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by: Dr.NoelSwanson
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Listed below are concerns from parents of special needs children:

1. Do special needs children understand cause and effect and also rewards versus punishments? Do they comprehend the same way as other children?

The fact is that this is not an issue. No matter what type of living being you are we akk have an interest in reward versus punishment to some level. Think about the bottom of the food chain such as a cockroach. Cockroaches despise the light and live to move around in the dark hours of the night. They associate good feelings with dark and bad feelings with light. They might not think about it, but rather just feel it based on experience and instinct.

Turn on the lights and the roach goes scuttling for darkness. In a very basic sense, light = punishment and darkness = reward. The behavior of escaping from light to dark is rewarded, and so is repeated.

But roaches are not trainable. To be trainable, you also need a memory. Dogs have a memory. They can remember that if they hear the word "sit" and they do so, they normally get a reward (a treat or praise).

The higher you go up on the food chain, the better their memory can be. Interest in time and the improvement of analytical skills appears. When these attributes increase, you need to vary the intensity of the rewards and punishments to have any effect.

How do you know what you can use? Simple. You start with a good guess, and then experiment. You implement a system of rewards and or punishments to modify a behavior (exact details of how to do this are in the book), and see what happens. If the behavior changes, the carry on! If it does not, then one of two things applies:

a) your rewards and punishments systems did not have big enough meaning in your child's life or

b) your child could not create a link between the behavior and the reward or punishment. If you wait too long to respond to a behavior then your reward or punishment may have little or no meaning. This is especially true when dealing with younger children.

If your plan doesn't seem to work at all then you need to stop and look at what you are doing. Make improvements and modifications. Try the system another time. Keep changing the system until you find one that works. If you are unable to find a system that works then think about the following:

You have tried all of the things you can think of and your child's behavior hasn't budged. What do you do? For example, let's say your child had PDD. You are required to complete a few hours of physical therapy with your child eacy day. However, your child doesn't want to do the physical therapy.

Richard has read the book. He has experimented with just about every reward, punishment, incentive scheme he can think of. He has tried to make the therapy more exciting and fun. But despite all of these efforts, half the time the therapy just does not get done.

What can you do to fix this? You have two options including:

a. You could become all bent out of shape about it. You get mad at yourself for your apparent failure. You feel like you are no service to your child. You want to find the magic cure that will help your child do his physical therapy.

b. You stop and evaluate your situation. You take a deep breath and look at things practically and logically. You are okay with the fact that half the time the physical therapy session may not happen, but this is still an improvement from how much physical therapy your child was accomplishing last year.

Which is better?

The downfall of (a.) is that you will amp up your stress level which affects everyone negatively. You are not having a good time and your results won't improve this way.

Sometimes you just have to understand the fact that your child may never be fully motivated to complete the physical therapy. It's sad, but true. It is better to work with what you have then cry about not achieving perfection.

Therefore, you should pay attention to your child's specific needs. Strive to define success off of what you are provided with and not an ideal. When you do this, you will alleviate stress and the results you want will happen. If things still don't improve would you want to have: a) 1/2 performance and we are all upset? b) 1/2 performance and we are all feeling good?

The key point is to not try to compete to an ideal level when it might not be a realistic goal.

About the Author

Do your kids play you up? Then you should really take a look at Dr. Noel Swanson's fascinating website packed full of parenting advice There are also articles on children's special educational needs that are worth checking out.

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