Destructive Behaviour

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Long post, sorry.

Background info:

I'm autistic. There is a possibility that my daughter is also autistic. She shares many of my personality traits, and has shown some signs of autism, but neither my husband or I want to get ahead of ourselves on what may be extremes of typical toddler behaviour. I have used advice aimed at autistic children on her before, and had success, so it's time to try again. I have a lot of experience with children her age, and though I could easily see many of her behaviours as 'normal toddler behaviour', experiencing it first hand shows me that she is not quite like her friends and other children her age. There are no obvious signs of autism, but I don't believe there were in me either - it's more in the subtle behaviours and 'extremes'.

The issue:

My daughter is very destructive.

If she gets hold of anything made of paper or cardboard, it is ripped within seconds. We have bought her hundreds of books throughout her early years, and slowly but surely they are all being ripped to shreds. I've stopped buying more.

She's also peeling all of the paint off her walls in her bedroom, working on it every time she's left unsupervised. I believe in the importance of some unsupervised play, and also simply cannot be with her 24/7, so I am accepting the risks involved with this but would like to reduce it if possible.

Now, all of the advice for NT kids is that she might be 'bored' or 'understimulated'. This isn't advice that I can act on. I absolutely fill her days with activities inside and outside the house - walks, sports clubs, arts and crafts, drama class, helping me around the house. We very, very rarely stop and take a break, but when we do it can take just minutes for her to trash the place. She is very advanced - she speaks in full, extended, complex sentences and is currently learning to read and type (don't think she has the motor control for writing, but she can type on the keyboard and is learning the letters and well-used words like her own name). I do all that I can to keep that busy mind at work, but in a second of down-time she will aim to destroy whatever she can. As well as the paper and cardboard, she likes to stand on electronics, throw things around and put her full weight on the bird cage to watch it start to collapse. She has also taken to deliberately throwing food and drink around, and constantly keeps water in her mouth to deliberately spit it out somewhere else/pours it straight out of the bottle.

In isolation, perhaps these are all normal toddler behaviours, but they do seem extreme in their frequency (given her very little unsupervised time). When she's destroying, she does not seem to care what she's doing. She'll happily do it in front of me and seem not to care whilst I'm trying to redirect her or tell her not to. Left alone, she will eventually stop and will then be very apologetic and say that she didn't mean to do it and she knows it's wrong.

I do not believe in punishment, so perhaps this is part my own doing, but I don't want to get into punishment for the sake of it. We use natural consequences, rather than a 'naughty step' or anything like that. I discuss with her, and we explain things, rather than just sitting her in silence. If she destroys something, it goes in the bin and she doesn't get it back. She doesn't care about this. If she messes something up, she doesn't get to do the next activity until it's cleaned up - this does bother her, and she will clean up the mess, but doesn't learn from this.

In general, aside from the destruction, she is an angel child. She's understanding, well-behaved, an absolutely lovely girl. She's very mature in her handling of situations and we don't tend to have tantrums (we discuss, find compromises and work out something that works for everyone). She's the dream child, apart from her inability to stop destroying things.

We went to a friend's house last week and almost the first move she made was to find something cardboard on a toy shelf, and start ripping it up, so this isn't confined to home but is less noticeable outside of the comfort of our house.

We have almost given up trying with her bedroom. I feel that if it's a sensory issue, we should leave her room and let her get it out of her system (whilst still telling her that it isn't acceptable, to try and drive the message home). It looks a mess, but we don't want to repaint and teach her that any damage is just repaired.

Today, I plan to go out and buy a big board and cover it with stickers. As she loves peeling stickers off things, I am hoping that this will distract her from walls and books. If it's a sensory seeking behaviour, I want to find ways to divert it productively. But I have concerns that this won't be enough, or won't work, or even that we're encouraging the peeling behaviour by giving her the board - she may not differentiate between destroying the board and destroying other areas of the house.

So, I wonder if there are any other suggestions that people with experience might have?

Sorry for the long post - I wanted to get all of the detail in there.

can she cycle?
be proactive, find new things to learn and broaden the world to explore
learn to make real things, with real tools

I'm sorry to hear about your frustration! I hope that you can find a solution soon. A couple of ideas (and a caveat, I'm not a child development specialist):

1. She has autism, spd, or some other sensory related issue. Solution- give her lots of things that it's okay to destroy. Focus on teaching her the difference between when and what to rip up instead of stopping the behavior.

2. She's frustrated. Do you expect her to be perfect? Or quiet? Are there sensory issues or just plain old requirements that you have in your household that could be keeping her from expressing anger or resentment in a more typical way? I wonder if she may be feeling something emotionally, but using the ripping as an outlet. Girls are especially notorious for "playing nice" but having their real emotions come out in some other way (destruction, cutting, etc). Is she being unconsciously suppressed?

