Losing My Patience

Post Reply New Topic

Son 7 is not diagnosed with aspergers or adhd or anything else as yet. still waiting assessment.

thing is, my son, just does not seem to listen and i am losing my patience. I just do not know how to get through to him. The same problems occur at school. My son had a hearing test to rule out any problem there. His teacher told me that she has been telling him for 6 months that he needs to write half a page of writing before going to recess.

For eg: If we ask our son to stop dancing around in front of the TV or making silly noises, he will usually stop after we have told him a few times. However, he will soon resume the behaviour. This has been a constant issue for years. I end up getting really angry because i just can't seem to get through to him that I want him to stop that behaviour permanently when the rest of the family is trying to watch tv. i am more than happy for him to dance, make noises etc in another room of the house. However, that doesn't appear to work either. My son is a very "in your face" sort of child. he wants to be sitting on my lap or curled up under a blanket next to me or underneath my chair.

I asked my son the other day why he continues behaviour that we specifically ask him not to do. He answered that it is because we don't tell him everyday. So does that mean that I have to reiterate the "rules" to him everyday? I feel so worn out by this. I am learning that if I actually get right in front of his face and give him the instructions this works better.

Hmm, yeah, that sounds like a bit of a miscommunication issue there. From what my mom tells me, I frazzled her nerves at seven, too. And at seventeen, for that matter, but I'm grown now and in college, and we have a friendly (if long-distance e-mail) relationship.

I think your son is assuming that when you tell him to do something, you're telling him to do it for the time being, but not permanently. You may have to explain for how long you want him to do something--five minutes? An hour? A day? Always? If he has problems understanding time, you might need to explain to him what those times mean, or tell him when those times are done.

I had some issues with this when I was little, but I had the opposite problem: I assumed the default was "Always". When I was a little girl, I accidentally locked the bathroom door from the inside and then closed it from the outside, and my grandmother had to call a locksmith to get it open again. She ordered me to leave the door open a crack whenever I used the bathroom, so that I wouldn't lock it again. When I came home from college to visit her, she accidentally walked in on me because I was still leaving the door open a crack whenever I used the bathroom... Silly of me, but there you go.

I guess you will have to tell him how long to do things for. It seems to be tough for him to remember that he was given an order.

You could also post the rules up in writing, and tell him that these rules are for always. I guess at seven he may not be fluently literate yet, so pictures could be useful.

Did you give him a GOOD reason why he shouldn't be dancing in front of the tv?

And did you give him another option?

"It's not polite to dance in front of the tv because the other people in the room can't enjoy the tv when you do that.

"If you want to be active, here's a coloring book, OR you are welcome to dance in front of the tv when noone else is trying to watch."

There has to be a reason behind the rules, otherwise they are "just stupid" and get forgotten or ignored.


(also giving him a why will increase his understanding of social norms, increase the chance of working up that logic center of the brain, and make the next thing - changing the channel in the middle of the baseball game - a bit easier to make sense of)

Definitely. It's important to know why the rules are there; otherwise you can't apply them properly. Like me and the bathroom door--I was just given a simple order, rather than being told, "Leave the door open a little so you don't lock us out of the bathroom again." With that reason, I might have known that there were other ways to fulfill that purpose, rather than sticking with the original strategy well into adulthood!

This will sound very non-clinical because it is but to me it sounds like your son is a very strong-spirited and fun-loving kid who will look for any way to be able to do what he wants. Not that he's a brat, he sounds really sweet and pleasant to be around actually. But I think he'd rather you pay attention to him rather than an electronic box, even if you pay attention to him 80% of the rest of the time you're not watching TV. And the loophole he's found is that he optimistically assumes you only want him to stop doing whatever he's doing in the specific instance you tell him not to.

When I was a kid, I wouldn't have understood that a rule applied all the time. If I had been, say, leaping from couch to chair to couch and making a lot of noise and my mother said to me, "Stop that right now, it's bothering me," I might have stopped only to resume my activity a little bit later..... with no idea that it would bother her "again". (I'm sure I drove her nuts.)



If you do decide to try posting up rules and your son has problems with executive functioning, he might understand the rules but have trouble applying them because he doesn't remember them when he needs to--i.e. if they aren't attached to the immediate context, he may forget they exist. It might be a good idea to post up a rule in the location where that rule applies--putting the rules about not dancing around in front of the TV over top of the TV, for example, to make the rule a part of every situation where he is in front of the television.

I used to shout random things when my parents watched football. Good times.