Living With Special Needs Children
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Listed below are concerns from 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.
Turn on the lights and the roach goes scuttling for darkness. In a very basic sense, light = punishment and darkness = reward. The behavior of escaping from light to dark is rewarded, and so is repeated.
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 higher you go up on the food chain, the better their memory can be. Interest in time and the improvement of analytical skills appears. 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 large enough effct in your child's life or
b) your child could not create a link between the behavior and the reward or punishment. If you wait too long to respond to a behavior then your reward or punishment may have little or no meaning. This is especially true when dealing with younger children.
So, when you see that your system is not working. You step back, have a think about it, modify it, and then try again. Ultimately you will either succeed in changing the behavior, or you won't. Which leads to the second question:
You have tried all of the tips you can think of and your child's behavior hasn't changed. For example, maybe 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.
Richard has read the book. He has experimented with just about every reward, punishment, incentive scheme he can think of. He has tried to make the therapy more exciting and fun. But despite all of these efforts, half the time the therapy just does not get done.
So what is one to do? Well you have two options here:
a. You could become all bent out of shape 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 cure that will help your child do his physical therapy.
b. He can step back, look at the situation, and take a calmer, more pragmatic approach, accepting that maybe 50% of the time is all he is going to get, and that that is better than the 30% that Tim was doing a year ago.
Is (a.) or (b.) the more productive option?
The problem with (a) is that it produces STRESS. And stress is unhealthy and unproductive. It means you are less effective, more irritable, and less fun. But it doesn't produce any better results!
Sometimes you just have to learn to live with the fact that your child may never be totally motivated to do the physical therapy. It's sad, but true. It is better to work with what you have then cry about not achieving perfection.
Is it not better to dial back the expectations and the striving, and aim to achieve the best that you can GIVEN THE LIMITATIONS YOU FIND YOURSELF UNDER? And, surprisingly, often when the stress is relieved, and the fun returns, then performance improves. But even if it doesn't, which would you rather have: a) 50% performance and everyone is miserable or, b) 50% performance and everyone is happy?
The key point is to not try to compete to an ideal level when it might not be a realistic goal.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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