daughter won't stop lying!! !

Post Reply New Topic

I feel some piece is missing. A 13 year old who sneaks to watch cute animal videos at night when mom forgets to take her phone seems young.

A few girls on the spectrum may be well accepted and perfectly comfortable going to a first dance, but only a very few, I think most would be anxious, uneasy, many would not want to go, and of those who go, many would not have a good time. The other girls at the dance will be trying to act older. This girl is watching cute animal videos.

Something seems missing. I don't agree with taking the dance away without warning over the phone, but I'm not sure this particular 13 year old isn't trying to have her mom say no in order to blame her and not have to go, and we shouldn't let our kids use us to block them from the stress of acknowledging and learning what is difficult.

Eh, maybe the cute animal videos is significant. Maybe it isn't.

I'm 20 and I tend to socialise with people older than me, so most of the facebook friends I have (that are not from school, because I don't often check in on them) are 25-35. They often share animal videos or tag others in these videos. To my knowledge most are NT, most have jobs and families/partners.

I think people here are missing the point, the mother wasn't upset about cute animal videos, she was upset that she stayed up watching videos on her phone when she was supposed to be in bed going to sleep. She even wrote, "Thank goodness" that it was what she was watching because it wasn't anything bad that she shouldn't watch.

But like I say this all sounds like normal teen behavior because they want their own independence so their parents rules may all of a sudden be stupid all of a sudden and unreasonable. The teen might not see anything wrong with staying up because just as long as she can get up the next day and not sleep all day, what is the problem? I don't know if school had started yet where they are but just as long as she can get up for school, she doesn't see the problem with what she did so she might find that rule dumb lol. School starts next week for us.

Then it's when parents should pick their battles.

I'm not how to say this to make sense, I am trying to suggest to the OP that going to a dance can be very stressful and many kids on the spectrum may be ambivalent or not want to go.

Just as we don't take away play dates or the OTs fun filled visit for our children on the spectrum when they are young because they did something wrong, the school dance is a social event, the child who is on the spectrum doesn't IMO need social events removed from her for bad behavior unless they aren't adequately supervised and would put her in a risky situation. She might however need someone to help her plan how to act and what to do at her first dance and hunk through what might be signs something is a bad idea. Ideally an adult could help her with that because there's a good chance she might be scared and not know what to do.

It seems like we may have lost the OP, though.

I remember my mom taking way my friends despite that she wanted me to be social and learn social skills. It was one of her punishments for when I would be grounded sometimes. Not allowed to leave the yard or play with anyone.

But that was before I was even diagnosed of course and I seemed to have turned out fine and no damage was done. It wasn't like I was deprived and she knew how much I wanted to be social but perhaps it was one of her parenting oopsies. :shrugs:


The OP hasn't been back yet to update or give us more information so we don't know how close to normal her daughter is or how far up on the spectrum she is and if she even wanted to go to the dance and was looking forward to it. Some aspie teens want to be social and go to parties or dances like everyone else. If she had no desire to go, then it would be a dumb idea to take it away as a punishment because what would she gain from it? There would be no punishment really.

I'm a little concerned that the OP hasn't responded (which would be inconsistent with trolling.)

I have a 15 year old who was given an Ipad by the school last year, and who we nearly had to take to the hospital over constant and escalating meltdowns. We finally figured out it was sleep deprivation - unbeknownst to us, he'd been sneaking the Ipad into his bedroom at night and getting maybe one or two hours' sleep.

Maybe a little compassion for this Mom? I know what it feels like to be at your wit's end when your child is engaging in self-destructive behavior that spills out into the rest of the family. I'd agree that the school dance feels over the top, but I can understand how this may play out bigger than the post made it sound.

People tell me all the time that I'm too strict and need to let my kid "live a little," but when I do, he melts down constantly and is in a state of near-panic and all his OCD tendencies come out. He isn't able to self-monitor electronics, and although he needs some downtime, he also needs us to help him set limits. We are trying to figure out how to give him more control, but I won't do that at the expense of his safety and well-being.

We talk it through as a family and come up with the limits together, and DS agrees to them. He does, at least, have an understanding that school is somehow important and that the lack of sleep and attention are a problem. During the summer, we let him have more time, but we asked him to do other stuff, too.

With DS:

1. We finally understood that he was not able to stop himself. He was very sorry and frightened when caught. We explained the connection between his behavior, his poor grades and his lack of sleep and lack of attention to homework.

2. We bought all parental control software and locked down all the electronic devices so they turned off automatically at night. This eliminated the need to keep them somewhere "safe." In particular, we put passcodes on the YouTube app, the app store, and the browser. All games came off devices used for school or during the school day - he has games on his console, and there are games on our home computer and on our phones, but none on the computer used for school and the phone. We let him watch YouTube via the Roku on our TV so it's public (I do let him watch videos that he chooses even though they aren't what I want to watch, within reason.)

3. Rule is computer volume up all the way and no headphones for homework, and computer use happens in areas where we can hear it.

We also have lying as an issue - it is untrue that all people on the spectrum can't or don't lie. DS lies, but his disability shows in that he doesn't have the social skills to be good at it and usually gets caught.

For the lying, we've talked a lot about trust and how lying makes us feel, and we've followed mostly this system: http://www.positiveparentingsolutions.c ... ting/lying We try to assume that if he's lying, he must feel like he has no other choice, and we try to figure out what the problem really is that's driving him to keep the truth from us. In the case of the electronics, DS was afraid to admit how little control he really had - we gave him a couple of tries before we locked him out of the fun stuff, and I think he was actually relieved when we put limits on it.

