Whether you have a three-year-old and you’re hoping to nip it in the bud or a teenager you assume should know better by now, the same question keeps surfacing: will my child outgrow meltdowns? In this episode Lisa answers it head-on by separating tantrums, which children do outgrow, from autism meltdowns, which are neurological and don’t simply disappear with age.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why tantrums, which are behavioral and goal-driven, are outgrown as kids mature, while meltdowns, a neurological response to overwhelm, are not.
- Why the expectation that a child “should” have outgrown meltdowns sets parents up to feel like failures, and how to hold acceptance and skill-building at the same time.
- How meltdowns evolve rather than vanish, sometimes turning inward as anxiety or withdrawal and sometimes increasing as the demands of age rise.
Resources mentioned:
- Free Training: Reduce Meltdowns by 50% This Week
- Schedule a consultation with Lisa
- The Autism Mom Coach
Related episodes:
Autism Meltdowns: The #1 Mistake Parents Make (Ep #200)
Autism Tantrums vs. Meltdowns: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters (Ep #76)
Listen Here:
Transcript:
You are listening to episode two hundred and six of The Autism Mom Coach. Do kids with autism outgrow meltdowns? Hint, the answer is in the question hi, I’m Lisa Candara, mother to an 18-year-old son with autism and founder of The Autism Mom Coach. Through years of trial and error, I have created tools that have helped me stop escalating meltdowns, make impossible decisions, and advocate more effectively for my son. I’ve now coached over 100 moms through these same struggles.
In this podcast, I share everything I’ve learned and what I am still learning with you. Let’s get started.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. I am back this week with a brand-new episode after taking a couple of weeks off. I was traveling, spending time with family, and I now have my eight-year-old niece with me, and she is keeping me so darn busy. I have spent so much money at Michaels getting crafts for slime, for painting.
You name it, she’s into it, and we are doing all of it. While I was taking a break from new podcast episodes, I was not taking a break from coaching my clients or doing consultation calls with prospective new clients. And that is what I want to share today because I saw a theme in several of the calls that I’ve had in the past couple of weeks with prospective new clients and with my current clients about autism meltdowns.
And it goes something like this: there are a great number of people who seem to find me after a Google search that they perform following an autism meltdown where they’re at their wit’s end.
They don’t know what to do, they feel outmatched, and they are looking for some sort of help. And in many of these instances, I’m getting calls from parents of I, I would say younger children, elementary school age e- and even younger, and their concern is, “Hey, my child is three, four, five, eight, and they are having this behavior” and there is a great fear that if the parent doesn’t nip it in the bud right away, that this is going to carry on into their later years, and it’s going to become more of a problem.
And I completely understand that anxiety. I had it myself. I remember some of the things that my kiddo would do when he was three years old, noticing yeah, people have a lot of grace now, but that will not last, and for sure it did not last. That is something that we all deal with as our children get older.
But when parents are coming to me and they have the young children, they’re just ready to do whatever they can to make meltdowns go away. And inevitably they’re asking me, “When will my child outgrow this?” And inevitably they ask the question: When will my child outgrow this? Now, on the other end of that are the parents who are coming to me whose children are older.
These are prospective new clients, and they’re also my current clients, and their child just had a meltdown over a schedule change or an unexpected… Now, on the flip side of that, the other end of the spectrum are the parents who come to me because their child is, let’s say, late elementary school, middle school, high school, and they are melting down about changes in routine or having, demands that are put on them and that they’re trying to resist those demands or anxiety about, social situations, and they are melting down.
And these parents are asking, “Shouldn’t they have outgrown this by now?” And so I want to address both ends of the spectrum with the same answer, and that is that the answer is in the question, will my child outgrow a meltdown? I want to take you back to previous episodes and conversations I’ve had on this podcast where we talk about the difference between a tantrum and a meltdown.
A tantrum is something that a child does that is purpose-based. They want to get the toy, more iPad time, a parent’s attention, and they engage in the behavior because they see it as the quickest way of achieving that result. Or maybe they don’t get what they want, and they engage in the behavior in hopes that mom and dad will just give in.
Tantrums are age-related, and children do outgrow them as they mature, as they gain more regulation skills, work coping strategies, or they come to understand that the behavior is not getting them the desired outcome. Yes, children do outgrow tantrums. But remember, tantrums and meltdowns, although they can look exactly alike, are not the same things.
Tantrums are behavioral– Tantrums are behaviorally based, outcome based, motivated by a specific means to an end, whereas meltdowns are neurological. Meltdowns are when your child’s brain and nervous system are overwhelmed, and they are acting out
So when you think of it through that lens, will a child, a person outgrow a behavior that they are using as a means to an ends? So when you are looking at it through that lens and you think about, will my child outgrow a neurological response to overwhelm? My answer is probably not. Now, will the manifestation of the response to the overwhelm look different?
Can and will your child get better at noticing their own signs of distress, interrupting those signs, using a coping mechanism, asking for support, being better able to regulate themselves? Absolutely. But that does not mean they go away, because implicit in that question is the presumption that they should, that this is something that should go away, that they should be able to outgrow this with time, with age.
