My Beautiful Boy

I haven’t posted for a while, as there hasn’t really been anything new to report. It feels like we are just not making any progress at all. We have stopped seeing the psychiatrist as all it was doing was making him richer and us poorer and it really wasn’t making any difference with Corey at all. In fact Corey hated going there and refused to even speak to him so it was quite difficult for him to get very far with Corey.

Sometimes I think he is getting better and then he goes bad again. I was talking to my friend the other day, who also has a son who she has a lot of trouble with, and we both said the same thing – that it’s just really hard to know whether to take things further and see someone else about him. It’s hard to know whether there is something that is causing his behaviour or whether he is just naughty and that’s it.

But you know, with 3 kids, why is it that he is the only one that acts this way, the other 2 are not a problem. And the language, oh my goodness, his language is shocking.

I just can’t seem to find anything that works with Corey. One punishment we tend to use with the kids is writing lines. But the rule is that if they are told to write lines and they refuse to do it, or throw a tantrum, then the number of lines goes up. Eventually they will do it but they might have a lot more than if they had done it right from the start. Now Ben and Lachlan might grumble and not be happy about writing lines, but they do it. Corey on the other hand will throw a tantrum, punch walls, slam doors, throw things around and will often call me some really foul names. He just cannot learn that the more he does that the more lines he gets – you would think that after a while he would learn just to do them straight away otherwise it only gets worse.

Ben and Lachlan usually do their 20 lines and that’s it, whereas Corey always ends up with around 100 lines by the time he throws his tantrums and finally realises that he has to do them because I’m not giving in to him. Sometimes I wonder whether I am just handling it all wrong, maybe I should just ignore the tantrum and let him just do his 20 lines anyway and that’s it – although chances are he wouldn’t do them. But at the same time, when he calls me things like ‘f#&$ing S#*tFace, I can’t just ignore that, its just not acceptable. But it doesn’t matter what punishment he gets, he will still do it again, and again, and again.

Then when he finally settles down and writes his lines after a couple of hours of yelling and tantrums and crying and then he has a headache – then I feel sorry for him and I feel really bad and think that I’ve just handled it all wrong, but I just don’t know what else to do.

It really does just get too hard sometimes and it really is putting a strain on the family, but we will keep going and keep looking for something that works.

Our Exceptional Kids

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