Just a couple of ideas. Have you thought about consulting with a professional?

Another idea - could she be overstimulated? You have very busy days, it seems. Could she need a nap, or some mindless activity like iPad or TV?

Thank you for the feedback.

I'll try to respond to provide more information and answer the questions.

Do we expect her to be perfect? Or quiet?

Not at all. We're very relaxed parents. My husband is, but me even more so. In fact, if anything there are comments that I'm too relaxed. She is given a lot of freedom and independence. She makes her own decisions wherever possible. We expect toddler behaviours. In fact, other than this destruction we expected more than we've got, so far!

We do, however, expect respect and communication. We have raised her to take deep breaths when she feels upset, angry or frustrated, so that we can then talk calmly and find a solution for her. Sometimes this involves compromise, sometimes it requires her to explain why she's upset about something and we can then go with what she wants or needs, and other times the discussion features our reasons why we can't allow something, checking that she understands and thanking her for that.

Of course, this may not be what she needs. You mentioned that she may feel kept from expressing her anger in a more typical way, and maybe we do need to allow her and encourage her to have tantrums and to scream and shout, rather than to speak about things. I would hate to think that she felt emotionally repressed, but at the same time what I want more than anything is to raise a child that learns to identify and understand her emotions, communicate them to others and find ways to improve them. Maybe that's wrong of me, at her age, and I should not have put some much focus on communication.

I do ask her multiple times a day how she's feeling. She expresses the emotions she's feeling at this time, and if 'sad' or 'angry' come up, then we talk through what we can do to solve that. Often, it's something simple like 'an ice lolly' or 'watch TV', but perhaps we are doing something that keeps in what she's feeling under the surface. I hope not, and it breaks my heart to think that this could be the issue, but it does need considering so thank you for that.

Regarding overstimulation, that has been suggested before and I did look into it. In particular someone suggested that her room was overstimulating, and honestly she does have a lot of books and toys, so we locked more of her toys away in secure toyboxes so that she couldn't empty every single one out, and that seemed to help for 24 hours but did not last longer. I have considered minimising the amount of toys she has, and removing all books from her room, but I couldn't bring myself to consider that idea seriously because I want her to have the freedom to enjoy her toys and to actually learn not to destroy her books, rather than just having them taken from her so that she can't do it.

She does have a daily nap (roughly two hours), and TV time (primarily an hour in the morning after breakfast, and usually an hour or two in the late afternoon/evening around dinner time and leading up to bedtime), but we do keep very busy during the day. We always give her a choice of activities if we have free time - "what do you want to do?" - though I make sure to include something active and outdoorsy in any ideas that I can suggest, and then leave it open-ended for her to include suggestions of her own. If we are going to an organised group or club, she can still tell me if she doesn't want to (we stopped going to one a couple of months ago because the class teacher was "too loud").

Primarily, all I want for her is to be her own biggest advocate but to know that her parents are there to support her as well. That's how we've raised her, and she seems to have responded well and seems like a very happy and otherwise well-adjusted girl, but you have given me more to think about and I appreciate that.

As we live in the UK, we will have our next scheduled visit from the health visitor in a few months and I will be bringing this issue up with them at the time, but I had hoped for ways to improve this in the meantime.

We're making the sticker board today, and I hope she can learn to differentiate between 'good' peeling of stickers of the board, and 'bad' peeling of paint off the walls.

I think you have two issues going on here:

1) She is stimming. The peeling and breaking down boxes is a way for her to reduce her stress. The repetitive behaviour makes her feel safe.

2) The destructive behaviour is more disturbing because it is symptomatic of anger and I would venture to guess that this anger is coming out of frustration at being autistic? I would get her diagnosed and get the available support for her.

I am going to second that ripping and cutting things up are stims. I used to do it to a limited degree, but could control it enough to stop, when I was told not to do it, as a kid. My son, not so much. We gave him things he was allowed to rip up, and eventually, he would stick to those things. he is still rough on things, but that is different than the ripping. he had a lot of scrap paper and junk mail for that purpose. he will still do it out of frustration sometimes, but this particular stim is not as common now.

He also went through a destructive period (largely outgrown) and I am also guessing like others it was frustration. Dealing with emotions is really hard and self-control can be delayed for autistic kids and I presume autistic-adjacent (BAP) kids. I wish I had hints for this, but I think the progress made on this front was developmental versus anything we did, though we tried many things. It is one of those things that you can make worse by handling wrong, but cannot improve beyond what the developmental level of the child is, I think. The best thing you can do, is have strategies to handle it that minimize the destruction when the meltdowns happen.