I was reading back over the questions that you posted me and there was a common theme emerging…

“What is the best way to deal with  my child when they are feeling upset, frustrated, annoyed, disappointed?”

I am pleased that this topic was raised because it is an area of treatment that I get quite passionate about and I would like to share my thoughts with you…

So often we are happy to engage with children (not just special needs kids!) when they are happy and joyous, but we tend to disconnect with them when they are experiencing more challenging emotions.

But why do we do this?

Feelings of frustration, sadness annoyance etc are all basic (and completely normal) human emotions that we all encounter on a regular basis. But when this happens to our own child we are naturally driven to find a way of making them feel ‘happy’ again by saying things like “Stop crying”, “You’re okay”, “Where’s your happy face?”, “It’s ok, how about we have something to eat”.

But all this actually does is disconnects us from what they are really experiencing and feeling, and we miss an important opportunity to ‘connect’ with our child and to help them learn and grow from the experience. » Continue reading “Dealing with your child’s challenging emotions”

Hello again,

Just a quick note. In case some of you do not know… if you ever have any questions, comments or opinions that you’d like to ask me or share with our other readers, you can leave them at the bottom of the message (you’ll need to click through to the full article first!).

Recently some of you have asked for my opinions on the subject of disciplining children with autism.

This topic is very detailed and I handle this area of development very individually with each of my clients. As you can imagine there are numerous ways of dealing with situations depending upon the age, severity level and personality of the child, etc.

I think the best way of us getting this conversation started is to take a look at an email that I received requesting some advice… » Continue reading “7 tips for disciplining children with autism”