Reply to Camp fail - give feedback or not?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Camp fail - give feedback or not?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It sounds as though you have a very clear sense of what you think happened, but I am concerned that you might be only hearing it from your kid's point of view, or you might be making assumptions and filling things in with your imagination.

As a special ed teacher, I often have parents who will call me and explain to me why something happened when they actually don't even know what happened, and their explanation doesn't match the events.

Did the meltdown happen at camp?  If so, if it ended in a way that didn't come to the camp leadership's attention, and didn't result in your kid wanting to stay home, then I would take that as a win.

If the meltdown did come to the camp leadership's attention, then I would assume that they are already coaching the counselor.  If they didn't exclude your child, or demand a meeting, then they must be confident that they have strategies that will work in the context of the group.

If you want to talk to them, I'd go in understanding that part autism, particularly in young children, is a distorted understanding of social situations, and that there may have been very good reasons why they asked the kids to sit rather than moving to a more physical activity. Asking kids to do something that's incompatible with unsafe behavior (e.g. asking a kid running around to sit down) is a pretty common strategy with both children and with people with ASD.

So, if the meltdown rose to the level that there were safety issues, I would go in  with an open mind and say "I'd love to know more about this incident, so that we can figure out what skills and knowledge to target going forward.  Can you tell me more about what happened?"

I'm also going to say that suggesting that a kid who is willing to go back into a situation stay home has the potential to backfire.  [/quote]

This is all really excellent perspective - thank you and I hope you comment more here! My only caveat is that sometimes the child actually does have a valid additional perspective of the facts that the teacher does not have. This doesn’t mean that the upshot is any different (kid may not have coping skills required for the setting) but plenty of times my kid was able to fill in more details about what actually happened when the teacher just said “he just snapped all of a  sudden!” Kids on the spectrum are usually pretty honest so they are not going to actually lie even if their perspective is partial. You may work with younger kids or less verbal kids than mine though. [/quote]

I largely agree with you, but a teenaged or young twenty something camp counselor is not a teacher. They aren’t trained about avoiding triggers and meltdowns so sharing the child’s perspective might not result in any change. [/quote]

To be clear, when I would talk to my kid about incidents, it was not with the goal of sharing his perspective. It was to try to figure out what the trigger was so we could help him next time. With a school and an IEP the goal was also to understand if the IEP had been implemented. I also needed a better understanding of the events to know if my kid was getting better or not. Sometimes the adult reporting would insert a lot of overheated language and when I figured out what happened I would realize that in fact his melt downs were improving. (Data collection IOW.)

For a camp though I would probably pull him if there was a meltdown big enough for a call home unless the camp was SN or were really clear that they wanted him back. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics