I found an article on the blog Simple Mom about Relinquishing Your Power on the Things That Don’t Matter.

I wanted to share it today, because its such a powerful idea for parents and the parent-child relationship.   Children with Autism often struggle a great deal with frustration and powerlessness before a world that refuses to be to understandable.

Sometimes, that sense of helplessness becomes overwhelming for our children and we enter the ever-familiar melt-down sequence.  Whether its at the grocery store, the playground, or even at the dinner table, we’ve all been there, and know how powerless a parent feels in front of the raging force of the melt-down.  Once you’ve entered the melt-down cycle, a child has become fairly helpless to control themselves and the parent needs to take charge somehow. Although for me, every-time I go toe-to-toe against the melt-down feels like putting on gloves in front of Muhammad Ali.

But that’s a different discussion for a different day.   Today, I want to talk about a method that can postpone or completely avoid melt-down scenarios by empowering our children.  Give up the choices that aren’t critical.  Don’t leave them open ended, children usually aren’t ready for that, they’re children!  But give them some pre-defined choices which will (should) result in parent-acceptable outcomes.

What I gave Caleb and Kylie last night: “Do you two want to watch Mulan now and clean up the downstairs?  Or do you want to go clean your rooms and then come watch Mulan with popcorn?”

(Not the clearest choice, and I had no idea what response I was going to get.  I admit, not my best work.)

Unanimously, “watch Mulan now and cl..ean..downst….” trail off.  Well, take what you can get.

Did they clean up? Yeah, some.  Not a lot, but they cleaned up both downstairs and in their rooms.  I had communicated to them that I wanted them to clean and expected them to do so while still giving them choice.  Which is still better than “Go clean your rooms!” and “No TV till I’m satisfied!” and almost instantly getting a tantrum and a melt-down.

We’ve been doing this with Caleb for years now and we’ve found wonderful success whenever we can remember to take the time and effort to do it.  Go see the link to simple-mom, she has some very important details on the techniques involved and they work well for all children.

For higher-functioning:

Link here!

This page on eHow has detailed methods for lower-functioning children:

Link here!

But really, just read both.  You’re gonna need it.