You get the call, the email, or the communication log, and now you are holding information about your autistic child’s school day that they do not know you have. The question is whether to bring it up at home, and if you do, when and how. In this episode, Lisa Candera, The Autism Mom Coach, walks through the three-part decision tree she uses to make that call, with examples from her own experience with her son and from clients parenting kids in elementary school through high school.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to decide whether the information you received is actually a problem, or just information about an ordinary school day.
- Why your own regulation comes before your child’s in deciding when to have the conversation.
- What changes when you stop trying to let your child know that you know and start trying to understand the behavior.
The goal is not to get in front of every incident. It is to decide, on purpose, which ones are worth bringing home.
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Transcript:
You’re listening to episode 216 of The Autism Mom Coach. The school called about your autistic child. Should you rehash it at home?
Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you are here, and I hope you are doing well.
For today’s topic, I want to talk about a situation that we all face at some point or another. We get a call from school, or maybe an email, or maybe we are just reviewing our child’s communication log, and we get some information about something that has happened outside of our presence. And now we’re deciding whether or not we should rehash the issue with our child.
This could be information about our child’s mood throughout the day, how they reacted to having a substitute teacher, whether they were having challenges with transitions, how they did in PE class, whether they avoided a particular task, if they eloped from the classroom, if they disrupted the classroom, if they got into it with a child, or if they got into it with a teacher.
A whole host of information that you perhaps have received about your child during their school day, and now you’re left with the decision: Do I talk about this with my child when we get home?
My answer to all of these questions is: It depends.
There are a number of factors that I consider, and there is no right or wrong answer here. All of this is a judgment call based on the information that you’ve received, your knowledge of your child, and what your goal is for bringing up that information with them after it has already happened.
I’m going to share with you some of the factors that I consider. For this, I created a little decision tree for myself, and you can use this too to walk you through each step of whether, when, and how you address information that you learn about your child’s school day with them at home.
First, I think it’s important for us as autism moms to take a big step back.
If we are lucky, if we are fortunate, most of us receive so much more information about our autistic child’s day than we would if they were not autistic. And some of you who have children who are neurotypical know this. You have no idea what goes on in their day unless you can pry it out of them.
But for your autistic child, you might be receiving regular updates, whether it’s a phone call from school, emails from school, or maybe your child has a communication log. So you’re getting a blow-by-blow of each portion of their day.
I think this is important to remember because when we get that information, especially about our autistic children, we are all so focused on data, piecing together information, and interpreting it, which makes complete sense given our roles as autism moms.
But at the same time, that information, while it can be helpful for us, might not always be helpful to our child if we are bringing it up with them and rehashing it, especially right when they get home from school.
That is why I really do think that even if we are getting more information than we would if our child wasn’t autistic, it doesn’t always mean that we need to act on that information.
Sometimes we can just gather the information, keep it in our back pocket, and decide how, when, where, and whether we’re going to incorporate it into a conversation with our child, maybe a social story, or just a teachable moment.
Here are the three decision points that I use and the questions that I ask myself at each point to decide whether, when, and how I will address information about my son’s school day with him at home.
Decision Point One: Whether
First, question number one: How big of a problem is this?
And really underneath that question is: Is this even a problem?
Because sometimes the information that we receive about our children isn’t a problem. It’s just information.
So, for instance, is your kid being moody in the morning? Are they having difficulty transitioning from math to reading? Or are they upset that outside recess was canceled because of the weather?
To me, all of those things are just sort of the day-to-day vagaries of being a kid at school and not something that I would address with my son unless they led to bigger issues.
For example, maybe your child was really upset that recess was canceled, and because of that, they knock over the desk and yell at their teacher.
Next, under “How big of a problem is this?” ask: Is this an ongoing issue? Avoiding a task, shouting, eloping? Is it a safety issue?
And finally, is it an issue that could lead, or has led, to consequences at school, like detention, missing out on a preferred activity, or being sent to the principal’s office?
The second factor I look at in deciding whether I will address an issue with my child is: Was this adequately resolved at school?
Again, this is a big factor for me because of my son’s separation of church and state between home and school.
For a lot of the issues that my son would have at school that were resolved at school, I let them just stay there.
Of course, I knew the information, and I could integrate that information into different conversations with my son that weren’t right on the nose of confronting him. I could still get my point across or incorporate it into a social story or another teachable moment.
Then the third question under whether to address this with your child is: Will there be a routine or schedule change or a consequence as a result of the information that you’ve learned?
If you get information that your kid was wilding out on the bus and now they’re not allowed to be on the bus for the next week, obviously this is something that you are going to need to address with them.
You’re going to need to talk to them about what happened, preview the new schedule, et cetera.
Decision Point Two: When
The second decision point is when.
For this, I consider first and foremost whether you have had time to chill out about whatever this information is.
If this is information that you find troubling and you want to address with your child, the number one task is for you to make sure that you can do this in a regulated and dispassionate way.
Because if your child senses that you are upset, that you are agitated, they are going to absorb that energy and reflect it right back to you.
And then, of course, you need to consider whether your child is regulated.
Have they just gotten home from school? Are they exhausted? Are they hangry?
