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A couple of things, quickly:

to Jeimey: the "Asperger's" designation is not in the new DSM, true-- but it's folded into the diagnosis of "autism," not gone. Many docs are using DSMIV and DSMV in conjunction for a while to make sure they do not miss anyone who should properly be diagnosed.

And to Moomin: good behaviorism is individually tailored. If she's not responding to this program, they should be taking data (please tell me someone is taking data) and making serious adjustments. If they are not doing that, IMO they're not doing what needs to be done.

DeeDee

I usually sit and nod through everything DeeDee says, and also PolarBear, but oddly this time I find myself in the opposite corner. I have a girl with Aspergers, it was excruciatingly difficult to get her diagnosed and happened only because I drove the process (and read and researched myself half to death). I get EXACTLY how hard it is to peg Aspergers in a gifted girl. But I am just not convinced you are looking at Aspergers/ASD. You certainly COULD be dealing with ASD, but I am not convinced. I also usually fall on the side of dealing with social problems by tackling them (ie keep the child at school). But this time I agree with HowlerKarma. I would be pulling her out while it is YOUR choice and not let her drive you to it.


It really seems like if you possibly can taking a break from environments that aren't working, it might be a good idea to try getting on a more even keel and then hopefully trying again when she is more mature and possibly you are more in control (as compared to therapists or teachers that she can run rings around).

I do think long term getting into a school environment is a good idea, but you are talking about a child who is radically advanced, even in the context of this board, and one who is at the age when being that advanced is MOST difficult in a traditional school environment (the first years of school suck for almost all gifted kids) and she's responding to that frustration in a manner that is atypical of her gender.

In general terms it's more common for HG+ girls to blend and for the kids that JUST.CAN'T.STAND the miss-match and act out hyperactively/violently to be boys. She's acting like a boy with ZERO tolerance for a radically miss-matched environment (and yes I know Aspie children can be less obviously gendered, or cross over their gendered behaviours). My question is, how would everyone's responses differ if she were a boy? Would she be more likely to be labelled ADHD? Would she be more likely to get the ASD label if she behaved EXACTLY the same or would they still say no ASD? Would it be easier for people to say "It's just SO HARD for 4yr old boys to tolerate being bored out of their minds, they're too busy and active to sit through abject boredom..." or "Its just so hard for 4yr old boys to realise that they are the smartest person in the room and not know how to deal with their feelings of being unsafe and out of control because at 4 they should not be the one who's 'in control'"?

Since home schooling appears to be an option in your case why not take advantage of this and home school for a few years at least. I can see no advantage in her spending a few more years manipulating everybody. I also question based on my experience whether putting a child in environment that is highly stressful for them day after day without their consent is the best way to teach them to deal with that environment in a healthy manner.

Moomin, I hear you. This is really hard.

Do you have a private psychologist? (who does the CBT?) In your shoes I would get whoever has the best professional handle on your DD's situation and have a long talk with that person about what you are seeing, and what educational placements would allow the development of coping skills/behavior improvement.

I can see that regular kindergarten will be more of the same unless you can get it set up in a truly different way, and HK's and Mum3's comments make sense to me. I just suspect that your DD will take command of the homeschooling situation and make it what she wants it to be (and therefore not have to work on the difficult skills she needs) unless you set it up *really* carefully.

Have you considered medicating for the anxiety? Some people won't consider it for a child, I know, but for our DS it made a world of difference in his ability to learn to cope. He still had to work to manage his anxiety, but it went from un-doable to doable.

DeeDee

DeeDee - part of the reason I think homeschooling might work is that I seem to recall moomin saying that they (and their Mom??) are the only two people that the child DOESN'T pull this stuff with and doesn't get away with it. I got the impression that with Moomin (and grandma?) that she can finally BE the child and let the adult BE the adult and function in a more normative way which has got to be a huge balm for her anxiety and provides a chance to actually GET the social instruction/experience she needs. It's also clear from the posts above that moomin is the one MOST likely to call her on her behaviour, push for the true cause of a the scenario and NOT tolerate it. The teachers and therapists seem to get that this is a one of a kind scenario and that they have no idea what to do. I just don't see how a bunch of people who have no idea how to deal with this have a better hope of shepherding this little girl to a point where she CAN "tolerate fools gladly" and can socialise normally. Clearly these skills must be developed but I am thinking that a combination of time out to reset and having a truly trusted adult in charge is the (least worst) solution (for right now).

