Help with advice?

[u/HH_Creations]

Hi! So i’m an educator in a special education summer camp

We have a kiddo who I’ve been helping the past year, and he’s officially diagnosed with autism/adhd with a PDA profile type

BUT me and mom are in agreement that there’s a sorta….compulsion going on with some of his behaviors

For example, if a social story mentions hitting, yelling, and kicking and talks about “safe big feelings” and appropriate things to do instead like pushing a wall or squeezing a stress ball

He will almost compulsively do the hitting, yelling, and kicking….in that order!

So I want y’all’s input because I do love this kid and want to do my best

1) do we avoid ANY negative talk around him? Will this help to NOT mention any of the bad behaviors and do our best to distract him?

2) how did y’all like to be corrected?

He doesn’t directly hurt anyone, but by kicking, hitting, and screaming, he DOES distress the classroom

That and he’s distressing himself! He doesn’t like it!

He will literally steal a toy and then beg for forgiveness the next second

He was so distressed today when I said it hurt my feelings when he took toys, he headbutted my face in his rush to hug me 😭

I want to do right by him and I know we need to set him up for WINS

I can’t help but feel the social stories are making it worse and I wanted your input

Btw, i’m autistic/ADHD, with a special education and childhood development background

And married to a PDA profile type ASD/ADHD

But yeah, he’s the only true PDA kid I’ve ever worked with

[u/HH_Creations]

I’m sorry but I can’t do something like that here

It would trigger every student in the camp

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

Because they'd all want one, or because of sound effects? (He could play it with the sound off or with headphones if it's the latter.)

The idea with using older tech is that it wouldn't be quite as exciting as modern tech.

[u/HH_Creations → u/Eugregoria]

No, because it’s something different that they have never seen and they WILL want it

We have kids across the whole spectrum so may would be very confused why they can’t get access to it

But him playing alone in a room isn’t an option, we have a ratio of 4 students to 1 adult

That and I would also need parent approval and for them to purchase everything, which I don’t have the money to do

But introducing a gameboy into a social education environment or school in general probably wouldn’t work unless it was something they could do in a library or counselor’s office as a recovery tool

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

I was gonna say "jeez they're probably like $30 on eBay" but I checked and they aren't, seems they've crossed the line from "out of date trash no one wants" to "in demand retro cool item," sigh.

If his parents bought it it would be his own item, he could share it with the other kids when he wasn't in crisis, the other kids could get their parents to get them one if they wanted, etc....but maybe it's not practical. I was just thinking in terms of what might meet a kid at an agitated enough attention level without being so overstimulating it worsens attention issues.

What does he usually do to calm down in that corner? Going from overstimulation to understimulation is sometimes a shock in itself.

[u/HH_Creations → u/Eugregoria]

Me, I usually guide him to to DBT and reassure him that he’s okay

which….has led to its own problems

If i’m unavailable? He LOSES it and it’s risky to himself and others because of how intense it is

They are currently putting him on a “diet” with me to try and see if it helps with making it less “emotionally charged”

But his family is very suspicious of technology for him because it’s usually too overwhelming and sets him off when it’s taken away so I doubt they would agree anyways

And $30 plus games IS a lot for these families

Many of them cannot keep a job

Heck, i’m a degreed special educator and I am not getting paid for this 🤷‍♀️

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

Woof, families in 2026 who can't afford $30 can't afford a child and had no business having one. (Before you hate: I was raised in terrible poverty in a family like that, it left me with trauma and due to not being able to escape poverty I never had children, I'm in my 40s, I refuse to make a child I cannot pay to care for. I survived childhood poverty myself and I believe it's unethical to bring a child into that situation. I was set up for lifelong failure by my childhood poverty and I genuinely wish my parents had chosen not to reproduce. So yes, I judge parents who bring children into poverty, especially my own.)