You want to give your child that time to regulate as well so that they can be present for the conversation.
Decision Point Three: How
The final decision point is how you address the information with your child.
And to me, this is the most important decision point that you can make because, again, how you show up to this conversation is going to impact how your child receives the information and responds.
For me, I really needed to make the shift from wanting my son to know that I knew what happened at school and he wasn’t getting away with anything, to just understanding the behavior and gathering information.
For years and years, I got a communication book every day from Ben’s team, and it basically gave me a blow-by-blow of each section of his day: what he did well in, where his challenges were, additional notes.
So I had a really good idea about what his day looked like.
In the early days, as soon as I got home from work, I would take this book out of his book bag, review it in front of him, and start peppering him with questions.
That, not surprisingly, was really irritating and agitating to him. And it never helped me gather more information because Ben would either shut down or become dysregulated.
So I needed to shift my approach.
The first thing I did was stop reviewing the information in his presence and then decide whether and what to bring up to him.
My approach with Ben varied depending on the type of information I received.
For example, when Ben was in second grade, I got a note or a call about him talking about guns and explosions and exploding the classroom.
I think he was frustrated. I think he was pulling from some sort of video game. I don’t even know what it was.
But the school had a zero-tolerance policy about that kind of talk, and they took it pretty seriously.
I needed to talk to him about it directly, but at the same time, I didn’t want to shame him about it because I just knew that he wouldn’t react well to it.
I was able to get him to understand the concept of what was not okay to say in school. So we were able to have that conversation in a way that was productive for him and that allowed him to modify that behavior without me coming home and being like:
“You said this. I heard you said it. You can’t say things like that. You’re gonna get in trouble.”
Because he would just not respond well to it, and it would almost be like inviting him to do it more at that point.
Another example from Ben is when he was, I would say, in fourth or fifth grade.
He was really getting self-conscious about the fact that he had a one-on-one aide and that his friends did not.
Because of that, he would avoid the one-on-one aide a lot throughout the day. He would tell her to get away from him, that he didn’t want to see her.
I needed to address this with him, but I also knew that saying, “Hey, it’s not nice to talk to the teachers like that. You’re not being nice,” wasn’t going to work. I just knew that he wasn’t going to respond to that.
In addition, I wanted to be able to validate the emotions and the experience that he was having because it was legit.
That was what helped me gather more information.
In doing that, we were able to have some really helpful conversations with his team about the placement of the para within the classroom, the times when she would engage with Ben and when she wouldn’t, just so he could feel more independent during his school day and less singled out by having the para, but at the same time have the assistance if he needed it.
Another example I have is from a client. Her son, eight years old, is a bit of a stand-up comedian, and he loves making his peers laugh.
The more they laugh, the more he does it.
He got in trouble a couple of times during a school week, so it was an ongoing issue, for disrupting the classroom.
Of course, this was something that my client wanted to address with her son at home because it was an ongoing behavior.
But again, not from the standpoint of what I want to call old-school parenting:
“I got a call from the teacher. You need to behave. You need to not disrupt.”
Because he wasn’t doing anything wrong per se.
And it’s like taking everything from the point of view of an autistic parent. You hear that your child is communicating successfully with other children, making them laugh, having community. That feels like a win, right?
I’m definitely not going to be scolding him for that.
But I also want to communicate a time and a place.
So again, that communication was more about validating:
“It’s great that you have friends. It’s great that you want to make them laugh. It is so fun when you see that you’re making other people laugh and you’re having a great time together. But let’s do that at lunch and on the playground, okay? We’re not going to do that in class.”
Now I want to give you a couple of examples from teenagers because the issues that they confront can be quite different than those of a child who is younger.
My client’s teenage daughter spent a lot of time each school day in the bathroom.
She had different teachers throughout the day, so she could get away with this each period, disappearing into the bathroom for 10, 15, 20 minutes.
At some point, Mom was getting multiple emails from different teachers about this behavior, and she was pretty concerned and wanted to address it with her child as soon as she walked in the door.
I really encouraged Mom not to do this.
I encouraged her to take a step back, regulate herself, and ask:
“Why might this be happening? What other reasons could there be other than just not wanting to be in the classroom, thinking it’s boring, or not liking your teacher? Why might your child be doing this?”
And the answer was obvious.
Her child was overwhelmed with anxiety.
In fact, the behavior of leaving the classroom for extended periods of time wasn’t defiance. It was a coping mechanism that enabled her to get through the day.
Just having that change in perspective is what enabled Mom to talk to her daughter effectively about the situation, gather more information, and assist her daughter in advocating for herself.
Because this behavior was not at all what it appeared from the outside.
It wasn’t defiance. It was strategic.
And in order for Mom to advocate for her daughter and support her daughter in self-advocating, it was necessary to come to this conversation open and curious instead of judgmental and wanting to lay down the law.
All right, everyone. I hope that this conversation was useful to you, and I hope that this decision tree makes it easier for you to work through the decision of whether to rehash information about your child’s school day with them at home.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
It is really a judgment call that you make as the person who knows and understands your child the best.
Take care, and I will talk to you next week.
