Timer meltdown

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The Sprout is in his room bawling and throwing things right now because of the mere suggestion of using a timer. Timers are mentioned over and over as an impersonal method of letting your child know when his turn is over. He reacts badly to the game being turned off suddenly, so every couple of months we decide to try a timer. Every time has been this exact reaction. Increasing hysterics from the word "timer" to the point of being totally overwhelmed--screaming, kicking, hitting, crying, hitting himself, throwing things.

Has anyone else had a kid that reacted so extremely to a timer? Any suggestions for ways to bring in limits that don't result in this?

We don't have that reaction so I can't share from experience bug I wonder if he might react differently if you used something different. I bought a couple of those desktop toy "timers" like egg timers but one has colored goo in it and the other has colored water. They are visually kinda cool to watch so maybe if you don't call it a timer he wouldn't be so upset? Just a thought. Sounds like you have a tough case one your hands.

DS7 didn't react quite as badly to the mere mention of timers, but I found they weren't always the solution for him, especially with video games. At some point I realized that he had a very strong need to stop at what he considered a logical stopping point. At first, this was the end of a level on his Wii lego video games, which could take 20-30 minutes. Finally one day I told him that a whole level takes too long, and asked him to pick a stopping point that would come sooner. He was playing games that he had played before, so he could identify something that would happen in a few minutes and pick that for the stopping place. So then it became about 5 minutes of play. Eventually he got to the point where he would pick something that was less than 30 seconds, like the character going over a bridge in the current scene. (This evolution in his ability to pick a stopping place took place over a 2-3 month period.)

Similarly, when he's building legos from an instruction book, we look ahead a few pages and pick which one will be the stopping page. For free-form building, he has to identify something he will finish, such as a wall or a tower.

Might be worth a try for you.

my son never had difficulty using the timer to stop a fun task, but he struggled to use the timer when tasks were difficult, like timing to get homework/writing/chores done.

Great ideas zette. I will have to try some of those.

Every time I go to a class for parents of kids with autism or meet with professionals, timers are mentioned. I've never introduced one, as I know how my daughter reacts to being told that she has 10mins left or 5mins left. She gets into a panic and her focus goes onto the time running out, instead of the task in hand. For some kids it won't work.

You could try different ways to use it which he doesn't mind. Maybe, how many beanbags tosses we can throw in a minute... just thinking... how long does it take to eat a banana... let him see you use it in cooking, or have him help you cook while using it... make something with lots of glue and time the drying according to the lable... use it to remember to switch the laundry.

Then set the timer for 10 mins before he has to end, then 5 mins, then1. It may not work at all.

Could it be the sound of the timer? DS hates the timer because it rings loudly and the idea of it makes him anxious - the waiting, I think. He usually just decides not to do 'whatever' if the timer is mentioned

For DS, we do use a timer - for instance, for video games - but it does cause a lot of meltdowns. (I'd do Bombaloo's method, but it doesn't work for us - everything leads to another thing for him.)

Basically, DS has no internal sense of time and is pretty rigid. Getting him to transition is difficult on a good day - I like to think about it as though his brain has momentum - getting him to stop is like stopping a freight train, it takes time, planning and forethought and if you do it suddenly or wrong the train crashes.

However, some stuff needs to be done within a certain time frame - so we use timers. DS has slowly gotten used to the idea. We don't use them in social situations, and we don't use them as punishment nor punish him when he doesn't stop - stopping is punishment enough.

What DOES work for DS is for things to be predictable and logically sequenced. For instance, in the morning (as I realize it, we do use timers there - but just alarm clocks) we have a very carefully sequenced system: he gets up, turns off the alarm in his room, comes into our room until our alarm goes off, it gets snoozed, he gets dressed, comes back in our room until the snooze alarm goes off. Then we go downstairs and have breakfast, after breakfast is personal care, etc., etc. I think the reason the alarms work without any difficulty is that DS figured out how to reward himself after each task/alarm (he gets to come in our room.)

As I'm writing this, I think maybe that may help - first explaining that you are using the timer to teach him ______________________(how long a turn should be, etc.) and that if he successfully stops when the time is up, that he gets a reward. Also, I haven't tried it but a visual timer may help because it may be a sound-sensory thing, and visual timers also give you a sense of time passing. http://www.difflearn.com/category/timer ... ers_clocks

What about verbal timing instead? It might be less jarring, especially with five and two minute warnings included.

