My son turns off all of the lights!

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Hello, I guess I should give you a bit of background...
I'm a mom of three and my youngest (he'll be 11 in March) is low functioning nonverbal autistic. I'm one of the moms who likes for him to be able to be himself at home. If he wants to line up cars or tear up phone books I let him because it keeps him happy and because he's already aggressive enough. He goes to public school in an enclosed autistic classroom with just three other students, but he goes on outings to the grocery store and restaurants and swimming and participates in Special Olympics thanks to the wonderful teachers and special ed staff where we live.

We had a hab-tech worker for two years, but due to a local crisis of mismanagement and cut backs in the mental health care system we lost almost all of our services for the time being except for 8 hours of respite a month and 6 hours of Personal Assistant a week. For months we have been trying out new workers and not liking them and we got a new worker coming for the first time tomorrow. (Please wish us luck on that one!)

Our son is very aggressive, not only when mad but also when excited and happy! He hugs too hard! He's not completely potty trained, and while he will use speech devices and some limited sign language at school and outside of the house in the community he refuses to do so at home and will tear them up if he finds them.

Recently, while out of school for the holidays, he began showing some stranger than normal behaviors. For one thing, he's been turning off all the lights. Basically, every evening when I close the blinds and go around turning on lights he goes behind me and turns them off. If I turn one back on he will turn it back off when I leave it. It makes for a very dark family room! He has also laid down in the road in front of our house three times! He knows I am scared and upset when he does this and he laughs and laughs at me. He's taken off running down the road too! (We have no fence but it is definitely number one on our wish list. Our case manager is trying to help us find a way to get one.) He's also been babbling and saying Mama which he hasn't done since he was two years old!

I feel like some of this is puberty and teen-ness coming on, but the thing with turning off the lights makes me wonder if he's getting migraines or something. Do other autistic kids like to sit in the dark to play? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere.

Also, at this point in his life the local mental health people keep bringing up "quality of life" to us. They think he's MR as well as autistic and they are going for maintenance now instead of therapy. Does anyone have any experience with this shift in gears? He still tests at infant to three years old mentally, but this child has his own computer and can somehow navigate You Tube to watch videos of other kids' first day of school and school buses (his favorite thing) without help! We don't know how he found them! He doesn't use the keyboard! That doesn't sound like a three year old to me!

Thanks...

is he on any medication ?

No, he's not on meds of any kind. His doctor says she wants to discuss putting him on Adderall next time we see her. I'm hesitant about this. You can't get any kind of medicine in this child, not even cold medicine without several people holding him down and forcing it down his throat and I HATE doing that to him!

bpgisme,
am LFA also,twenty four and still do most of the stuff that own son does including lining up things over and over,tearing up paper things,toilet problems and-the lights,prefer being in room with them off,to am it feels less overloading having so much visual input together,at least with dark room and tv or laptop screen,its just those things that can see.
but with own son there could be other answers-maybe because he does it when blinds are closed which means its getting dark/it is dark,he may think it has to be dark inside as well? or could he be trying to communicate something? or could he be looking for a reaction? or maybe he has just got stuck in this routine? or could he be visually overloaded by the light? sometimes,the light bulbs can be a problem-those newer ones out that are made to be better for something [forget their name,but theyre supposed to be replacing all the old ones]-they can be bad for some autistics because they flicker and can cause visual overload,just saying in case that is the ones have got if would want to see if replacing them works.


----mental retardation,dont let them strongly and so finally write him off well within MR as he may not be,and this could affect him for the rest of his life,like it has for am,it is very difficult to have a reliable IQ score from an autie,due to verbal, language and often learning difficulties,it is also common to have splintered intelligence-that is being better in some stuff than others.
am was also labelled as MR as a child,still test at being MR [borderline]-since adult age have had the MLD [multiple learning disability] label to use instead of,and am similar to own son in that am good with computers, but am rated at toddler age in most things by staff.
am think mixed intelligence is probably more down to learning disabilities/difficulties than mental retardation,as mr is supposed to be near equal difficulty in all things,whereas LD is unequal difficulty.
one of the adults am live with [in a residential home for adults with LD] has downs syndrome and is classed as having quite obvious MR,but he has a gift in fishing-he knows all the technical stuff,and can do it all,so am think it isnt really fair to people with MR who have a good skill/s in something to be stereotyped as not good at anything under the label,most of the support staff wont even let him get a laptop,even though he's got the money and has used the one am have perfectly because they say he's not intelligent enough.


---hugging,he may not understand that he is hurting others when hugging because it sounds like he is a pressure seeker,am like that and dont realise am hurting someone because it does not hurt self.

what is he like with animals?
one thing that has helped calm am temperarily and with other thingd such as interaction is horse riding sessions with the RDA [riding for the disabled association] america has a similar service,think it has the word hippo in it,or zoo-but its riding therapy.
maybe this could be a help if he has never tried it yet.


sorry if wrote too much,and hope new staff are good.

Yes! We do use those new florescent bulbs! Someone mentioned that to me and I really think that does have something to do with it! We're going to buy a halogen bulb and see if he reacts the same way. Then we'll know for sure!

I also think you're right about the over stimulation thing. During the Christmas holidays he was home all day long for two whole weeks except for his OT appointments on Saturday and he became more and more aggressive and violent. I thought he was bored and kept trying to get him interested in other things and playing games and letting me read him books and things and he would get twice as mad! I asked his OT about it and he said he was over stimulated! He said there is so much going on at home and so many noises and things happening that my son was going into overload and couldn't handle it. So, I have since started turning things down and getting everything and everyone to be quieter in the evening. (This is a very small house and there are five of us and a cat living here together so it tends to be kind of busy and noisy around here at night.)

About the MR thing, you make me feel like we're right when we say we see so much intelligence in our son that the testing and all the mental health people don't see. Luckily his teachers also see the potential there and so does his case manager. His first computer is what really opened our eyes to his intelligence. He turns it on every time he comes home from school and every weekend when he gets up and for a couple of hours a day he wanders the internet, at first going to Playhouse Disney and Noggin and such and slowly expanding to more complicated websites like You Tube. He doesn't use the keyboard yet though it is right there waiting. I'm not sure how much he can read, though I do know he can read some. My dream is that he may one day start typing!

That's just awful about your friend not being allowed to buy a computer. It's wrong of the staff to not allow him to buy one.

As for animals, he goes with his class to horse riding lessons at a local farm. (His class also goes grocery shopping once a week and to a restaurant about once a month and swimming lessons too. There's only three students in his class so they can do all these special things pretty easily.) We have a cat here at home but he and the cat don't get along too well. She will lie in his sunny spot and he will pull fur out of her tail until she gets up and leaves. He doesn't like the way she feels and he will get one of us to push her off if she's lying on something he wants. She's a very patient and good cat though. She will swat and growl at anyone she thinks is hurting him and at night she sits with me while I sit in his room at bedtime. (He wants me to sit with him every night as he goes to sleep. I've been doing it pretty much all of his life.) She's a very good cat. He laughs at dogs but he's very afraid of them. In our neighborhood most people have dogs for pets so there's usually dogs walking by and sometimes they come to visit us. He hides behind me until they leave. My daughter has a parrot and he's really afraid of it because it squawks very loudly so it lives at Grandma's house and she visits it every day.

Thanks to everyone who responded to me!

hang in there