Originally Posted by Mk13
He spent all afternoon telling me how sad he was and how he felt this wasn't fair.

I like DeeDee's advice about setting a timer and giving him 3 minutes to talk about how it's not fair, and then move on. I also found that the concept of "fair" was something my kids latched onto when they were little, and many times they were latching onto it in situations where "fair" really wasn't the issue at all, but it's an easy concept for a child to grasp. So another thing that I found helpful was to also try to frame the situation for my kids (they aren't on the ASD spectrum, so our approach may not be appropriate or might not work in this case)... but fwiw, it helped us when my kids were getting stuck on things being "not fair" for us to talk about the concept of "fair" and where it applies and then put a frame around the situation they are upset about and talk about whether or not it really i ssomething you can view as "fair" vs "not fair" or maybe more so just "something that happened" and needs to be dealt with. I am probably not explaining it well at all! But it did help my older dd, who used to be a bit rigid in looking at things like this.

Best wishes,

polarbear