Socially Speaking (or, Don't Kiss Ruby)

I've been thinking a lot lately about Nick and his incredibly poor social skills.

Let me start with an example. Nick doesn't know when enough is enough until it's directly in his face, loud and clear. Say he wants Ruby to give him a hug. She does. But instead of going on about his business, he grabs her, tickles her, kisses her, hugs her again, until she's screaming for him to leave her alone. It's like he can't figure out social boundaries, and so he's always pushing against them. Luckily Ruby adores her big brother and doesn't hold it again him. Imagine the problems he had in middle school, when he'd offer a kid a high five and then tickled, noogied and generally harassed the poor kid until he was told to go away. The saddest part is he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand how people view him or how annoyed people get when their personal space is violated.

There has to be a way to teach him social skills. I'm taking this Positive Behavior Seminar. The main point of it is to teach teachers and parents how to change bad behaviors. I'm wondering if it couldn't be tweaked to fit social skills training as well. The main gist is to pick one problem behavior and replace it with a more acceptable (not necessarily perfect behavior.)

So let's take something simple.

The Problem: Nick doesn't listen to Ruby when she says "no" when he asks for a hug or kiss from her. His sustaining consequence is an interaction with his baby sister.

The Perfect Solution: Nick asks Ruby for a kiss, she says "no" and he says "okay" and walks away. His sustaining consequence would be that he was happy to respect Ruby's wishes.

The Acceptable Solution: Nick asks Ruby for a kiss, she says "no" and he pats her on the head instead and walks away. He will still get the sustaining consequence of an interaction with Ruby, while still respecting her right to not want to kiss him.

According to the PBS rules, I need to come up with a "million dollar reward" for Nick for the first few times he uses the acceptable behavior rather than the problem behavior. A reward that's so huge that he can't wait to try the new behavior again to see if he gets the same reward. This is where I run into trouble. For one thing, Nick is nearly impossible to reward (or punish for that matter.) I can't make a big deal about praising him, because it immediately sets off a rebound round of bad behavior. ("Yea, Nick! I'm so proud of you, you rock!" "Yeah right." Followed by a crash and something breaking.) Punishment is also a problem, because first he doesn't take it and then once he does, he forgets all about it and it doesn't have the desired effect. ("Nick, that's it you're off the computer for the rest of the day." Imagine kicking, screaming and a general tantrum for about ten minutes here, followed by Nick forgetting that the computer ever existed.)

He doesn't do well with rewards or punishments, I think because they upset his flow and make him have to struggle to get it back. He does, however, want to know that when he does what he's supposed to someone notices.

So I'm hoping that Nick is old enough and bright enough, that just learning to get along better will be reward enough. With some luck, just a nod or some small notice of his using the acceptable behavior will be enough.

Here are some future social skills that I hope this plan will work on:

Doing something nice for someone without saying "don't I get a thank you?" afterward.

Saying "I'm sorry" properly and with sincerity.

Having a conversation with someone where he looks them in the eye, has a give and take, and doesn't interrupt to talk about something else or ask if the conversation is over yet.

Keeping a comfortable amount of personal space around himself and other people (instead of leaning against someone he's sitting next to, sitting too close, standing too close, etc.)

Autistic people have to learn social skills by rote. Did you know that language is only 7% verbal? That means that 93% is reading tone, facial cues and body language. Autistic people can't do that, so they are only receiving 7 % of the message when someone is interacting with them. Nick can't read Ruby's irritation when he's trying to make her kiss him, until she makes it very verbal and loud. He can't tell when he is annoying someone, so he has to learn by rote which behaviors are annoying and how to avoid them.

All About Nick

I've had a few sort of epiphanies about Nick in the last couple of weeks. One is that, whatever his difficulties, he's basically a really good kid. The other day he was supposed to go to the after school program, but when he got there a kid who (for very very good reason) he doesn't trust was there, so he left. I got three immediate, frantic calls from three different people. The other teachers in my classroom were all "leave, you have to go find him!" I was utterly calm. I knew Nick wouldn't run off and wander the streets, and that Kevin would track him down in a few minutes. He'd either gone to his grandparents house, the library, or he was still at school somewhere. I was right, he was in the resource room hanging with his teacher.

It's so easy for me to blame myself and buy into the idea that he's the way he is because I've done something wrong as a parent. An almost unbearable amount of guilt goes along with being the parent of a difficult child. But I can trust him, and that's saying something. I've seen enough kids his age roaming the town, unsupervised and doing shit they know better than to do, to know that it's something to be proud of that Nick isn't one of them.

Something else I've realized is that I'm so concerned about what other people think about him, how they perceive him, that I'm forgetting to help him be just who he is. So he's not a typical kid. Who cares? And even if they do care, what good will it do? This is a hard one for me to face. It's hard to give up that wish that he were normal. Fact is, he's never going to blend. But with some help, he can learn how to be who he is and still live with the rest of us.

