Reason 1: Scripting. Scripting and stimming go through the roof. For my gal, three weeks off means that she is spending a great deal more of her time with her purple dinosaur friend. Other than the fact that it starts to grate on my nerves to hear the same tiny portion of her CD over and over and over again. Let's imagine what will happen when school resumes. Scripting much? Scripting tends to be a problem during the school year, but come September her scripting is over the top.
Reason 2: Obsessing. The school environment is inherently more structured than the home environment. This means that she needs to find a way to cram structure into her home life. How? With endless lists and calendar conversations. Not once a day. Not twice a day. Endless. Heaven forbid we need to change the schedule we wrote out five times in the morning. We cannot leave the house until we review exactly where we are going, when we are coming home, and in what order we are doing things...and it all needs to be written down.
Reason 3: Expense. Imagine that for twenty years you cannot leave your child unsupervised. Ever. Not for five minutes and not with the typical young teen willing to watch your child. Now imagine you have a full-time job. That means that during these three weeks of school vacation you pay a professional and/or well trained, caring person to supervise and amuse your child for approximately 45 hours per week (40 hour work week plus an hour a day for traveling to and from work) for 15 days. You also need to send money with your child for entertainment and food. It's pricey. So instead of covering the 135 hours for three weeks, you take vacation time and get creative so you can manage a 40 hour work week...assuming you have that type of job. Stressed much?
[As a side note, I should mention that the one huge bonus for our family is that over the years we have developed relationships with people who love to spend time with RJC and who go out of their way to make themselves available to watch her for some of these hours. They also take her places that we don't and she loves being with them. In that way, we are luckier than many families].
Reason 4: Regression. There are areas in school that have been a challenge to RJC. The teachers and paras work very hard to get her to a place where those challenges are less and she is able to get through the day with significantly less difficult behaviors. She now has three weeks away from having to navigate through the difficult areas. It is quite normal for those difficult behaviors to show their ugly faces in September because she's been away too long.
Reason 5: Attachment. When RJC is home with me, she is content. She does her own thing. I revolve my day around her requests. She wants to go to the movies? Off we go. She wants to go get ice cream? We're there. After all, there is no sense in her sitting around all day and on top of that she is using words to communicate so I reinforce this wonderful behavior. If she'd like to go someplace and she asks nicely, I accomodate her. On top of that, I understand RJC. She has a funny way of saying things - often scripting and using that scripting as a way to communicate. Her syntax is off but I understand. Spending time with me is easy. She becomes attached. In September when she returns to school a great deal of her "conversation" with others will revolve around "Mommy will come at ?" The biggest irony here is that I have had more than one professional point out the importance of her becoming independent from me. Um...three weeks off from school. Not so much independence.
So how's it going you? Here are the positives:
- Week one is over.
- We have not had any big tantrums so my walls are intact.
- She has done fairly well at adjusting to having people take her out and about for a few hours per day.
- I have seen more frustration from her than usual which leads to screaming and scripting. She is obsessed with watching the purple dinosaur on YouTube.
- She is attached to my hip when we're home, showing a preference to hang out wherever I am than being elsewhere.
- It is difficult trying to figure out how to best cover all of my hours of work and how to coordinate hours of RJC coverage.I literally have nightmares about my leaving for work and forgetting to wait for the sitter.
- Fitting in the day to day life stuff...not very easy. If hubby wants an actual meal he generally needs to be the chef. Clean clothes? They are in the basket...wrinkled.
All of this leads me back to: So some genius decided that over three weeks off from school for some of the most needy kids in the state of Ct was a good idea. Um...really? Not. So. Much.
It was suggested that I explain stimming and scripting. Here is my amateur version. "Stimming" is a term for self-stimulation. It's an action done over and over that serves a purpose, generally one that will comfort the person when they are anxious, nervous, worried ete. Stimming can take many forms depending on the person - hand flapping, rocking, wiggling fingers, lining things up in perfect rows, watching the same snipit of a video over and over etc. Scripting is when a person quotes from a movie, video, or even another person. Scripting can be a form of stimming for some, but can also evolve into a form of communication. For RJC, it can be both, depending on the situation. She will use exact quotes from Barney in "real life" conversations that fit so perfectly that if you were unaware of the video she was quoting you would assume you were having a spontaneous conversation. During times of anger or frustration, she will often script over and over until she feels better. She will also engage others in her scripts because it is comforting. For example, before bed she has her script that includes me. She says her line, I say mine, she says hers etc. There is a great deal of info about these two subjects on the internet if you are looking for a more professional definition.
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