Emotionally wrought dad

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You're making an effort to improve your son's life. I think that's great.

Well done on implementing the gluten/casein free diet. That's a big step. I only started that in my twenties. I dropped out of school at the age of 15 because I was a wreck and got bullied.

If you stick to that gluten/casein free diet it could definitely pay off. I remember often feeling tired and irritable because of having those in my diet.

Regarding diet I recommend you also get him as healthy as possible. Now that I'm an adult I can see my parents spoiled me by letting me have what I wanted and it made it harder for me to behave and succeed.

I'd recommend only allowing him candy and chocolate one day a week at the most. Sugar is addictive and ASD people have addictive/obsessive tendencies. I would advise against microwave meals because of the radiation. In our family we all noticed feeling better (ASD people and non-ASD alike) by stopping using the microwave.

There are a few ingredients that are very good for the gut too, which I think are beneficial to ASD people. One is raw apple cider vinegar. In our house we use that in cooking a lot and sometimes have it on fries. It improves nutrient absorption, promotes healthy blood sugar and is also alkaline. Most of us these days have acidic stomachs because we eat far too many acidic foods, it's a cause of much indigestion and can lead to illnesses, so it's worth looking into.

Don't forget too that fruit juices are high in sugar because so much sugar is pressed into one glass. I'd avoid them and stick to fresh fruit or make your own fruit smoothies/juices using a blender which would be lower in sugar than commercial fruit juices.

I don't know how good a chef you are but if you think your food isn't too tasty make an effort to go on a short cooking course. Lots of colleges offer them. It's easier to get kids to eat healthy if you can cook well. Since I learned to cook my nutrition improved a lot. If you struggle to get your child to eat vegetables there is always the cheat method of chopping them up small and putting them in stews or bolognese sauces.

When it comes to communicating try to learn what makes him click. We all communicate differently, even people who don't have an ASD. Some people are more visual. For example there are some people who you could not teach to do anything by telling them, you have to show them. Some people are doers. They have to learn by doing. Some people are aural, they learn by listening and talking. And some are processors, they learn by thinking about things a lot. We're all a mixture of all these types to varying degrees. So there's no one size fits all way of teaching someone things.

I appreciate it must be hard for you. Being a parent isn't easy for anyone and even though I have an ASD if I'm honest even I would find it challenging having a child like me. Good luck with everything!

Update:

Six days of GFCF diet has changed everything in a good way. I don't think that this will be accepted in this forum, so I'm signing off given the hostility towards treating my son's symptoms, but when a simple dietary change enacts so much positive good, I call that "a clue."

We are of course, doing the diet with him as a family. We are going to see a nutritionist that specializes in treating this sort of thing with dietary changes. We are so happy, we're afraid it isn't real. My son has lost 90% of his irritability. We can take him shopping now! He greets strangers with good English. He speaks much, much more. Most of his potty issues are gone. He's playing so much better with his older sister now. He no longer yells and plays for two hours after bedtime, just zones right out and wakes up 11 hours later, happy. The changes in our grocery bill necessitate a little bit of belt tightening, but we are conservative with our bills anyway (only have a house payment) so we can and will handle it.

If someone had told me that he could change this fast from a simple dietary change, I wouldn't have believed it.

That's really awesome it is working so well. Honestly, I'm still a little skeptical. There have been a good number of studies on GFCF diet, and almost all have shown no gains, although most have pretty small sample sizes or weren't double-blind. Also, Gluten remains in the system for up to six months, so it is a little surprising that the results would be so instant. I don't want to deter you, please note I'm a pessimist, but I'm just waiting for more studies.

We give our son a probiotic daily and it seems to be helping to regulate his bowel movements. I'd like to learn more about the leaky gut stuff, but it's so expensive.

I'm also going the ABA route with my son, but I do like a lot of the things the other parent said. Not to try to make him act more NT, but to help him acquire skills that I don't know how to teach him. I will try drawing for my son more. He is certainly a visual learner, and definitely has a hard time comprehending what we say to him.

SO GLAD the diet is helping. I don't know that it's particularly related to autism (did nothing for me, other than give me terrible carb cravings and make me grumpy as all get-out)...

...but if someone, particularly a child, already has a gluten and/or milk protein sensitivity, having a constant belly-ache (and not being able to tell anybody) has to do terrible things to their mood.

I'm a big believer in "WHATEVER WORKS," without causing harm to the child in question.

So, good for you for being willing to experiment. That's how we're figuring things out out here on the frontier.

We don't mean to be so harsh on the behavioral treatment front-- It's just that, looking at it from an adult's point of view, we get very frustrated with doing things the way we NEED to do them being termed "diseased." If you keep in mind what others have said about the GOOD use of therapy being to teach some skills for a better interface with a neurotypical world and NOT, emphasize NOT, to attempt to ultimately produce a child that functions as an analogue of a neurotypical, you will be OK.

What we really want you to get is-- You have a normal kid. A perfectly normal autistic kid. A lot of this stuff IS an autistic child's normal; however frustrating it may be, you will never get neurotypical normal out of an autistic kid, and trying to achieve it (versus trying to find creative ways to resolve particular issues) will just frustrate the living crap out of everyone and actually cost you and the child things you really can't afford to lose (enjoyment of what you do have, closeness of relationship, trust, functionality) in the long run.

Therapists, by and large, won't tell you that unless you get very, very lucky. Most modern mental health care hasn't caught on to that fact yet; they still idealize and idolize as single ideal called "normal." I don't know if most of them are ever going to catch on, either-- teaching people that they're either close to that ideal or "sick" and "in need of help" is profitable. So-- it's up to you to realize that, and respond to it. Honestly, language aside, I think you are doing a good job of doing just exactly that, and deserve commendation. Hard to navigate, being thrown into this river cold is.

I was a very emotional autistic kid (cried violently at the least provocation) for years. A great deal of it simply had to change with time and maturity; I don't think any amount of therapy would have fixed it (and probably would have made me less functional as an adult-- the worst, and least functional, times of my life have been the times I was most focused on "not seeming autistic"). One thing that DID help in the immediate term was that I was lucky enough to have a father and a grandmother who understood that BEHAVIOR IS COMMUNICATION. Even when I was too young to have the verbal and reasoning skills to tell them, they learned to figure out what set off those meltdowns and help me deal with it. Sometimes that was a matter of removing the stimulus (AKA coddling me), but more often it was a matter of explaining to me what was happening and how I could deal with it more effectively.

I have a 4-year-old daughter I currently call my "maybe baby" (as in, maybe she has it, maybe she doesn't). Whether she does or not, she definitely has a significant speech impediment. It's only been in the last six months or so that it improved enough that we could isolate specific phonetic problems (she does not use the letter "r" at all, and tends to morph all fricatives into labial stops). The upshot of this is, until very recently, we couldn't understand a single word the kid said (and speech therapy is prohibitively expensive, at upwards of $500 a week with no help from insurance for her to see a therapist for an hour and us to do the bulk of the work). I have always made her at least ATTEMPT to speak, but teaching her to use other forms of communication ("Show me, baby") and teaching myself to read her behaviors for the things she just can't tell me has paid off immensely, both in tantrums avoided and in language skills acquired, even if they have come late and slow.

Hang in there. This ISN'T easy.

I know it's very frustrating right now. Hang in there-- it is a long, slow process, and this is a frustrating age even with typical kids. You're doing a good job; you already understand a lot more than many parents who don't have a family history of dealing with the decidedly, um, interesting puzzle that is autism.