Currently on a miserable beach vacation with 4 yo
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Anonymous
Sometimes kids who don't like screens that much do like listening to music on headphones or earpods, you might try that as a calming reward. An old fashioned Ipod works best. If not music then maybe audio stories. Just a thought. |
he sometimes finds them entertaining for short periods of time, but is generally not that into them. We even bought a special iPad for him brand new from Santa for this trip and he shows no interest in it
Anonymous
| +1 on music and/or audiobooks |
Anonymous
| What is DC's age, OP? |
Anonymous
oops it was in the subject line! Oof, at 4 years old I would cut bait. Head home. Let grandma and 6 year old hang out. We learned in parent behavior therapy for our ADHD kiddo that vacations are not "exciting" for a kid with ADHD, as they might be for others. These kids need routine in a big way. |
Anonymous
This is stupid advice and extreme. The logistics of doing this would be potentially enormously stressful. As many as 1 in 4 boys has adhd - they can’t all not go on vacation and the rest of the family exists too. Op just asked for techniques to help, not to be told ‘there aren’t any, go home and stop trying to live life’ |
Anonymous
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Another parent of a difficult child (there are so many of us). The way we handled trips was building in structure, letting go of expectations and making safety a high priority.
For structure, we’d take a whiteboard and write out the schedule in detail (down to bathroom breaks) every single day. If we deviated, we’d change the whiteboard. Even before kid could read, the knowledge that a plan existed worked wonders. We’d make the day into what most made kid happy. We’d recognize that we were going to be carrying a screaming kid off the beach and just plan for it because that was our life. I also had no issue with holding mine down to brush his teeth and I would have done the same for sunscreen. I never even offered a different option because I either held him down or it didn’t happen so why pretend we’re something we’re not. We rarely even tried restaurants because it wasn’t something that would work and we’d just be disrupting other guests while being miserable ourselves. In your case I’d definitely get a leash for safety. One thing we did do was that we started our still existing practice of letting every family member choose some activity which we dubbed their “adventure”. Everyone had to participate and no one could complain. As parents we often choose what difficult kid would be happy doing because success was important. I share this because this has made our trips together so much more satisfying over the years and we started it during very difficult times and made it work. I hope the rest of your trip is more peaceful and that later you can look back at pictures of the amazing parts of the trip and find yourself glad that you had those moments. |
Anonymous
DP, but we did come home early from vacation once (when our son was 5) and we did stop traveling for a few years. Sometimes it’s just not worth the stress/disruption. OP is heading home soon so maybe not worth rescheduling given how crazy flights are right now. |
Anonymous
| Op, back to what you said re not understanding first/then - that’s a great thing to work on in ABA. But I hear you, at 4, my son didn’t either. It came. This will all get better and you will get better at it. We took my almost exact same sounding child at that age who is now 10 on many international trips this year and while it isn’t easy it’s doable. |
Anonymous
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First-then. Ocean is reward. First we (eat, dress, put on sunscreen) then we play at the ocean, the faster you dress, the sooner we go.
I know you mentioned there is no ASD in the picture, but some of the tools can help (given speech delay): picture schedules are super useful. in a pinch, you can draw stick figures and show to him, so he can visualize what's happening during this day. Give choices: we play indoors without sunscreen or we put trunks and sunscreen and go to the ocean (you can do these as corresponding to your 2 hands - he gets to high-five which one he wants). Give him time to process (this is kid specific, but mine can take 30 seconds to decide, repeating it over and over doesn't speed up the answer). You can practice choices for other stuff: food, which shirt to wear, etc. the idea is to build up the feeling of (some) control that he has, because he clearly craves it. Manage sensory input - if it's super loud somewhere, or something else out of the ordinary, it's can be hard to manage at this age - it's work for him, and keeping the lid on is so much harder if there is a sensory overload. In the longer term, your team of professionals should give you resources on how to best manage. Also, there is a great virtually-delivered course "Parent-Child Journey" by Dr. Dan Shapiro, who is the pope of the dev. pediatricians in this area. There is also a shorter course on challenging behaviors I believe. I hope this is not considered advertising. |
Anonymous
| It is sadly comforting to hear we aren't the only family ever asked to leave a Disney park. Security "helped" us walk back to our hotel to make sure we really left. Fun times! |
Anonymous
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Op here with an update.
We ended up just getting a babysitter today from 10-6. It’s amazing. We are going to contact the agency to send us another nanny from 6-9 today and 6-noon tomorrow. Wish this had been an option from the moment we landed. We were at a different destination initially with very limited services and are now in a larger city where there’s more childcare options. We had to take a ferry yesterday and DS screamed at the top of his lungs from the minute we left the car until we finally got to our next hotel (2+ hours). We were completely soaked in sweat from carrying him in the tropics. I’m 100% done parenting today. I told my DH that all I want today is to sit. I just want to be sitting or lying down the ENTIRE day if possible lol. |
Anonymous
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Op here. Some of the tips above that have really helped:
-just accepting that DS is going to fight me on everything (getting out of the ocean, putting on sunscreen, putting on clothes, etc.), so instead of negotiating and trying all the things we always do that don’t work (first/then, bribes, choices, etc.), I just accept that he’s going to scream and force him. It suxks but is better than all the negotiating/cajoling/bribing/pleading -mourning the vacations I want to be able to take but can’t -hearing about others nightmare travel stories has been so helpful!!!! Thank you for sharing!! We’ve already done all the obvious baseline things before I ever posted here (prioritizing sleep and meals, first/then, timers, visual schedules, exercise, sunshine, dropping expectations, taking turns, screens). I’m realizing more and more that I just have a very different kid. The things that work on “normal” kids don’t work on him. At the heart of it is that he does not seem to understand things in the way a normal kid does and that breaks my heart into a million pieces. Just thinking he’s more disabled than we wanted to believe and is less capable than I thought. But he’s only 4, there’s hope that he will keep developing. But also….he may not. All of this is so hard. Thanks everyone for being with me on this vacation. Now that we have a nanny service I’m half hoping for a travel snafu tomorrow so we can extend!! |
Anonymous
Omg I feel your pain. I was afraid we might get kicked off the plane because DS wouldn’t stop kicking everything. I’ve heard there are cruises geared for kids with ASD. While DS doesn’t have ASD diagnosis (yet?), I’m sure he would benefit from that set up so I am Going to look into it for the future!! |
Anonymous
Happy to hear things are leveling out a bit! I’m curious, though: how did he do with the nannies? Was it OK simply because he wasn’t being asked to do anything he didn’t want to do? What did the nannies do with him in a hotel room for that period of time? |
Anonymous
I'm sorry. That just really sucks. Often things turn out a lot different / better than it we see in the hardest times early on dealing with our kids with disabilities, but it still just sucks ... especially the isolation and the "why don't you just ..." advice from people who just have no clue. From someone who has BTDT, letting go of the idealized family vacation really helped. It also helped to start having one-on-one vacations (or staycations) with each of the kids or, like you've done, getting a babysitter rather than trying to include DS in an activity where he's not going to have fun. Being a sibling of a kid with disabilities can be really hard, so prioritizing giving them a chance to have mom all to themself to stay at a local hotel and go to their favorite museums and activities is really important to them. |