And again, while that may be true of certain behaviors, it’s not true of the meltdown itself, the neurological response to being overwhelmed that results in yelling, screaming, stomping, maybe punching a wall st-
Will your chi– do people with autism learn better ways to deal with their overwhelm as they age? Absolutely. But that does not mean that meltdowns go away or they are outgrown. They might look different from the outside, but that does not mean that they are not happening. So when you are posing the question, when will my child outgrow this, or shouldn’t they have outgrown this already, you are presuming that a meltdown is something that can be outgrown.
Now, we don’t think this way with other neurological conditions. Take epilepsy, for instance. There are many ways, mostly medication, that people use to regulate their epileptic seizures, but that does not mean that they outgrow them
They– N-now, I, I know this from my own firsthand experience with my sister, who never had a seizure until she was twelve, but then had tons and tons of those absent seizures, and they receded, disappeared for a number of years, and after she had her first child, they came back again. Does that mean that at some point she outgrew her brain’s wiring?
Absolutely not. At no time did she outgrow the neurological condition of being an epileptic
But this is such a different and difficult distinction to make when you are looking at behaviors that are socially inappropriate, that we are conditioned to view as bad, and that are quite frankly dangerous.
It’s really hard to look at a behavior and be able to make that distinction And we want to believe that with the right supports, the right discipline, the right medication, the right everything, that we can make it go away, that we can support our child in outgrowing it. But I think that is actually a situation where we set ourselves up for failure and feeling like really bad parents.
Because if you have the belief that all you have done to support your child should result in your child not having a response to a meltdown that manifests in behavior, you’re going to feel terrible. You’re going to feel like you missed something. I can speak to this firsthand. I did all of the behavioral interventions with my kiddo.
I did not view myself as a permissive parent at all, and he was not having aggressive behaviors until he turned thirteen, and then here we go. He was very aggressive towards himself, towards me, and my thought was for sure, he is too old for this. He shouldn’t be doing this because of his age. Shouldn’t he know better?
Doesn’t he know better? And none of that is a factor when a person is in a neurologically induced state. They’re in a meltdown. They’re in complete fight or flight. They’re totally offline, and they are reacting So the long, so long story short, I don’t think that people with autism outgrow meltdowns. I think that meltdowns, just like everything else, evolve over time.
And there was a time when I thought the worst thing in the world was my kiddo being aggressive towards me while he was melting down, and then several months later, all of that outwardly focused turmoil, he turned inward into more things like suicidal ideation, where he was closed down, where he was hunkering in his room, where he was being really quiet and really private.
And I remember thinking, “I would rather the outward aggression because at least I know what’s going on.” And I see this with my clients, most specifically my clients of high-functioning young women, late teenagers to early adults who are struggling so much.
They have been masking so hard for so long, and they are now imploding or exploding with that anxiety. Shouldn’t they have outgrown that? No. The neurological condition, you do not outgrow that. That is something that people with autism have to deal with at every stage in their lives. And I recall seeing an interview several, I think, years ago of an autistic man who was saying that his meltdowns actually increased with age as the expectations, as the demands got higher.
Things like holding down a job, having a family, having a child with autism, and those additional responsibilities and taxes on his nervous system made him more apt to actually have a meltdown as an adult
So if you are at either end of this spectrum with the younger child thinking, “I need to nip this in the bud. Or you have a child who is a young adult and is engaging in similar behavior or behavior that is more inwardly focused and you’re thinking, “Shouldn’t they have outgrown this by now?
Aren’t they old enough to be able to cope with their emotions? The answer is your child is autistic. And yes, the meltdowns, the overwhelm, and the expression of that overwhelm may evolve over time, but it is not something that is outgrown. And I know as a parent, to understand this and accept this on an intellectual level is very different than understanding it and accepting it on a day-to-day basis.
Because we are in this situation where even if we accept intellectually that these things can and do happen, we are still working our asses off to support our children in learning the coping skills and strategies to curb the behaviors that are socially inappropriate or dangerous, right? So we’re holding like two things at once, and that can be really confusing and frustrating.
If you want support with understanding this for yourself as a parent and learning to manage these behaviors, this is something I can help you with, both in my one-on-one coaching program where I work with moms one-on-one, and in my group membership, The Solid Circle.
Whether you work with me one-on-one or inside The Solid Circle, you will have a better understanding of what’s happening for your child during a meltdown, and you will have, even more important, a better grasp at what is happening for you so that you can better regulate yourself in the moment and be the best support that you can be for your child.
To learn more about working with me one-on-one or joining the Solid Circle membership, schedule your consultation on my website. I will leave the link in the show notes. All right, everyone, have a great week,
Thanks for listening to The Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me. Podcasts are great, but the ahas are fleeting. Real change comes from application and implementation, and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program.
To schedule your consultation, go to my website, theautismmomcoach.com, work with me, and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with autism.
