Living With Special Needs Children
Author: Dr.NoelSwanson Total views: 7 Word Count: 832
Some questions I have been asked by readers of my newsletter:
1. Do special needs children understand cause and effect and also rewards versus punishments? Do they comprehend the same way as other children?
The interesting thing is that this is not an issue. All creatures great and small have an interest in reward versus punishment to some degree. 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 in those terms or even at all.
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.
Roaches don't have a memory and can't be trained like humans can. Canines can be instructed because they have a great memory. They know, for example, if they hear the word "sit" they will sit down in order to receive a treat or reward.
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.
How do you know what you can use? Simple. You start with a good guess, and then experiment. You implement a system of rewards and or punishments to modify a behavior (exact details of how to do this are in the book), and see what happens. If the behavior changes, the carry on! If it does not, then one of two things applies:
a) your rewards and punishments systems did not have big enough meaning in your child's life or
b) your child could not build a bridge 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 most often see when dealing with younger children.
If your plan doesn't seem to work at all then you need to stop and look at 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 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.
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.
What can you do about this? You have two choices including:
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. 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 your stress level will sky rocket which affects everyone negatively. You are not having a fun time and your results won't improve this way.
Sometimes you just have to understand the fact that your child may never be fully motivated to complete the physical therapy. It's sad, but true. It is better to work with what you have then cry about not achieving perfection.
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?
Don't try to fight battles you cannot win!
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About the Author
Worried about your child struggling in school? Thinking about special educational needs? Get more of Dr. Noel Swanson's parenting tips and articles, at his parenting advice website, and check out his acclaimed GOOD CHILD Guide and free newsletter.
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