dragonwolf
Well-Known Member
I can't speak for the person you asked, specifically, but my son also gets very aggressive when he gets overwhelmed, so I figured I'd share my experience.
1. Preempt the meltdown.
Be mindful of the environments that overstimulate your child and either avoid them or provide them with coping tools. For example, one daycare center was a disaster, because it was an explosion of color. All of the walls and the play equipment was painted with bright primary colors, very few neutral ones in sight, and the routine was a lot of transitions, so he'd just get settled in to doing something and then be told to go do something else. Honestly, it's a wonder even the NT kids could deal with that place. Suffice it to say, he didn't do well and basically got kicked out, because of all the incidents each day. The change of environment from that daycare center (and staff that didn't know how to handle kids like him) just to one with fewer kids, neutral decor, and better-prepared staff resulted in him going from 3+ incidents per day to less than one a week.
Also, watch for your child's overstimulation cues. My son will fold his ear into his ear canal in an attempt to block out sound when he starts getting overstimulated. That's the time to act and get him to a quiet place for a break.
2. Provide a safe place.
In both his school and in his afterschool program, as well as at home, my son has a dedicated place that he can retreat to if he's starting to feel overwhelmed. This is a quiet, dark room, where he can do whatever he needs to to be able to recenter himself.
We work closely with both facilities to ensure that said retreat room is respected. We've actually recently had an issue where the afterschool place recently got someone that used to be an intervention specialist for AS/D, but her training is very out of date. She tried doing things "her way" with my son, which only made things worse. There's another staff member there who's also an intervention specialist, but has his own kid in the program who had similar reactions as my son and so deals with him better. She tried telling him that restraint (used when my son gets to the point of threatening to harm himself or others; only the person doing the restraining, no tools or anything like that) was a felony, despite us giving him permission to do so. She also tried to work with my son by forcing eye contact and getting him to understand his actions, while he was in the middle of a meltdown, instead of letting him retreat and talking to him afterward.
Our response to her actions? Making sure that she either did things our way (you know, the way that we've refined over the past several years with him, specifically), or she doesn't go anywhere near him. We also arranged with the school that both facilities can collaborate with each other about his care, so the staff can talk with his intervention specialist and they can share what works and what doesn't.
3. Burn off the excess energy.
I don't know about you, but my son has endless energy. If I could harness it and use it to power my house, the electric company would probably be paying me.
His afterschool program is one of the local martial arts schools. As part of his membership there, he gets a daily martial arts class, then gets to play with the other kids until pickup time, which includes things like dodgeball and flag football. It comes out to like three hours of physical activity after school, and it's been the best thing ever for him. He'd been doing fairly well in school, behavior-wise, but even the previous once or so a week bad day has noticeably decreased, and he sleeps better at night (go figure).
As someone who wasn't diagnosed until adulthood and had a childhood full of confusion and misery, her denial makes me sad. I hope she comes to her senses early enough for her daughter to get the help she needs. Interventions and IEPs have changed quite a bit in recent years, and they favor keeping the child in the general classrooms as much as possible and teaching them coping skills, instead of just isolating them in dedicated classrooms.
Egads, as an adult, even I get overloaded by someone like that.
Definitely, the best way for your son to deal with her is to have a place to retreat to and make sure she respects it. It might also be worth talking to her, if she's old enough, and helping her realize that she's sensory-aggressive and needs to tone it down if she wants to spend any amount of time with him.
She needs to realize that her sensory aggression is essentially the same thing as "actual" aggression and it triggers the same fight/flight/freeze response, prompting your son to, quite literally, fight back against it.
