Living With Special Needs Children
Following are questions asked by parents of special needs children:
1. How do special needs children understand cause and effect and also rewards versus punishments? Do they understand the same as other children?
The fact is that this is not an issue. No matter what type of living being you are we akk have an interest in reward versus punishment to some level. Think about the bottom of the food chain such as a cockroach. Cockroaches despise the light and live to move around in the dark hours of the night. They associate good feelings with dark and bad feelings with light. They might not think about it, but rather just feel it based on experience and instinct.
If you flip on the lights you will see roaches hurrying towards darkness under a couch or a crack in the wall. They sense the light and know that a feeling of punishment is headed their way. They know that if they head towards darkness they are heading towards a reward. This repeat reward makes them always want to scramble to the darkness.
But roaches are not trainable. To be trainable, you also need a memory. Dogs have a memory. They can remember that if they hear the word “sit” and they do so, they normally get a reward (a treat or praise).
The more you go up on the ladder of life creatures, the higher memory functioning. Improvement of awareness and analytical skills surfaces. When these attributes increase, you need to vary the intensity of the rewards and punishments to have any effect.
What reward and punishments should you dole out? Easy. Try first by experimenting with different rewards and punishments based on your own experience. Have a system of rewards and punishments that will affect your child’s behavior. Make sure that you are consistent. If their behavior changes then you have accomplished your goal. If it does not then take these two things into consideration:
a) your rewards and punishments systems did not have big enough meaning in your child’s life or
b) they were unable to make a connection between the behavior and the consequent reward or punishment. For example, if the time interval between behavior and consequence is too long, then the younger or less able child may not be able to connect the two.
If your system doesn’t seem to be effective then you need to stop and evaluate what you are doing. Make improvements and modifications. Try the system another time. Keep changing the system until you find one that works. If you are unable to find a system that works then think about the following:
You have tried all of the things you can think of and your child’s behavior hasn’t budged. What do you do? For example, let’s say your child had PDD. You are required to complete a few hours of physical therapy with your child eacy day. However, your child doesn’t want to do the physical therapy.
You try everything in your bag of tricks and read the book thoroughly. You try different reward and punishment systems to no avail. You have struggled to make physical therapy appear like a fun time. No matter what you do, you are not accomplishing the physical therapy session every day.
So what is one to do? Well you have two options here:
a. You could become all upset and flustered about it. You get mad at yourself for your apparent failure. You feel like you are no service to your child. You want to find the magic trick that will make your child want to do his physical therapy session.
b. You stop and look at your situation. You take a deep breath and look at things realistically and logically. You are okay with the fact that half the time the physical therapy session may not happen, but this is still an improvement from how much physical therapy your child was accomplishing last year.
Which is better?
The downfall of (a.) is that you will amp up your stress level which affects everyone negatively. You are not having a good time and your results won’t improve this way.
The reality is that there is, perhaps, nothing on Earth that would motivate Tim to do those exercise 100% of the time. Sorry. But we live in an imperfect world, and maybe the child in the wheelchair really will never walk. We would all wish it were different. But if that is how it is, then that is how it is.
It is critical that you pay attention to your child’s specific needs. Strive to define success off of what you are provided with and not an ideal. When you do this, you will ward off stress and the results you want will occur. If things still don’t improve would you want to have: a) limited performance and we are all angry? b) limited performance and we are all happy?
The key point is to not try to compete to an ideal level when it might not be a realistic goal.