him something new to play with — my watch, some pennies, the tiny tape measure I carried with me everywhere, a coin purse full of change, my driver’s license, anything he hadn’t seen in the last twenty minutes.  When he would start getting bored and irritable, I would dig around for something else, sometimes desperately trying to come up  with something “new”.  In other words, well before he could talk, he was taught to play quietly in a restaurant.  He was taught what was socially acceptable behavior.  

And it didn’t involve expecting him to sit there dying of boredom and somehow behave anyway.  He was taught he could get his needs met, that was perfectly okay, he just couldn’t scream and cry incessantly — and that not screaming and crying wasn’t some exercise in self discipline. It was an exercise in keeping yourself quietly entertained.  We were in the restaurant more to meet my needs than to meet his and that generally remained true his entire life — mom needed to eat a decent meal, by god — but that didn’t mean it needed to be just utter torture for him.

So my kids didn’t hear “no” all the time.  Instead, they were taught what they could do.  It not only made them ‘well behaved’ in the eyes of others it also means they have a better relationship to me than many kids have to their parents.  Why?  Because their experience of me wasn’t overwhelmingly negative.  I was not that awful person who told them “no” constantly. I was that person who kept them quietly entertained and helped them get their needs met.  Which means my kids trust me, like me, and when I do scream at them (which I do), they either figure I have a very good reason or I am temporarily insane due to my health issues.  Either way, it doesn’t create baggage.  We either resolve whatever good reason I have for screaming at them or we work on getting me feeling better so I’m not some deranged screaming lunatic.

So if you want kids like mine — kids who are well behaved and who are fanatically loyal to you and forgiving of your personal shortcomings — then stop telling them “no”, “quit that”, “stop that”, “I’m warning you!”, and  ”if you do that one more time…”.  Process of elimination is the hardest, longest, most painful way to learn something.  Knowing one thing that works is worth a heckuva lot more than knowing 10,000 things that don’t work.

When my oldest was eight years old, his brother turned six. For his birthday, my youngest son got enough money to purchase two or three video games. My oldest tried to talk him into buying a video game for him as well. I promptly forbade my youngest from doing so. He then defended his request by saying something like “It’s not like I want all his money. I’m letting him keep part of it.” I didn’t bother to discuss it with him. He clearly didn’t understand what the problem was. When he was nine, I put him on a vitamin therapy. After about a year on this treatment, out of the blue, he suddenly announced that he finally understood why that was wrong. He continued on the therapy for several months. In addition to improved social behavior, he also showed improvements in handwriting. Even after he stopped taking these vitamins, anytime he got too weird, I would give him a B-complex supplement. There was one memorable incident when he was about fourteen. He had done something unacceptable to his brother and I sent him to go sit on my bed to keep him and his brother apart while I went and got his vitamins. He was so frustrated he was in tears. He just didn’t understand what he had done wrong. I gave him his vitamins and told him I would discuss it with him later, that he just wouldn’t understand until the vitamins had time to get into his system.

For my oldest son, inability to understand social issues was at least partly rooted in a vitamin deficiency.  Treating the vitamin deficiency dramatically improved his social skills without any need for occupational therapy  or other behavioral intervention. I have heard similar stories from other parents — that treating an underlying biomedical issue significantly improved social skills without need for other (behavioral/psychological) intervention.