Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, this is not medical advice. I share my own experience.
We had an incident a few weeks ago.
Let me start by saying that when we as a family go anywhere, I mean ANYWHERE, there is always one of us with our eyes on our little bundle of TNT. We engage with him regularly to see how he’s coping, and gauge whether or not he’s reached that overstimulated point of no return.
This time we didn’t.
These are the things that nobody talks about, the difficult situations that parents of neurodivergent children have to deal with. Angry outbursts and violence that can occur when our children get overstimulated (nobody’s fault, just part of the neurodiversity body). The embarrassment, shame and guilt we feel afterwards, and the lack of words to make it right with the others involved. My worst nightmare had come true and it made us think long and hard about the way forward for our son. If he cannot learn to control his temper (which is virtually impossible for an Autistic brain), and then something like this happens when he’s older, then it could lead to a very different outcome. We definitely don’t want our son to grow up not knowing how to regulate and see when he’s getting overstimulated and remove himself to calm down and we also know that we are not going to be around him 24/7 as he gets older.
So we went to our GP a few days later and she talked with him, and asked him some questions about how he sleeps, what does he like to do, just getting a feel for his personality. She prescribed medication to help him sleep at night (melatonin) and an anti-depressant to help with his anxiety (especially for school). If you read my post about School Refusal, you would understand the level of anxiety and freeze from him that we’ve experienced in the past. He started his medication, quite fortuitously at the beginning of their 2 week term break, so we would have some time to monitor him and see if the medication was being effective or if we needed to change the dosage for any reason before school started again.
The results of the medication have been unbelievable. He is calm, relaxed, sleeping well and his beautiful, kind personality is shining through. There are still normal emotional fluctuations, but nothing near the kind of yo-yo effect before the medication. We are confident that this is going to help him in his return to school, as this environment can be his most challenging (other than church).
Now I know that there are so many different kinds of medications out there that Doctors prescribe for Autistic children, OCD, ADHD and others, and I understand that sometimes it takes a very long time to find the best one for your child, I have heard stories of parents who have had to deal with difficult side effects with their children, and it honestly breaks my heart that we even have to go this route, but if I myself am on medication to help stabilise my mood and combat my own crippling anxiety, why should I keep it from my son if it helps so much with quality of life? We started with a supplement booster, but it just wasn’t enough for him, so now we wait to see how the fourth term progresses, and we are trusting that his attitude towards school will shift to a more positive one over time.
SOME FACTS ABOUT NEURODIVERSITY AND SLEEP:
Over half of children with autism – and possibly as many as four in five – have one or more chronic sleep problems. Many adults on the spectrum likewise have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep through the night
Autistic people can often have trouble sleeping. There are a range of reasons for this including difficulties with relaxing or winding down and irregular melatonin levels.
Autistic people need a full night’s sleep to get even close to enough REM sleep. When you fall asleep, you cycle between NREM and REM sleep. During NREM sleep, your brain moves memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. During REM sleep, your brain integrates this new knowledge with what you already know.
Sleep problems are very common, reportedly as high as 80% in children with ASD. In typically developing children sleep problems and insufficient sleep can result in daytime sleepiness, learning problems and behavioral issues such as hyperactivity, inattentiveness and aggression. Recent research in children with ASD demonstrates that poor sleepers exhibit more problematic behavior than good sleepers.
Fortunately, there are several ways parents can improve a child’s sleep.
