I'm at my wit's end. Please help me troubleshoot this.
Jan 25, 2015 7:50:29 GMT -5
Post by mrsbuttinski on Jan 25, 2015 7:50:29 GMT -5
Just to clarify, I wasn't suggesting you give him 100% unfettered access to the Xbox, just that taking it away from him as a punishment may be causing anxiety that then makes sleeping more challenging and also behaviors. Putting it out of sight, out of mind is a solution (just make sure you don't hold it over his head to try to get him to "earn" it back or anything like that). Another option is to assure him he can use it for a half hour a day on a basic schedule (right after school, right before dinner, etc) or can use it an hour a day on weekends, etc etc etc. There are lots of options.
I believe most kids want to "be good" and do the right thing, which is why spooko's situation strikes me as more acute than most garden variety impulsive kid with ADHD making bad choices.
Part of the issue is that as kids get older, their increased cognition allows them to increase their load of anxiety. The burden on a kid who is as bright as the OP's 7 1/2 year old is likely much greater than the load he carried a couple years ago. To that point, the strategies of allowing some parentally controlled access to X-Box may have been sufficient in dialing down the temptation to defy his parents at 5. But as he gets closer to 8, he knows how easily their rules can be circumvented even as he still wants to make the right kinds of choices.
This is the stuff we worked on when DS was 7- maybe it's a developmental stage or something. For us it wasn't the X-Box, it was trains. They were running our household and interfering with DS's ability to make the choices he needed to to be successful as a student and learn to regulate his own behavior which is a huge step toward independence. We had similar issues- a kid who would get up in the night to play with trains, or who would be perseverating on different locomotives he'd seen when he was supposed to be learning math facts. And that's the point. By removing them entirely, DS's anxiety and hypervigilence around when he'd get to access them again went away because it wasn't going to happen. I really, really didn't want to do this; it took DS's psychologist months to get me to agree to even trial it. I tried reducing the amount of time spent with the trains, I reduced the actual number of trains in the house- but it only made him unhappy and ramped up the anxiety.
Eventually, we bought in to the psych's suggestion. We purged the house of trains. They went away for a while. This was not done as a punitive measure, as we discussed with DS and his psych in therapy, but to set him up to be successful. The point was to teach him that he was capable of being OK without access to them. He was pretty unhappy the first day or two, but the improvement in his anxierty level was dramatically reduced. He was happier, more engaged in school, and slept better. DS used to do the "planned middle of the night wake-ups, too) Over time we were able to give the trains back, but he'd learned to self regulate so they rarely interfere with his day to day functioning. It's interesting because the experience taught him to recognize when he's going to the dark side and put the brakes on it himself.
It sounds a little nuts, but electronics can be as addictive as drugs for some kids. LOL, when DS was about 11 or 12 I had a discussion with his psychologist about buying him a gaming system for his birthday. He said he strongly discourages them as a rule, but thought DS might be OK since he'd grown so much around control around trains. He showed me some studies that show young gamers' brains lighting up exactly as heroine addicts do when given a hit. In a way, getting the X-Box out of the house is a bit like not having liquor in the house if you live with an alcoholic who is new to sobriety- you're helping them make the right choices by making the wrong ones require more effort.
FWIW, I am watching this is my niece's bio-son (he's biologically my niece's son, but adopted by his grandfather and his grandfather's STBX). A will be 8 next month; he's an abstinance baby with severe ADHD and a tendency toward the sort of behaviors associated with ODD though he doesn't quite meet the full criteria. They're dealing with a full on electronics addiction right now and it's been really hard. It's all Minecraft, all the time. He's a reallym sweet, funny and bright kid (FSIQ around 130) with almost no self regulation skills- he's willing to manipulate and even lie to get screentime. And it's hard because his parents aren't on the same page- each wants to be the favorite parent, so they aren't as consistent as they should be. Plus the little brother is on spectrum and sometimes just sucks all the air out of the room and distracts the parent-in-charge from staying with the older boy's behavior program. The irony, of course, is that both mom and dad are mental health counselors and really struggling with this because it's really hard.