Working with Your Special Needs Child

Listed below are concerns from parents of special needs children:

1. How do special needs children understand cause and effect and also rewards versus punishments? Do they understand the same as other children?

The interesting thing is that this is not an issue. All creatures great and small have an interest in reward versus punishment to some degree. Think about the bottom of the food chain such as a cockroach. Cockroaches despise the light and live to move around in the dark hours of the night. They associate good feelings with dark and bad feelings with light. They might not think about it in those terms or even at all.

Turn on the lights and the roach goes scuttling for darkness. In a very basic sense, light = punishment and darkness = reward. The behavior of escaping from light to dark is rewarded, and so is repeated.

But roaches are not trainable. To be trainable, you also need a memory. Dogs have a memory. They can remember that if they hear the word “sit” and they do so, they normally get a reward (a treat or praise).

The more sophisticated the creature, the better their memory and analytical skills, and the greater their awareness of time (i.e. that future events will happen) then the more complex the varieties of reward and punishment that can be used.

What reward and punishments should you dole out? Simple. Try first by experimenting with different rewards and punishments based on your own experience. Have a plan of rewards and punishments that will affect your child’s behavior. Make sure that you are consistent. If their behavior changes then you have accomplished your goal. If it does not then take these two things into consideration:

a) either the rewards/punishments were not sufficiently motivating (again, see the book for details) or

b) your child could not build a bridge between the behavior and the reward or punishment. If you wait too long to respond to a behavior then your reward or punishment may have little or no meaning. This is most often see when dealing with younger children.

If your system doesn’t seem to be effective then you need to stop and evaluate what you are doing. Make improvements and modifications. Try the system another time. Keep changing the system until you find one that works. If you are unable to find a system that works then think about the following:

You have tried all of the things you can think of and your child’s behavior hasn’t budged. What do you do? For example, let’s say your child had PDD. You are required to complete a few hours of physical therapy with your child eacy day. However, your child doesn’t want to do the physical therapy.

You try everything in your bag of tricks and read the book thoroughly. You try different reward and punishment systems to no avail. You have struggled to make physical therapy appear like a fun time. No matter what you do, you are not accomplishing the physical therapy session every day.

So what is one to do? Well you have two options here:

a. Richard could get stressed and worried about this. He can berate himself for failing to get his child to do the therapy he needs, and he can continue the search for some magic wand that will somehow motivate Tim to do those exercises. Or,

b. He can step back, look at the situation, and take a calmer, more pragmatic approach, accepting that maybe 50% of the time is all he is going to get, and that that is better than the 30% that Tim was doing a year ago.

Is (a.) or (b.) the more productive option?

The problem with (a) is that it produces STRESS. And stress is unhealthy and unproductive. It means you are less effective, more irritable, and less fun. But it doesn’t produce any better results!

Sometimes you just have to learn to live with the fact that your child may never be totally motivated to do the physical therapy. It’s sad, but true. It is better to work with what you have then cry about not achieving perfection.

It is critical that you pay attention to your child’s specific needs. Strive to define success off of what you are provided with and not an ideal. When you do this, you will ward off stress and the results you want will occur. If things still don’t improve would you want to have: a) limited performance and we are all angry? b) limited performance and we are all happy?

The important thing to remember is to not try to compete to an unrealistic level. Strive to achieve the small successes and accept that things might never totally be the way you want them to be.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.