Also I guess I come from a place where we KNOW that our DD has issues that we don't feel confident to deal with alone and yet again and again and again when we try to get professional help there just ISN'T any. We have a core group of professionals who we like, trust and respect, they are the best our city has to offer. They can see her problems are real but all basically agree that she's too high functioning for what they can offer and they are at a loss ("Yes she needs social skills training, but you MUST NOT put her into any of the social skills groups we have available, she will get nothing and might be harmed" "Yes she has a receptive language problem, but she's so perfect 1:1 this needs to be addressed in a group - oh but there isn't one"). Increasingly I am having to accept that I am the only expert on my child and I have to do the absolute best I can and "the best I can offer" generally does not involve the therapies or scenarios that one might naturally assume would be useful. And my child is not even REMOTELY PG. She's MG on a good day, not even that on a bad day...

Hi,

Her K readiness class sounds like a fishbowl with 6 goldfish and 3 greedy piranhas. I don't see how that ratio or their goals mimic a K environment at all. A K teacher may well be focused on enough other things they basically ignore minor infractions like an otherwise smart girl who makes faces or attempts to startle another child (unless it becomes a real pattern).

Having been asked for an opinion, I would say take her out and spend the next 3 weeks trying to convince her she is as wonderful as she always was, that she is not the behavior problem people have been telling her she is. Separate her from her occasional behaviors. Yes those particular moments were bad choices but she is basically a very well behaved kid. She is capable of showing excellent behavior so just expect she will in the future. For the moment keep her with people with whom she does well. Let her breathe for a few weeks and have a chance to enter K without having just practiced being mean to kids.

DS would get out of the pre-K we later pulled him from and I would ask him how it went and he would refuse to talk. He is very excitable and even more impatient and he got in trouble for things like talking over the teacher or not sitting criss cross apple sauce. I would say, "Did you poke anyone's eyes out?" He would say no. I would say, "Well they must have at least called an ambulance". He would say no. "Did you take a chair and beat the teacher with it?" Etc. And finally he would laugh and I would say that it sounded like he did great, and hand him his juice box and we would go do something more fun.

I encourage you to take this humorous take on it with your DD, for the beginning of K. Be on her side. And I encourage you to see it more humorously yourself -- she is 5 and there is a reason worldwide structured schooling starts around 6. Yes most girls are probably ready at 4 but not every single one. Few 10 year olds yell at others for not playing house the right way. So somewhere in there they grow up a little. Yes behavior experts disagree with me but they are basing their opinions on an average, on the general population, and what you have is so very far from the general population, she is a very bright girl capable of great insight and frustrated with all sorts of things that are beyond her control. Thinking far more thoughts per minute than most of the experts.

Tell her you agree the child didn't understand how to play house properly and you can imagine you might have yelled at them too if you were in her shoes. Or that it does sound unfair the other child wanted the scissors or that they wouldn't take her suggestion even though it does sound brilliant. Only in the barest way condone the teacher's response. Make it so that unless someone really did get seriously injured that you don't think she did much wrong. Set the bar very low. Draw the line at actual injurious physical aggression.

Otherwise, just acknowledge that yes that was probably something that would be upsetting to a teacher, in a matter of fact neutral way. There is a real difference between what is acceptable to a parent and what is acceptable to a random assortment of teachers. Don't attempt to have premonitions about what would set off her new K teacher. Do you personally care if she disrupted the class from counting pennies when they've been counting pennies every day for the whole year? No, deep down not really. So don't say you do. It's a real learning curve about what upsets a teacher, they are really all different and each classroom is different. So make sure she is clear what is okay with you and what is not, and set that bar so low that she has very little trouble jumping over it.

