We had a spectacular meltdown last night. As part of her Laundry Frenzy Mrs. Agent told the girl to get the dirty clothes out of our bathroom. Now, this included articles of our daughter’s clothing, and some towels and other clothes. Mrs. Agent told the girl not once, not twice, but three times to get her clothes and any other clothes out of the bathroom.
Once they were ready for bed, the kids settled down to watch “Brisco County Jr.” on DVD. The wife came in and asked the girl if she had gotten all the clothes out of the bathroom. Zombie-like, the girl barely flickered her gaze from the television screen and said she had.
But, of course, she hadn’t. The girl immediately lost her TV privileges for the night and the next day. The wife took her back and pointed out all the clothes she had missed. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. Tears were shed. “It’s not FAIR!” she screamed.
We asked her what wasn’t fair. “Mom never told me I had to get the other clothes! She just said I had to get mine!”
I pointed out that this wasn’t true, and that I had heard her mother warning her to make sure she got all the clothes out of the bathroom.
“It’s not FAIR!”
Fairness is an interesting concept. Children have a razor-sharp sense of fairness, and while it is undeniably slanted in the direction of self-interest, it can sometimes be surprisingly abstract. In this case, the girl believed it wasn’t fair for her to be punished when she genuinely hadn’t heard her mother’s instructions. And I can sympathize. Except for the ‘mom told you three times’ part. Clearly, the girl still feels it is our responsibility as parents to make sure she understands what is requested of her, whereas we have moved on to the expectation that she take that responsibility onto herself. It’s a significant difference.
The girl had a consultation with another counselor this week, and there was a discussion as to whether she is getting the proper dose of medication. Would she respond better to a higher dose? Would she respond better if she took a small supplemental dose in the afternoon? These are troubling questions for me.
On the one hand, we will never know if she isn’t getting a fully therapeutic dose unless we bump it up and see what happens. On the other hand, I feel we have to remain vigilent against any tendancy to use medication to change behaviors, rather than changing our daughter’s ability to cope with life. And that’s an important distinction.
If we do decide to change her dosage, it will not be because we don’t want her throwing hissy fits in the evenings, it will be because we want to address the distraction and absent-mindedness that seems to set in after school, that in turn gets her in trouble because she misinterprets (or just completely misses) instructions.
It’s something to think about.
***
I was riding in this morning, and making good time. I was blazing down Barbur in the bike lane at probably between 25 and 30 mph. As I headed into town, I became aware of something creeping up on my left. I turned my head to see a young lady in the traffic lane, on a scooter that was going maybe 1 mph faster than I was.
And it pissed me off. I am constantly hearing about how reckless and dangerous it is for cars to have to share the road with cyclists. Now, which is more dangerous — me, going 29 mph in my own separate lane, or her, doing 30 on the street with traffic that’s going about 50 (or more)? And yet, you don’t hear much from the anti-Vespa crowd about how we have to get scooters off our roads.
It’s not FAIR.
While I know that our daughter is much younger than yours, one strategy we have put into place is, after we ask/tell her something we really want her to do/listen to, we ask her to tell us what we just told her. It’s a pain in the butt, but sometimes it helps.
We definitely get the “It’s not FAIR!”
I do know what you mean about changing behaviors versus changing ability to cope. Ability to cope being changed means more, because it’s more generalizable, whereas changing a specific behavior tends to be geared towards a specific circumstance.
Good luck.
You know what…she’s 9/10 now….why not *write* these things down? Write it on a notepad piece of paper and hand it to her? Get a big dry-erase board at Costco (or the like) and put it on there? If it’s writen in ink, she can’t say she didn’t know what she needed to do.
Maybe write it down, have her *repeat* it (twice if necessairy), and see if that helps? My boyfriend may be 31 with an I.Q. of 140, but if I don’t write it down on the dry-erase board, it’ll never get done. And then, I have to remind him to read the board. But, it eventually gets done. But I was thinkin with a youngster, that writing it down, reading it, and repeating it out loud might help
We have a whole lot of history with this kid that I don’t bother to go into when I blog. Please believe me when I tell you that we have struggled with her at every step of the way, and have tried LOTS of strategies over the years, before we got to this point. By way of illustration, let me give you two examples:
From early on, the girl seemed to be completely unable to stay on task when getting ready for bed. This tendancy was greatly exacerbated by the fact that she never, ever, wanted to go to sleep in the first place. Out of frustration that we had to keep reminding her to do the same things *every night*, the wife drew up a big chart with a bedtime ‘To-Do’ list on it, with a column for every day of the week, and laminated it. The idea was, the girl would check items off every night, and we wouldn’t have to nag her any more.
The result: We had to nag her *every night* to check her checklist.
When she was much younger, whenever we wanted her to do more than one thing at a time, we would stop her, make her make eye contact with us, and repeat each step of each task, in detail, and in proper chronological order. After a few years of this, it became completely reflexive for us — we did it without thinking. And then at some point (I think we were watching someone interact with their kids) we relized that we were actually handicapping her. Because we never gave her a chance to figure out how to do ANYTHING on her own, because we were always telling her EXACTLY what to do, she wasn’t learning how to figure out how to accomplish a task by herself. At that point we decided that we had to make ourselves stop.
Remember, this is a 5th grader who is exceptionally bright. She’s 5 feet tall, and 130 lbs. At this point she NEEDS to be able to follow instructions (for example from her teacher) without having them written down for her.
And if she hadn’t been so completely fixated on getting in front of the TV last night, she probably would have done just fine.
Have you had her hearing checked? Because when I was little that was my problem. I go into a lot of trouble because I would guess what Mum was saying or the teacher and just about always got it wrong. But no one picked up on it unitl I was 20. Also hated going to bed, had insomnia from birth!
Hey PAgent, I heard a rumor that my site was mentioned in the Oregonian Edge today, but I can’t find anything online about it! Can you check that for me? I’d like to know what it said.
You WERE mentioned in today’s Edge. They cited you as the source of the billboard with the woman musing why she, like, wasn’t, you know, hired.
It should show up later today here.
No advice, just tons and tons of empathy, in a ‘been there, still living through that’ kind of way…