Update on our monkey: since he was physically assaulted by his teacher back in the first weeks of January, they have been struggling with him at school. His behavior has just been terrible. He kept trying to fight everyone that would get close to him. We kept fighting for him. Letting everyone at school know that this is his way of defending himself in a situation where he feels threatened. We requested a certified special ed teacher. After weeks of fighting, we finally… got one this past Monday.
The problem is his behavior at school is now bleeding over to our home. If he gets mad, within seconds he jumps from one to ten. He would occasionally do this at home, but lately, it has gotten more frequently. When I spoke to the principal a few days ago, I told her that these behaviors are the results of his assault. And because during all of this time, we had a sub that didn’t know how to handle my son, this has escalated. I don’t think she realized that she was rewarding his bad behavior, which increased it. At home, we re-direct him, and these behaviors didn’t last long and were not very frequent. But now that’s not the case.
I spoke very honestly with the principal. My son is six years old. We need to be able to re-direct his behaviors now. We need to be able to address these issues now. What happens when he is 15 or 20? If I struggle to hold him down now, what will happen when he is older?
I want to be honest. I know my son. I know what he is and what he isn’t. I know that there are occasions that he cannot handle his emotions and we all struggle. But we had been doing really well in teaching him to self-regulate and calm down. Before, he’d get upset and he would put his hands on his sides, and just breathe until he was better. Now, he reacts by trying to hit and bite with no chance of even trying to cool down.
And because of this drastic increase of aggressive behavior, I do blame the school for their slow response in trying fixing their errors.
So now we are trying to assist him more at home. We are trying to help him to re-learn to self-regulate. It has been an emotional and exhausting process.
My worst fear is for him to hurt my elderly parents in such a way that they will not recover.
And then what will we do???
Monkeynism AKA Autism 