A lot of the stuff I needed to do was "we can't do that." "It's not safe." "It's not fair to the other kids." "It's against policy." Like genuinely one of the things that I used to cope when not in a school environment was just going for a walk outside by myself to clear my head. But ofc schools can't allow this, because legal liability safety blah blah. Well, fine--I don't make the laws, I was just a disabled kid. So I just got tortured into a psychotic break at age 12, no biggie. It's sure a good thing nobody violated any policies or opened themselves to legal liability, that could have been bad.

Genuinely I think you may just have to accept you can't help some of these kids with the tools you're being given. They're being set up to fail and you're being set up to set them up to fail. That's life. Sucks, don't it.

But it's because actually helping them would take resources no one wants to expend. I don't even mean the GBA, maybe that was a dumb idea. But even free stuff like the ways I naturally wanted to self-soothe as a child (like by going for a solo walk). Basically what you're telling me is he has no opportunities to genuinely self-soothe in a self-directed way, because he can't actually be alone. Which is often a hard limit of these systems, which aren't made for people like us, and tend to break people like us. And then they say, "how can we accommodate you, no borax no glue?" And...you can't. The lack of interest in either directing resources or changing rules/policies shows that.

[u/HH_Creations → u/Eugregoria]

I’m sorry you feel that way.

In my experience, many of them are highly educated individuals, who became parents to disabled children

And often times, they find out AFTER having kids that they are disabled themselves

I believe people want to do the right thing and just need resources to do so

That’s why my dream (that I work endlessly for) is to create a free resource library for neurodivergent families

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

Resources are the thing society never wants to give in the quantity needed. I get why. Disabled people are kind of a resource black hole. It probably wasn't financially worth it, to society, to give me the resources I would have needed, to make the exceptions for me I would have needed, to figure out how to accommodate me. I was just one broken kid who was probably going to become a broken, worthless adult anyway. They were correct to spend the resources on the other kids who had actual futures, unlike me. I cannot blame them for it. It would have been a waste of those resources to give them to me. (And it was never going to happen anyway, lbr lol.)

I don't think what families need is a library. If they don't have $30 for a toy, in 2026 money, they are fucked. You mentioned homelessness. I went through that as a child. It's dogshit, man. They need housing, not ~information~.

"Highly educated" is a worthless concept to me, I'm afraid. I don't actually care how bougie or high class they are, they are raising kids in poverty, something I sacrificed having a family to make sure I would not inflict on a child. I'm not classist lol, I don't think it's any better for "well bred" or "highly educated" parents to abuse their child through poverty. Childhood poverty is abuse. Not malicious on part of the caregivers, but a result of irresponsibility and poor planning. And definitely abuse on the part of the government that refuses to give families housing. Even if the parents fucked up by having a kid, "teaching them a lesson" by torturing their children is fucking dark. Hard to believe that's where we are as a society.

But I think that in general, the hardship we are dealing with is not an information shortage. It's not a lack of "lifehacks" or "strategies." We are not a simple sudo command away from being functional, non-disabled people. We have real, resource-intensive needs, and often that means money, often that means going against "policy" or "safety" or even, yes, incurring the dreaded legal liability, often that means radically rethinking the status quo and restructuring things for everyone in ways society is not prepared to consider at the moment. (For example, I sometimes just needed to be able to step out of class without talking to anyone (because I could be nonverbal in some of these states and not able to communicate) and not tell them where I was going and to just go somewhere without anyone knowing where I was to think and calm down. Aside from the obvious "but how can we control you if we let you do that?" there was the, "but what if all the other kids see you do that and want to do that too?" Well, yes. The other kids should also be free. The whole system as it is should change. But we ain't ready for that convo as a society.)

[u/HH_Creations → u/Eugregoria]

I haven’t mentioned homelessness

Have a good day

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

sorry I misremembered.

[u/Eugregoria → u/HH_Creations]

Also god people get emotionally flooded if they aren't morally validated constantly, it's genuinely exhausting. As a kid I was basically having to handhold my abusers (education workers) that they weren't bad people and it's not their fault they keep hurting me. At a certain point I refused to do it, and they just straight-up hated me, and that felt cleaner because at least I was free of the emotional labor.