I'm about half done with a six-session, thirty-hour long ordeal called the Positive Behavior Seminar. I'm there officially as Nick's mom. I'm also there as a school district employee, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. I'm gaining an exciting insight into human behavior.

I've actually managed myself very professionally through the first two sessions. At this third session I was an emotional train wreck. I broke down in hiccuping tears twice, and was generally irritated for a good portion of the afternoon.

I get to this place where every instinct I have as a mother tells me that the only way to protect my son is to stop sending him to school. Screw socialization. He's miserable. I'm sending him everyday into the trenches where he feels like he's at war. Why, oh why, is trying to force him into being able to socialize in a group of 300 snotty middle school nightmares so fucking important anyway? What if sending him there is actually impeding his socialization? What if it's making him worse?

That's the place I was in today.

After doing some data collecting I felt this "Ah-ha" moment that Oprah would have been proud of. For thirteen years I've been positive that what Nick is ultimately seeking with his behavior is attention. The data was perfectly, undeniably clear that I was wrong. That every teacher, every adult he's ever been in contact with, was wrong. Nick isn't seeking attention. He's seeking self-stimulation, and he's seeking to be left alone.

The woman running the seminar was talking to us (Team Nicholas!) about trying to figure out strategies for preempting the "staging events" (in Nick's case, transitions during class) that set off a particular behavior (grabbing his aide's arm when his aide tries to walk away from him.) The woman asked me why Nick was doing it and I said "because he's autistic." She said no. He's autistic, but ultimately he's trying to get something out of the behavior, autistic or not. He's trying to get his safety-net to stay near him.

I'm still struggling with this, because I keep thinking that I could go to a million seminars, a zillion doctors, and I just can't use some sort of strategy to wash the autism out of Nick. It doesn't work that way.

And then the woman said that all we're trying to do is help Nick get what he needs in a way that makes people want to give it to him.

Oh. Yeah. That makes so much sense. We aren't trying to get Nick not to need a safety-net person. We're trying to get him to ask for one in some way that doesn't involve grabbing at his safety net physically when he feels insecure.

Nick has never been in regular classrooms before. Not even in elementary school. He's never been expected to do the same work as his peers, to do homework, to be held to the same standard as everyone else. He's used to classrooms with less than ten kids, now he's in classrooms with 20 to 30. He's overwhelmed and literally latching on to his aide as a port in the storm. His aide is only five years older then him, young enough to relate to Nick on his level. He's a friend that Nick can trust won't be an enemy tomorrow. He's a friend who, because he's being paid, is always there. Having someone in authority stand up there and say that it was okay for him to need that was incredibly gratifying.

I still feel the fairly intense desire to just remove him from the incredible stress on our whole family of him going to school. I'm a little calmer about it right this minute. The program ends in January, about the time the semester at school ends. We'll see what happens then.

On Misbehaving

I used to say that when my kids had the day off of school for teacher in-service day that it was actually "teacher party day."

Yeah. Not so much.

I had to sit through a hideously boring, demeaning seven hour long in service today. In case you didn't know this, and if the subject ever comes up for you, grown people do not like when someone counts them down (four, three, two, one) to silence like a bunch of first graders. It's ridiculous. Also, don't talk in the same sing-songy voice you used when you used to teach second grade if you now teach teachers. Your regular grown-up voice is just fine, thanks.

I left the meeting irritated, which isn't probably a good thing. I also left with even less faith that I'll be able to send Nick to the high school next year then I had when I came in. Blank stares when I brought up the fact that my resource students have to stop working to perform janitorial duty every day just before lunch. Pats on the shoulder when I discussed how disappointed I was in losing my job because my student is moving. A complete lack of understanding about the fact that our class HAS NO TEACHER. And the woman they've hired to be the teacher? She DOESN'T HAVE A DEGREE IN EDUCATION. How is it possible that I'm the only one that's bothered by that???

Oh yeah. I'm the only one with a special needs child about to finish up the eighth grade.

See. I was perfectly fine this morning. Now I'm all riled up.

At lunch I saw a bookmark with the title of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Ulrich also wrote the book A Midewife's Tale, the diary of Martha Ballard (a colonial midwife), which I read for my history class. For some reason I connected with that bookmark, even though I haven't read the book. I haven't stood up for my students regarding their forced labor because I don't want the principal to think I'm a trouble maker. That I'm not well-behaved.

I don't want to be well-behaved. I want to be the woman who stands up for what is right. I want to be a boat-rocking trouble maker, damn it!

So, while I've been thinking about Ulrich's slogan (a sentence she wrote in graduate school in the 70s), I realized the irony between my newfound desire to misbehave and my intended job as a school teacher. I want to be the kind of teacher that encourages students to not take things lying down. I do NOT want to be the kind of teacher that says "four, three, two, one" and flashes the lights just when the conversation is getting good.