Tough Love

This week may well have been a watershed for us. Let me explain. Alongside Aspergers S has elements of something known in shorthand as "PDA". This is Pathological Demand Avoidance and explained very crudely means that S has a strong reaction to any demand at all being placed on him. In reality it's like having a child stuck at the three year old temper tantrum stage where if the child doesn't want to do something he certainly makes that very plain for all to see and hear about. With S this is mixed up with his Aspergers and then on top of that is the fact that he is a 9 year old boy with firm ideas in his head! With PDA you quickly realise how many demands can be made in any one day. From getting dressed, to keeping hygienic at the very basic level all the way through the day to brushing teeth at the end of the day and going to bed. You can imagine therefore the fun and games that persist when it comes to home school time. I've had enough! To have a constant running battle with the child you love is very exhausting. I love my son dearly and to be constantly battled with is soul destroying. Often after a morning of moans and groans (and that is putting it politely!) I'm often ready for a dark room. S forgets all about it immediately. That is a gift in itself! Yesterday, as usual the time came for home school. We rarely start first thing. I always need a little time to sort things out after the chaos of getting the other 3 kids out to school and know fine well that to start S straight away without any time on his own would be counter productive. So, we started just after 10 with mental maths as usual. You would think I was asking S to do 300 sums in 2 minutes! We struggled through that and then moved onto spelling. That's when I really had had enough! The moaning wasn't anything out of the ordinary but the dripping tap effect was grating on my nerves so much!! I've felt so challenged about how I come across to my children in the house. As a Christian family we feel its important to love each other just as much inside the house as we would want to love other people outside of the house. In the house with moaning and whining children can be one of the first places to lose the rag and forget all about love, patience, peace, kindness, gentleness or self control! I am trying hard! I certainly am a work in progress and teaching S day by day certainly keeps my feet firmly on the ground - if not feeling stuck in the mud!! With all this in mind I explained to S that I could feel myself getting very angry and frustrated and that I didn't want to shout as that did neither him nor I any good. I told him that he would now have to complete the task on his own as I was not willing to sit and work with him whilst his attitude was so negative. (I did know that this task was straight forward!) This task should have taken him 5 minutes, 10 at the most. An hour later he finished! It honestly was like pulling teeth!! He was not a happy chap! It was murder to listen to and several times I could have stepped in and helped him. But you know what? He finished it all by himself! I was amazed! The rest of the day went well. We worked through our other tasks quickly and without problems (which to be fair normally does happen once he gets the moaning out of his system). I did wonder whether yesterday would have made a difference at all. We can go through huge dramas one day that he forgets and have to repeat all over again the next. Well what a shock I got today. When I said it was time for home school he came, sat down and completed his mental maths with not one word of complaint. He then worked through his spelling and his maths workbook without moaning! He even pointed out to me that he has noticed that if he doesn't moan he gets through the work faster! I kid you not that is the first day in 19.5 months of home school that he hasn't moaned! It was bliss!! I'm not naive enough to think that he will never moan again and this tough love is going to be here to stay otherwise home school will have to end. But if today is the start of something new I would not only be so happy but so so so relieved!