Learning Part 4 (Hopefully last)

This is the last blog that is going to be a one note wonder. I promise after this, I'll be back to my old boring everyone with Eden's new triumph or complaining that a teacher told me the wrong thing. That I don't know what I'm going to do for dinner, or that I'm too busy to even sleep (which is usually the case anyways), so bear with me.

This last post is going to be about reinforcement. I feel this subject needs to be made the most important goal of the whole thing. It's some work but paying attention to the warning signs is all good but if you can't take the 5 seconds it takes to give a "high 5" for a job well done or even use a toy to get them even HAPPY about doing their chores or do anything for that matter, why even bother? Some of the reinforcers, I'm sure will start to lose their awesome value in our home, and I have a plan for that. I will just take the reinforcers and switch them to new and more "valuable" ones for them I bought extras and didn't put them all out at once of course.

The thing about rewards, is they have to be more important that the behavior you want to avoid. If your child really is scared of something; for example tonight going out to eat with Eden. She got real freaked out when her spaghetti smelled different than what she was used to. She got visibly upset, started breathing heavy and went under the table at the restaurant. I saw the warning signs, and needed to react.

This to anyone else would have been the moment that you say, "whatever, she won't starve." just not make her eat and avoid a scene. I noticed this right off and instead of giving in Tanya and I found an incredible opportunity. We didn't even need much talking about it, but we decided there was going to be an issue and if we wanted to eat at all we had to make this work. We needed to make eating the spaghetti (something she loves to eat) a very fun and reinforcing experience for her.

I first offered her a small bite of a cookie, I just so happened to have in my purse (just for this occasion) if only she ate one piece of spaghetti. It took her about 2 minutes of worrying about it and climbing under the table and back on to the seat, to actually break a small piece of spaghetti off and eat it. I praised her and she ate more, once she was about half done I put the small bite of cookie on the table so she could see it (I had the cookie on the table but not in a piece for her). She ate little piece by piece but managed to eat the entire spaghetti noodle. I gave her the cookie.

Tanya for the second piece of spaghetti, saw that the cookie idea was a not going to be a great solution and I needed to eat some dinner to decided to make a game out of eating.She thought of this game from games she has used with our in-home support to get her to eat food previously. She drew a dragon on the paper table cloth, and then drew it eating spaghetti. She talked very positively about how Eden can eat spaghetti like her dragon. And she did eat it, no problem and no need for another piece of cookie.

I would just like to say on a side note on how happy and proud I was that Tanya being 9 took the tools we have been teaching her on how to communicate with her sister. To evaluate the situation, figure out a solution and then successfully use it in a public setting. She wasn't acting like a mom or a therapist she was just being a sister. And to be so thoughtful to let me eat for a few minutes. She is an amazing kid. (Carly was not with us during this outing but she has been amazing too at times)

Just tonight we took a very out of sorts kid (who couldn't even sit in her chair at dinner due to sensory overload) and got her to eat 2 pieces of spaghetti that "smelled" different. She would never have even touched that before, and even the act of me asking her to eat it more likely than not could have resulted in a fit of rage where she would try and hurt me or throw something at someone or put her in a teary meltdown to which we would have had to endure a million, "I can't believe she's eating while her kid is just there screaming her bloody head off!" or worse. And used 2 of the reinforcements we knew would work and made it through dinner with no crying and not a single embarrassing moment. I call that a success!