All the money I spent on Autism therapy a waste

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I agree. A child should be offered many alternatives.

A kid can’t spend all day in the sand unless it’s summer.

My son’s play therapist has sand in her office, and I have a big bin of rice that he likes to play in. He likes to bury his hands and arms in it. I like to, too.

Anyway, we can’t avoid all challenging situations with our kids. That’s just not how life works. Life is challenging.

Sometimes meltdowns are unavoidable, depending on the kid and extenuating circumstances, but I try to keep things simple as much as I can and to avoid having too ambitious goals on our more challenging days.

I never liked sand, by the way...

Wait a minute. I thought we were talking about meltdowns?

You guys would probably complain: but you were the one that changed the subject and showed a picture of a boy playing in the sand!

I have not changed the subject. THAT. IS. PRECISELY. THE. POINT.

When your children are having fun, like enjoying themselves on the beach, you guys totally forget about their meltdowns.

Now, think, how is playing with sand related to going through meltdowns? How can I see a connection whereas virtually no one else in the world can see? If you understand this point, your children can be as happy as mine.

My daughter has picked up some avoidant behaviours for things that worry her (fear of loosing personal possessions, spiders, mild threat, that kind of thing) and last week because she was exhausted it was getting on top of her..... so I briefly told her how exposure therapy works and she disappears off and returns an hour later with this huge chart she made for herself with incentives to conquer all her fears. Within a day she was doing things she hasn’t done for months. Within a week nearly all her OC like checks are fading.

Today she was glum and I talked to her about the power of exercise to help with mood. She again made herself a chart for 30 min a day training and had a great time working up a sweat using my phone to time herself and felt brilliant afterwards.

Both these examples are not that strange in my household. Something seems fixed but it isn’t. There is so much power and energy to change things. Yes it was autism that made her get stuck but it is also autism that made her persevere and get unstuck.

For myself, I trust my brain to help me find the solutions to what I need. The older I get the less I care about what people think.... and the sand box is a good example because so much of well-being for me comes back to sensory needs, in particular proprioceptive ones. It makes all the difference to how i function whether I meet my sensory needs or not.

ahhh I see what I mean...thanks for the clarification

My daughter loves sand

Playing with sand is perfectly fine. It's great. The mistake of the mother of the boy, is that she only let the boy play with sand. She did not know that she should leverage the boy's passion and expand his brain connections from there. So, the brain of the boy didn't develop. The same applies to meltdowns. The right moment to talk about meltdowns, is when the children are happy and doing their favorite things.

A mother once told me, she tried to talk to her daughter about her daughter's negative moments when the daughter was happy, but the problem was, the mother did not remember what negative moments had recently happened. Yep, that would be a difficulty. There is a reason why so many children on the spectrum undergo meltdowns. If the removal process was trivial, most parents would have solved their children's tantrum issues long ago, and nobody would need me to tell them anything. That takes me back to my original comment: what do parents do, or, what do school teachers do, when children throw tantrums or have meltdowns?

What everyone forgets to do is to keep a visual-manual record of the incident. That is why I say raising autistic children is not hard: all you need is a piece of duct tape. Put the duct tape over the mouths of parents and teachers, and they will soon learn to use their hands. What parents and teachers need to do, when meltdowns happen, is to keep a stick-figure drawing of the situation, and write down a few words (sometimes 2 or 3 words are enough). If done by parents, keep the drawing in your pocket/purse. Now, you will not forget to talk to your children next time they are happy, right?

School is where children suffer. Home is where they have good time. But, the American educational system places all too much emphasis on privacy, and there are just too many barriers between home and school. Bi-directional communication between home and school is important. So, whenever incidents happen in school, no matter how small, teachers should let parents know. Similarly, any good time the children have at home, no matter how small, parents should let teachers know. Only that way, you (parents) can talk to children about their bad moments in school, when the children are at home and doing fun stuff. Vice-versa, when children are sad in school, teachers now can talk about children's good time at home.

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I basically told school teachers to absolutely stop doing all those "chilling-down," "behavior replacement" approaches in school. Children need none of that. Those techniques don't work. I don't know why people keep doing it when they can see with their own eyes that tantrums/meltdowns would keep coming back, with those techniques.

How to immediately stop tantrums/meltdowns? Nowadays it's pretty simple. For children that are already verbal, give them a smartwatch. Every time a negative episode happens, tell them to use the voice-recording feature to record down their thoughts, in a few words (OK to be cryptic). Guess what? Even if the child is not carrying a smartwatch, teachers now only need to point to their own wrist, and the child would immediately calm down. This works, 100% of the time. That's one thing.

Second thing: all what the children need to know is: sometimes life is tough, sometimes life is fun. That's all. You don't need to tell them anything else. Children are smart: they will figure out everything else. Treat them with respect, as equal-rights fellow human beings, and not as someone that is defective and that need you to teach them all that BS about emotional control, mindfulness, breathing techniques.

If you really do talk to your children about their tough times when they are happy, and remind them about the recent good times when they are mad/sad, and always remind them about "sometimes life is tough, sometimes life is fun," then their tantrums (specific to each issue) can be permanently removed. I have not failed once to remove all tantrums (specific to each issue) permanently, from my children. (For non-verbal children, you need to draw things down in stick figures.) Yep, it even works for non-verbal children. That's how I communicated with my children, when they were non-verbal.

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Frankly, by looking at the Taijitu (the Yin-Yang diagram) and reading about the Three Poisons, I am pretty sure that autism was solved already a few thousand years ago.

