Reply to Why do you think some kids have difficult personalities?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP above- I want to clarify that I’m not saying that kids who act out always have abusive parents, but rather there’s often something like developmental delays or mental illness or sensory processing challenges behind a child’s behavior. [/quote]

I agree, and my first thought when I read the OP was actually autism. Often what autistic kids need are things that are considered indulgent by other parents. Parents who are doing a good job raising their autistic kids would probably be accused of having bad boundaries. I have no idea what’s going on with the people OP is talking about but I would assume that a) they are doing their best and b) the kids have special needs and they need something different from what they’re getting. [/quote]

This is such a valuable observation. Sometimes autistic kids need a level of tenderness and accommodation that simply looks like lazy, bad parenting to someone who has only ever worked with NT kids. Other parents don't understand that the reason you might give an autistic child something they've demanded in a rude voice (without saying please) is because their need for whatever they are asking for is immediate and critical. It's different than an non-autistic child screaming "Gimme another ice cream!" where the appropriate parenting response is to calmly say no and then remove the child from the situation. With an autistic child, they might be screaming that they need to go close the door you just closed themselves, and demand that you open the door so that they can close it. But for the autistic child, this ritual is an actual need, and they may not be able to regain emotional regulation until it happens. It looks like the parent is getting bossed around by the child, but actually the parent is making a calculated choice to accommodate what seems like a random need (and is the result of OCD behaviors that are common in many autistic people) in order to facilitate the child regaining regulation so that you can move forward. It's not lazy, it's a ton of work. But people who don't work with autistic kids don't get that. They think the parents are just being pushovers and that the failure to say no to such requests in the past are causing the behavior to happen now. For a child diagnosed with autism, the opposite is often true -- the parent used to hold firm boundaries in those situations before diagnosis, and has since had to learn how to be flexible in these situations because their child's brain is not wired to learn from that kind of boundary. It's wired to lose control when a boundary like that is set.[/quote]

This!!![/quote]

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