PDA Irish Style

Quote from my son age 7 I know what the problem is with school Mummy. They group everyone by age. Why do they do that?

What home schooling looks like in our house. Don't Replicate School People often ask how do I manage to home school? Does it take up a lot of time? What curriculum do I use? Am I qualified as a teacher? I imagine I thought the same things before I started. That there was only one way to do it, and that was to copy a classroom and try to be like a school. Except we weren't home schooling for religious reasons, or location reasons. We were homeschooling because school didn't work for my son. So why would anyone think replicating a classroom would work? When my son was first out of school, I made efforts at timetabling the mornings for learning, and buying books, and using online lessons. The meltdowns I thought were caused by school continued at home. But once I understood PDA was the challenge, I changed my approach and gradually things started to work and the meltdowns stopped. Priorities Remember education is broader than academic lea...

Supports need to remain in place for progress to be sustained. Don't misread lowered anxiety due to PDA strategies with a newly developed ability to cope with anxiety. They are not the same thing. PDA strategies support my son by reducing anxiety so that he is enabled to function. So that he does not have to shut down to cope. So that he does not have to meltdown to cope. But once he is coping, it is very easy to forget that it is a challenge for him. That his low anxiety levels must be maintained. It is very easy to forget that his anxiety remains, that his PDA is not gone. He is simply able to manage his PDA due to reduced anxiety. In my son's mainstream school, a very individualised supported approach helped him return to school in 6 th class. I've written about the strategies used in a previous post here . He went in daily at lunchtime and stayed til the end of the school day. He was looking at secondary schools, and he managed to attend asse...

Quote from my son age 6: Do you know what the problem with school is Mummy?  They wait until you know it, and then they teach it to you.

TURN IT AROUND I started my development journey with my son in crisis and no understanding of what was going on. A lot of time after that was spent on trying to figure out what was wrong. Trying to figure out what the problem was. The problem was identified as an asd. Then time was spent trying to 'solve' the asd problems. It is difficult to change your own expectations and preferences. It is difficult to challenge your own beliefs as a parent. It is difficult to undo all the preconditioning of parenting that you have. It is possible though. I believe it was necessary for me. My life with my son stabilised and improved when I changed, when I dropped all societal expectations of what I was supposed to do as a parent and instead looked to my instinct of what my son needed. I started to think of his strengths. I started to think of innovative ways to work with him, not against him. Available for learning An unsupported school environment was causing untol...

Christmas can be fun, but watch out for January I've read a number of 'how to cope with Christmas and autism' posts the last few weeks, and wondered at my family's positive experiences of Christmas. Adapt As I look back I realise that we did a lot of adjusting as a family before any diagnosis was ever in our thoughts. Every family adjusts to their idea of the perfect Christmas. Our quiet stay at home times worked for all of us. We never did a lot of visiting or travelling. We didn't go to parties. We always stayed home on Christmas day. My son loves food so we made a lot out of creating the Christmas meal. We made annual fudge. We still do. We've always been flexible. We got a garage tree late one year in the dark because that's what was going to work. We always included the decorations and pictures he made. I still put up his creations age 3, age 4 even though he's now 14. We did whatever was fun for us.  He could spend all day o...

When back to school means more than new books. Wanting and not being able to go is not refusing For my son with pathological demand avoidance getting into the school building was always the challenge. As school broke down age 9 in 3 rd class, and he ended up out permanently, the idea of getting to school seemed further and further away. But I knew he wanted to be there, with his friends, the same as all the other kids, so I fought and fought and worked and wrote and all the other things you have to do, and by 5 th class we began a process to achieve the impossible. Change the Language used Even using the word school made it harder for my son to get there and stepping across the building threshold was impossible, and going in the morning was too early, and joining all the other children was a step too far. So we didn't try. We didn't use the school building. We didn't refer to it as school. Small Steps The plan for our first step was a half hour ...