Downward Trend is a Good Thing

When things are not going well, and I'm not talking the typical kid stuff like stealing a brother's toy or whining about which show they can watch, it's really hard to keep perspective and to fight feeling hopeless which seems to be a frequent emotion among parents who are raising a child with special needs. The effort involved in trying to steer an autistic child's behavior toward a goal such as being potty trained, learning social cues, controlling anger and aggression is so exhausting and requires constant focus. When this tireless focus is not enough or even makes a situation worse it's hard not to drown in feelings of utter hopelessness and despair. I hate that feeling, and I do everything I can to stomp on it when I feel it growing in my heart. The feelings are understandable but they don't help him. He needs me to be strong and to be stubborn and to retain my focus whether he realizes it or not.

I think I'm typically a happy person. I probably annoy people with my cheer. Don't be fooled. A very happy person can reach very low depths and I've been there more often than I care to admit. Since I'm a stubborn, stubborn lady though, I decided I needed a plan in order to help me have a healthy perspective during the difficult times. I have been building a repertoire of tools that I develop during the "good" times so that they're available to me during the bad (since when it's bad I have a difficult time not thinking everything is awful).

One thing that has been particularly helpful for me is ranking my son's behavior every day. I created a simple spreadsheet in Excel and, for each day, I rank his behavior from 1 to 5 - 5 being the worst. In order to be consistent, I have criteria on what each rank means so that I can truly compare one day to the next. For instance, if my son is aggressive (i.e., hits, bites, etc) then his rank is at least a 4.

In order not to focus on the negative, I also input information on what successes he has each day. For instance, the last few days he has tried new foods which for those less familiar with autism is a common issue for them since they tend to have sensitivities to different foods and often prefer to stick to the same foods. It was so nice to write this into my spreadsheet to see that, yes, he is making progress in certain areas.

I also track what things may have triggered undesirable behavior such as did he sleep well? Is he feeling well? There are certain triggers that inevitably lead to problem behavior. Tracking these triggers often leads me to find possible interventions to help reduce the affect or frequency of that trigger.

Finally, I note each day if there were certain things we did that helped him. For instance, if he had a melt down, was there something we did that worked to help him calm down? Did we use distraction? Restrain him safely? Talk him down from it? By collecting this information, we can learn what works and what doesn't so that we are more effective. Oftentimes, it's hard to think what to do in the heat of the moment and focusing on these helpful tools daily makes it easier to remember things that might work when responding to a crisis.

We started this tracking system at the beginning of the year. We put his rank information into a chart, at first glimpse, it seemed to fluctuate all over the place but then we inserted a trend line and, happily, we could see a downward trend (remember that a rank of 1 means his behavior was very good). I can only hope that we continue to see this downward trend as we learn how best to work with our darling, little guy. I'm proud of him and I'm proud of us and I refuse, simply refuse to let despair prevent us from helping him be the best that he can be since we already know he's totally awesome.