|
|
re:Michelle Garcia Winn...
Michelle Garcia Winner 是一个社交思维(Social Thinking)方面的专家.以下是从她的博客中摘录的一篇文章,也许对我们中间的许多家长有启发.
When our kids are in preschool there are tons of books, parent support groups, play groups, field trips and play dates. When our kids get older all of that goes away, during some of our hardest parenting years we have the fewest networks and support systems... and through this process our children are magically supposed to evolve from kids to adults. My own two neurotypical daughters have continued to teach me about what they needed me to teach them to help them prepare for life as adults. Having worked with many adults with social thinking challenges they have also taught me about how they handled this transition. The lessons I have learned through watching my daughters and my clients' transitions into adulthood and abilities to sustain themselves as adults are these:
There is a huge leap, larger than any our kids have experienced before, between teen years and adult years.
The leap relates to the fact they have to acquire skills of dealing with the larger community (budgeting, time management, assignment or job-hour tracking, laundry, etc.) where we parents are no longer welcome to be their ears and eyes. Nor can we or should we walk the streets with them, drive the bus or help drive the car to keep them safe.
For our kids to feel good about themselves they have to learn that they can make mistakes and move on. The good thing about being a “young adult” is that people expect you to make mistakes; a lot of them. They also expect you to learn from them.
They have to learn to live with others who will not comfort them like their family did by just co-existing with them.
They have to learn to find someone to relate to and in so doing find their own community that expands beyond their family.
To cope with their increasing “freedoms” our kids have to learn to be more “comfortable in discomfort”; e.g, to tolerate the crappy moment and live with disappointment without self-destructing.
To learn to take on their own challenges we as parents have to start to let go of our advice, our directions, our wisdom and enter into a conversation where we encourage our kids to take on their own thinking and problem-solving. This means we say things like “what are you going to do about it?", rather than, “This is what you should do about it!” We then help them to feel the pride of their own accomplishments when they figured out how to pay their bills or the reality of what happens when they don’t pay the bills, etc.
Our kids with social learning challenges learn all this slower, no matter how high their IQ! If you have a “high-functioning” child who is scoring well on tests, social learning is the frontier that will be his or her most difficult challenge but it is his or her challenge to take. How do we teach them to pursue these accomplishments?
Here are my thoughts for parents whose children have been served through IEPs or 504 plans:
Don’t wait to the legal age of the school’s transition plan to start transitioning your child into increasing responsibility and independence. The kids will not willingly go along with this plan to do more but set an expectation and reward small, very small steps towards the accomplishment. Don’t over focus on the sneer on their face or the less than complimentary words they may say; pick your battles carefully. Subtly praise any step towards being a more responsible member of the family. Withhold treats (videogames, cell phones, books, etc.) if they are not trying to be a reasonable member of the house most of the time. To give in to their stormy ways is to reinforce the cloud hanging over your house.
The adult world is unaccommodating - a fact that is hard to face for everyone, but is particularly so when our special education teams have tried to serve our kids by accommodating to their disability (to some extent). Prevent the IEP team and yourself from making decisions that always keep your child comfortable and in control of what he wants to do. As parents of young kids we work to keep our kids comfortable, now we have to work, literally work to make sure our kids are learning to be comfortable with the fact that world frequently does not offer “comfortable” options.
Problem solving is about finding the least painful option not the one that causes no pain; problem solving often does not actually solve the problem! Assure you child, “Yes, you hate the teacher, but you got to learn to deal with it! You will hate a boss one day!" Parents then need to make sure they don’t step in to intervene to try and solve their children’s problem for them. There is a tendency when we identify a child with a disability to make the child’s disability be everyone else’s problem but by the time they graduate from school it is totally their challenge to deal with mostly on their own. While there will be some special people to reach out and continue to help especially while they are in their young 20’s, the “ game” has changed significantly. Our kids are expected to do much more for themselves the year after they graduate from high school then the year before when they were in high school. Plan for this ahead of time!
Avoid burn out. Something the parents of my clients have taught me over the years is that they wear out! Begin to work on all of the above slowly but surely at 13, 14, 15 years. They may have been happy to drive their child to high school but they no longer want to drive their child to college or their job, nor should they! The social rules have changed and it is SO incredibly unhip to be driven around by your parents when you are a young adult! You won’t regret it. Your child won’t be ready to fly solo (very likely) by the time they graduate from high school (nor were my NT daughters!) but they will be more on their way and slowly be able to handle the growing pressures of having to do more for themselves even if they don’t want to.
Don’t confuse loving your child profusely with doing things for your child. The more you love them the more you let them figure things out for themselves , learn to ask you the questions they need to ask to locate the information or at least teach them to go find the answer from someone other than their parent. Problem solving is important!
Our children’s self-esteem is born from the recognition of their own accomplishments and not on just “being smart” or being told they are wonderful. Show them how to appreciate that feeling good about the fact you can do things in your community for yourself is at least as important or more important than getting good grades on tests. The world has a lot of smart people in it; what the adult world really celebrates are people who can figure out how to work as a member of society, which means working reasonably well with other people.
Teach your children your own experience, what you know yourself. Your lessons of how to be a more effective adult continue to be learned across your life. Help them to know that the process of learning about being a citizen of the world is not like graduating from high school, there is no diploma, it never ends, but a growing sense of maturity is something to be proud of.
These are just some of many ideas either I have observed or I have learned to help with my own parenting. This blog was inspired by many parents coming up to me at workshops confused about what to do with their demanding adolescent, thinking they should call another IEP meeting to make the world easier for him or her. Parenting kids into adulthood is just plain hard, emotionally wrenching for us all; whether your child has AS, HFA, ADHD, or is just a garden variety kid like mine.
If it's not working...
All this being said, if you think your child’s challenges are far, far larger and his or her mood far, far darker before putting any more demands on your child FIRST go to a psychologist/counselor to seek an assessment and guidance about how to help with possible mental health challenges (e.g., depression and/or anxiety) that may need to be addressed before adding more pressure at a confusing period of development for us all!
http://www.socialthinking.com/what-is-social-thinking/michelles-blog/352-parenting-through-to-adulthood
|
|
IP卡
狗仔卡
发表于 2010-10-15 16:05:50
显身卡