I think our job is not to toe the party line. Our job is to think long term and raise a child that will always tell us the truth about what happened at school that day. The teacher doesn't deeply care if she tells you the truth or how their comments affect your whole family's weekend. They care that they felt a bit scared when they saw her holding up scissors and snarling at another child. Our job is to nod to the teacher and say oh how upsetting in a empathetic voice, and then go home and tell our child that it sounds like they had a frustrating day but that it's great no one was injured, feed them a cookie and go to bed, get up and encourage them to use their words that day or maybe not play house if it is something that ends up upsetting them. If it feels like a run on sentence it is.

And then over time we try to give them general principles, maybe role play or talk about how to express themselves in a more mature way. Maybe with words, for example. The "Man she really did that with the doll? That makes no sense!" "Lets brainstorm and think how to respond next time so you don't get in trouble for yelling again. What else could you have done?" is a tried and true tactic. I'm sure you have and wonder why it hasn't worked yet and it has nothing to do with you, it almost certainly is that your DD is wired to react without thinking too deeply about it. That being the executive control part.

We can compliment them on the times they do act mature. We can brag about them with them in earshot about specific things they did that show us they can act mature because that is a way bigger compliment than just to their face. We can try to avoid them being in a setting with unfair expectations (if they have poor self control then that's a different setting than if they have good self control).

For my DS6 public K did not appear to be a good option. We kept him in his preschool which had a K, they were a playbased preschool that called his intensity "passion", they were wonderful with him and expected very little but by and by a little more, and he did very well there. I am so thankful it existed and that we happened to find it. If it had been a worse fit then K probably would have looked like a better option, but he was happy at the preschool so we thought it a safer bet for him to stay.

At about 5.5 I thought there might be some chance that some day in his teens maybe he would get to go to a regular school. Right around when he turned 6 I started to think it would go okay if only he'd get the perfect teacher. And now at 6 and some months I think most any teacher next year in public 1st grade will actually tolerate him. As much as I would like to compliment his preschool teachers I think it was more just time that's made him more ready for a large group type setting.

We really liked Transforming the Difficult Child workbook that Grinity suggested. We implemented mainly the part where you compliment the child on all the mundane things one usually takes for granted. Closing the door when they come in, taking off their shoes where they are supposed to. It's endless, the rules we want kids to follow and most do almost all of it. It really helped us see how obedient DS actually was trying to be. And then the other part of the book we put into practice was a long list of specific expectations and clear rules. Lots of no this and no that under headings like "respect for others" and "everyone helps". We use time outs occasionally but more just remind him when he breaks a rule. He's a good kid who has lot of frustrations and an immense ability to escalate his energy level in seconds.

I felt like by getting DS more on our side, or put another way by making him feel like we had complete faith in him through relentlessly complimenting things he had forgotten he chose to do, that he opened himself up more to working on things that are hard for him. He had been very oppositional with most everyone but is barely so at this point.

Moomin, it does seem like a common attitude here too that it's "better" for kids to have lots of friends in the lower grades, rather than one particular friend, but none of my kids' friends have actively prevented close friendships (that I am aware of). Maybe that is something for the IEP? That she not be forced into a broad social group until she indicates readiness?

At my sons school you can request they be placed with a specific friend for the next year (or away from a particular person) but it is not guaranteed. They like children to have someone they work well with in the class. If 2 kids were playing with each other to the exclusion of all others someone may gently intervene i guess. But we are in NZ not US.

For what it's worth, which may not be much, we have started treating our anxious, depressed, seems sort of ADHD/Aspie/sensory (but also does NOT check off a LOT of those boxes) 9yo DD with Rhodiola this summer, following a tip here. It's an herb, a so-called adaptagen, with quite a few studies showing efficacy in treating depression and anxiety. Though I would not say it is a wonder drug, we have seen noticeable and real improvement. It is possible that this is due to it being summer and DD being out of school, but last summer was quite bad. I'm just throwing this out there.