Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Explosive Child and/or Nurtured Heart approach

I wanted to publicly clarify something too as Grinity brought up something to me privately.

I'm not really arguing for or against the Explosive Child.

In fact, I don't use it except for the fact that it helped me understand that there are very good explanations as to why certain children do not respond to traditional behavioral modification techniques.

In fact, I don't use any "technique" to help my child who was difficult/spirited/oppositional (fill in the term of your choice) and was prone to melt down or dig in her heels 10 times a day over the course of 3-4 days. By that 4th day, I can honestly tell you, I wanted to a) run away or b) hang myself, because I couldn't cope. Even though I was grilled endlessly on some of my forensic cases, my 5 year old daughter's baffling behavior brought me to my knees.

Even though I spent 7 years learning about Attachment Parenting, Positive Discipline, and Playful Parenting (other things that worked well for my oldest and youngest daughter, so I know it wasn't that it wasn't my parenting techniques), I was having trouble "keeping up" with these meltdowns and other oppositional behaviors.

My daughter with those meltdowns was the one with severe social anxiety as well and selective mutism (a communication disorder in social settings - though she was highly communicative at home). Turns out they had a lot to do with each other, but the common element was a neuro-developmental delay (not a dysfunction or a disorder, just a delay in development) in her emotional regulation centers though her cognitive development was advanced. Or, in other words, she was developing asynchronously and her emotional intelligence (for lack of a better term) needed to be brought up to the level of her cognitive intelligence.

For her, the subtle sensory processing difficulties made it difficult for any messages I had to "get through". No matter how hard I tried to reassure her, to teach her things, didn't make one difference until I reduced her overall stress about how the world felt to her.

Interestingly enough, all her perfectionist tendencies seemed to mellow out as well. She's got a lot more tolerance for herself than she did 2 years ago.

I honestly don't know about the "Nurtured Heart Approach" with the exception that one blogger I know with an autistic child uses it and seemed to do well with it.