FWIW, the parental controls can be hacked - we aren't using them for that reason. They offer DS a moment to think things over before he gives in to the impulse of breaking the rules on the electronics. He's actually told us the couple of times that he has figured out our passwords, or our system for creating passwords. He needs that minute.

I appreciate where you are coming from MomSparky, and I didn't think about meltdowns and problems from that, but wouldn't she have mentioned it as well as the lying? She only mentioned the lying and sneaking the phone, etc. I would think that meltdowns or other problems besides the lying would be something she would bring up as well, especially if they were going on together.

I could be completely wrong, but as you know I identify with this kid here. My mom was a bit controlling and I was privacy deprived until I just learned to be really sneaky with things like a diary and such. My mother used to go through my purse every morning before I got up. She said she was "organizing" it, and making sure I had tissue. I was 15 years old, she didn't need to do that. She used to do a lot of things like that. I was rebellious and wanted to go places with friends and to school events. I did not have meltdowns from overstimulation or sleep deprivation or any of that, I was pretty stable with meltdowns then, but I would throw one hell of a temper fit when she would refuse and refuse and refuse to let me go. It was literally a mile away, at the gym. She would have taken me and picked me up. She wasn't doing anything else or going to bed. She just wouldn't. Well, my temper and attitude and rebellion and anger over her not letting me do anything at all made her take me to a child psychiatrist. I talked to the lady, and told her the truth. I told her everything and what I wanted to do, etc. I also told her about the state of our messy house and other issues at home, like my grandfather's drinking all the time and how my mother used to get mad and tell me I was going to get sick if I took a bath, etc and I had to argue and yell fight with her to just simply take a bath. (Yeah, she was eventually diagnosed borderline) Well the lady told my mother everything I told her, probably out of concern over some of the things and possibly disbelief as my mother was a well respected member of hospital adminstration at the hospital where the psych office was.

My mother hit the roof and yelled at me all the way home for telling that. She was only worried about how I "embarrassed her" but she said that luckily she had told them about my attitude and behavior so they probably wouldn't believe me and she wouldn't be too humiliated. Yes, shes said this kind of s**t to me. This was typical. Overprotective and trying to smother mother me or control my every move or I was the enemy out to humiliate her. Anyway, not too long after that she just said f**k it basically. I don't remember what I did exactly but she got fed up and just threw in the towel and I had normal freedoms and even did normal "naughty" things like sneaking out with friends (daytime, not night time and we only walked to the store for chips).

So I went with my gut on this one. We both come from different places here. You are protective for a reason and I was overprotected because my mother was batshit crazy. So my knee jerk response is very different than yours, and I guess until the OP posts again we won't really know. But I would have thought if she was having difficulties along with just the lying and sneaking the phone/game, that she would have mentioned it. She seems to be really on top of things there in an uncomfortably familiar way.

No hard feelings for me posting all this to you I hope. I just wanted to explain in a little more detail where I'm coming from. Someone saying they were overprotected as a child may or may not be true, because even as adults we don't have the same perspective our parents had back then and many times we don't have all the information they did. So I could see how you might think I was overreacting to what could have been normal and good for me, or maybe it wasn't as bad as I remember it to be. Thats why I wanted to give you a little more information on how things were, so you could understand why I'm like I am about this topic and you can hopefully see that I don't address it to attack or judge anyone, I do it out real concern that someone may be going over to the dark side where my mother ended up, even though unintentionally, and I'm not making mountains out of molehills. I'm actually probably minimalizing it to an extent and even laughing it off, because it's not like I can change the past. So I really just wanted you to know where I'm coming from so you can maybe understand better why I react the way I do.

Thanks for reading.

_________________
I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com

Something to remember: Ross Greene's assumptions/techniques also work on parents and other adults.

Meaning, parents do well if they can.

I am not excusing my parents (who were controlling and abusive) or OOM's parents - but I do take into consideration that my parents didn't have the tools they needed. As adults, they should have gone looking for those tools...but they did not.

In particular, this forum - a subsection of a forum FOR people on the spectrum, is the kind of place people go when they are really looking for help and support. Parents who come here are actively looking for help and tools, and that is a step ahead of anything my parents did.

If you are completely new to the idea of autism, it takes time to sink in, especially if you have a child who wasn't diagnosed until they were older. In my case, I was told by all sorts of people that the problem was I wasn't being strict enough, wasn't being consistent, was "letting him get away with murder." I even got a "spare the rod" lecture at one point. Obviously, the more I punished, the worse things got, and I wasn't a good parent - full stop.

It's taken me a long time to figure out how to change, to find ways to provide limits for my son but not be punishment-driven. We're doing pretty well now, I think, but it took a long time and I made lots and lots of mistakes (and I still have a hard time keeping my temper...building frustrations can create a meltdowns domino effect in our family; it isn't pretty; but we bounce back better than we used to.)

I know we had a judgemental poster here a while back who was probably a troll, but that person was posting about other people's kids and had no idea what the reality of parenting a kid with autism is.

So far as we know, this poster is the parent of an autistic teenager and seems to have a complaint that is common among AS teens (do a site search for screen time limits and lying; there are lots of similar posts.) I say we give her the benefit of the doubt.