This is a paragraph I recently found in "The Meaning of Life," by The Dalai Lama, Jeffrey Hopkins, while googling about Three Poisons.

"... Based on this misapprehension of the status of persons and things, we are drawn into afflictive desire and hatred, symbolized by a rooster and a snake respectively. In many drawings of the wheel, those two are depicted as coming out from the pig's mouth in order to indicate that lust and hatred depend on ignorance for their existence. Both the rooster and the snake grasp the pig's tail in their mouths to indicate that they, in turn, promote even more ignorance - confusion, bewilderment, and cloudiness. ..."

I still don't have the paper copy of the book, I will look up the diagram later when I got a hold of the book. But, it really is important to go to the right source of information, because, most people are just parrots, and don't even understand what they are taught. So, while are a gazillion people talking about the Three Poisons, while there are thousands of versions of the diagram on the wheel of the Three Poisons, most people actually have no idea what they are talking about. Most diagrams are wrong. The three poisons are not on equal-footing. There is an "ignorance" element. Just like the Yin-Yang diagram (Taijitu), sure, you see the black and white parts, but you don't see the Space-Time Wormhole Tunnel that connects the white dot to the black dot. Information (entropy) propagation, brain connection, that's the part about "ignorance."

I think about it, and it all does make sense. In the old days, the Buddhist monks were the ones that had to go out to rescue people from their sufferings in Samsara. But, they had to learn things from their masters or Buddha. Guess what? We can safely assume that those monks-to-be were all autistic, and had their own issues. So, when they were being trained, part of the teaching was actually meant to train those monks as well. There is no surprise, then, that the Three Poisons match so perfectly about how to solve autistic issues. My point is, as a society, we actually knew how to solve all these problems. We simply have forgotten what we once knew.

I like your use of Buddhist analogies

The three wholesome mental factors that are identified as the opposites of the three poisons are:

delusion - resulting from ignorance
amoha (non-delusion) or prajna (wisdom)
(this is what you mean about duct tape over the parent's mouth)

attachment
alobha (non-attachment) or dāna (generosity)
(being attached to therapy/instructions that as a parent we know doesn't work)

aversion resulting from hatred
- adveṣa (non-hatred) or mettā (loving-kindness)
(as a parent letting your child experience things in life, not relying on school and not locking the child away)

Buddhist path considers these essential for liberation from samsara

A list of autism signs: https://nationalautismassociation.org/resources/signs-of-autism/. I will classify them by ignorance, attachment and aversion:

Ignorance
Not respond to their name (the child may appear deaf)
Not point at objects or things of interest, or demonstrate interest
Not play “pretend” games
Have difficulty understanding, or showing understanding, or other people’s feelings or their own
Have no speech or delayed speech
Give unrelated answers to questions
Have low to no social skills
Demonstrate little safety or danger awareness
Reverse pronouns (e.g., says “you” instead of “I”)
Impulsivity (acting without thinking)
Short attention span

Attachment
Want to be alone
Repeat words or phrases over and over (echolalia)
Have obsessive interests
Flap their hands, rock their body, or spin in circles
Have unusual interests and behaviors
Line up toys or other objects
Play with toys the same way every time
Like parts of objects (e.g., wheels)
Hyperactivity (very active)

Aversion
Avoid eye contact
Get upset by minor changes
Have unusual reactions (over or under-sensitivity) to the way things sound, smell, taste, look, or feel
Avoid or resist physical contact
Have extreme anxiety and phobias, as well as unusual phobias
Become upset by minor changes
Aggression
Causing self injury
Meltdowns
Unusual eating and sleeping habits
Unusual mood or emotional reactions
Have unusual sleeping habits
Lack of fear or more fear than expected

In broader terms:
Ignorance = intellectual disability
Attachment = stimming, narrow interests, obsession
Aversion = tantrums/meltdown, anxiety, sensory issues

The way out, is to connect all three aspects together, but you always have to leverage attachment as your starting point. From the children's interests, develop their brain connections, make them smart, and eliminate their aversions (negativity). The neural connections always have to be bi-directional. The part where parents and educators fail, is when the children are happy and having fun, the adults don't do a thing to connect children's passions and good times to other parts of the children's brains. So, the end result is the children become intellectually disabled, and develop gigantic meltdowns or become stuck with anxiety issues when they grow up. Information only propagates in one single direction, pretty much like entropy in physics can only increase. You can't defy the second law of thermodynamics. You must develop the connections from the positive side. Unfortunately, all too many parents/educators want to solve things from the negative side. So their children end up going nowhere.

And that, is the price you pay when you just let children play with sand, and don't do anything to connect that experience to something else.

I wonder what would happen if your daughter was given a copy of the book by David Berceli called "The Revolutionary Trauma Releases Process"? This book describes a very unique exercise routine that bleeds stress from the body. It is stress overload that causes meltdowns. Reducing stress levels helps to eliminate meltdowns. The book even has a full set of photographs that walks one through the exercise routine.

Well, I got the book but was disappointed to find out that the image there was still the most common one. Roughly similar to:


It is therefore interesting to see this alternative picture:

where one doesn't see the cycle. Instead, one sees attachment (bird) and aversion (snake) both coming out from ignorance (pig).

The best therapy for me was finally, at 48, getting my driver's license. I could then pursue my interests and build social skills based on those interests. If I had started that at the normal age, I would have been much more advanced.

This is bad.