Thank you for all the responses. This is a new issue to me. My oldest never had a problem with stopping as long as he got to a stopping point and he was always pretty good about picking a close one. The middle child did fine with regular timers. The Sprout has always been very much more rigid than either of them, and much more prone to the big showy kind of fit/meltdown. The oldest would run to a corner and cover his ears and rock when overwhelmed/upset. The middle didn't have the same kind of issues (he's ADHD, not ASD) and time outs, etc. usually worked on him (after age three anyway), but the Sprout it often feels like walking on eggshells to avoid the next huge fit, and he runs the whole gamut of bawling, screaming, throwing things, hitting himself, hitting other people, kicking, pinching, biting. Being in his room alone with no one trying to interfere seems to help get over it fastest. Yesterday, he threw things and screamed and ended up in his ball pit and that calmed him down.

I don't even know if I should call it a tantrum or a meltdown. Is he being a brat or this something else? Whatever it is, it is getting more obvious the older he gets. He's going to be five at the end of June. Maybe it's a combination of both brattiness and something else? There is definitely a point where he gets overwhelmed and does not seem to be in control at all. At that point he can't talk, and everything anyone does only makes things worse. Other times he just seems to like hitting people and saying extremely negative things like "I hate you! I wish __________ would die!" (where the blank is whatever is annoying him, even inanimate objects or concepts like bedtime.)

I don't know what a visual timer is. I don't know that the sound of the timer bothers him, because he's never gotten to the point of having it on and hearing it go off to tell him to stop the game. He is very sound sensitive though, and it has gone off when things are done cooking. He doesn't like it if he is close to it when it goes off, but his game is far enough away that he doesn't usually react badly to it when it goes off with cooking. The problems start from the word timer and escalate to the point of total loss of control on his part usually within ten minutes of hearing that there will be a timer. So far he's never actually played any of his game after hearing the word timer.

I like the idea of trying to desensitize him to the timer with the fun things. "How many bean bags can you throw in a minute?" "How long did this take?" That sort of thing. Maybe that will help get past this. He really doesn't do well with any kind of verbal warnings. If I tell him he has ten minutes left on something, I am guaranteed that those ten minutes and usually many minutes beyond will be spent in tears and hysterics. He doesn't do well with just suddenly turning the game off or being told this is the end of playtime/bathtime/it's bedtime etc, but he's going to have a fit either way.

Every now and then if he is in a good mood, then we've had some success with saying, "After you get to the end of this level it is time to turn it off." The problem we often have then is if he doesn't succeed to the degree he wants in that level. Say Angry Birds, if he doesn't get three stars with one bird, then he wants to keep going until he does, and he doesn't consider that level complete. In that case, he runs out of birds and the level is over, but if we stop him from restarting it, we end up with the fit. I have taken to being more specific. When you run out this set of birds, you have to turn the game off. Like I said, if he is in a good mood this might not set him off.

Sometimes we have success with bribery. As soon as you stop that you can have a bead for your bead jar, or you can one of these cookies or something. Sometimes distractions work. "Come on and turn off the game so we can do _______________!" (in an excited tone). The problem there is finding something he likes to do. He hates going shopping, driving his brothers places, leaving for preschool, visiting relatives--basically anything that involves him leaving the house, so none of those work for a distraction. We usually have to go for a bribe to get him to leave for those things without also needing to turn off his game.

Visual timers work by illustrating the progression of time without making a noise: e.g. an hourglass. I linked several new clock-style models that were made just for kids on the spectrum.

If you go back and dig a bit, you'll find that someone linked a study about aggressive kids on the spectrum here. It showed that the biggest correlation for aggression was rigidity, and that aggression tended to peak at 12 years old. My son fit this profile to a T (in fact, his alarm didn't go off yesterday and it mostly derailed the entire morning - but now that he's nearly 13, he handled it much better than he used to.)

Teaching flexibility is really, really hard - one of our biggest challenges - and I'll be honest, a lot of it was just that DS needed more time to develop. We might have learned to smooth the way by preparing him and using visual schedules, but some of it just was that he was ready...but we didn't really see improvement until this year.

Hang in there!