When a child has a temper tantrum, a good opportunity may present itself to the classroom teacher in terms of teaching social skills to the child with ADHD. If this intervention is difficult for the classroom teacher to implement, in consideration of the fact that she has many other children in her classroom, she can find a “safe place” for the child to have the temper tantrum.
For example, sometimes the gymnasium has an area with padded walls. Hopefully, as in some of the schools I have visited, there is a collaborative effort among the faculty, so that each teacher helps another in an emergency situation. If the teacher has an assistant or a paraprofessional in the classroom, the teacher must instruct that person how to respond when the child with ADHD has a temper tantrum. Everyone who is involved with this child must have a clear understanding in how to respond, yet not react to his misbehavior. When a teacher responds to a child’s misbehavior, that response is intentional and planned. When a teacher reacts to a child with ADHD’s misbehavior, he behaves in an emotional manner, which oftentimes reinforces his behavior in a negative way, therefore encouraging him to behave in that way frequently. As the child is involved in the temper tantrum, you know very well that he does not see or hear you at all. So you have to wait; in fact, you have no choice but to wait. So, you wait, and you wait, and you wait for the child to stop the temper tantrum. He finally slumps down in the chair and quiets down.
Now what? The first thing to do is to talk to the child and try to find out what triggered the temper tantrum. Most times the teacher might think that the child would not have any idea of what possibly triggered the tantrum. However, you can usually find out a little bit at least about what might have been one of the causes of the tantrum if you have a conversation with the child. That conversation, however, must begin with open-ended questions. Let me give you an example of what caused a temper tantrum in a five-year-old boy with whom I am working. I entered the door of Eddie’s home at the same time as he entered. Eddie was five years old with a diagnosis of ADHD, hyperactive type. We often arrived at his home at the same time. He noticed immediately that his toys were not in the same place as they had been before. He started to cry at first, demanding to know the location of his toys. In fact, he was crying and then screaming so loudly that his babysitter (who took care of his younger sister and him when he was not in school) became very upset.
Apparently, it was the babysitter who put his toys away in order to try to make the house neat. She certainly did not mean any harm, but somehow was acting as if she had indeed done a terrible thing. Therefore, she began to give him his toys back. I was at his house to teach him social skills. I honestly thought that it was unreasonable to reward him with his returned toys when he had been crying, screaming, and shouting. Well, when I mentioned to Eddie that he could have his toys back if he said please, you would have thought that the world was exploding. He even threw some toys at me. His temper tantrum then escalated into a full-blown tornado. His mother interjected, unfortunately, and infantilizing him, held him on her lap and asked him, “Was someone mean to you in camp today?” Well, come on! I somehow convinced her to permit me to handle it with her in the room, and then finally convinced him to agree to have her exit the room while leaving the door open.
After she left, I slowly began asking him open-ended questions such as, “Did something happen to upset you?” “No.” “Did someone say something to you that upset you?” “No.” Then my questions became more pointed in order to try to figure out what got him so upset that he had the temper tantrum. “Did someone in camp upset you?” “No.” “Did someone in camp say something to upset you?” “No.” “Did something happen on the way home?” “Yes.” Ah . . . now we were getting somewhere!!!! He then proceeded to tell me (in answer to more specific questions) that his mom had picked him up from school after his entire class went to a Build a Bear store as a class trip. They each received a “Build a Bear.” What a school and what a trip; I could not believe it!
Anyway, his mom was on her cell phone as she was driving, talking away, as usual, and he kept trying to talk to her over and over again. She simply did not hear or did not respond to him. He wanted her to stop and buy clothes for his bear RIGHT THEN AND THERE. Atypical for her, and perhaps for the first time ever, she said that she could not do that now because she did not have time. She needed to drop him home and get ready to attend a fund raiser at his school. She said she would take him the next day to buy the clothes.
Apparently, initially he became frustrated when she would not talk to him in the car and then became frustrated and ANGRY when she refused to buy him clothes for his bear at that moment. THEN, he walked into the house with that frustration all churned up, saw that his toys were not where he left them, and EXPLODED. After he calmed down, I talked to him about how to control his anger next time. He told me that he could not control his anger because “My body had the temper tantrum and I could not do what my body did not want me to do. My body did that, not me!”
He also said that he likes to be angry because then he is “tough.” I told him that a person could be tough and not be angry, but he did not understand that concept or accept it. I decided at that point that he would not be able to listen to my words, so I read him the book When Sophie Gets Angry by Molly Bang (1999), to him. Unfortunately, being five years old and having ADHD, he laughed when the little girl in the book became very angry. We talked about the book. Little by little over a few sessions he began to understand that it was counterproductive to react to something that he was angry about by having a temper tantrum. (I did not use the word counterproductive to him; I said that having a temper tantrum did not help him to figure out why he was angry.) So, I gave him some steps to try the next time he became so angry. Before his body becomes so angry, I told him to ask himself:
“Why am I so angry?” “
Am I angry at a person?”
“Am I angry about something that happened to me?”
If he cannot ask himself those questions (as one step on the journey to self-regulation), then I told him to take three deep breaths and count to five before his “body” becomes so angry. We practiced the deep breaths together. When we spoke about how he could control his temper tantrum during our next session, he did say that he tried the deep breathing, but he also said that “When my body takes over, it takes over.” I realized then and there that it would be a long process before he would be able to self-regulate his temper tantrums as a vehicle to learn social skills.
Teaching social skills to children with ADHD, as you can see, is not always as easy as it appears to be. It is not just a matter of actually teaching the social skill. As you saw from my example here, the teacher cannot achieve real success in terms of the child learning the social skill and diminishing his socially inappropriate behavior unless the child with ADHD is totally, 100 percent “on board” and in complete agreement that this skill is important for him to learn.
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