noahtheduke

take data in change it push it out

cis - straight - white - 30 or 40 years old
clojure programmer
living in the shadow of grief


nothing remains forever empty


Profile pic commissioned from @ICELEVEL


noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

i'm not doing a good job and we can't see an occupational therapist until july.

my 4 year old probably has sensory processing disorder and adhd, she's self-confident and precocious but lacking in any real world experiences, and she triggers me nearly every day like i'm living at home with my dad. (that's another story for another day.)


noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

transcription of this morning, after offering other foods:

Me: "well, what do you want for breakfast?"
Her: "a egg!"
Me: "hardboiled?"
Her: "yes".
Me: <makes the egg> here you go, little lady."
Her: "no, I’m not hungry."
Me: "remember yesterday when you were upset and didn’t want to play at the playground even tho you asked to go because you were hungry?"
Her: "yeah"
Me: "wanna eat the hard boiled egg we made that your asked for?"
Her: "no, i don’t like hard boiled eggs, it’s going to be gross."
Me: "sweet girl, you don’t want cereal, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, or any of our leftovers. you haven’t eaten anything. you need food energy if we’re going to play. we can’t go to the play place if you don’t have any food energy."
Her: "<crying> Nooooooooooooo i wanna go!"
Me: "what do you want to eat?"
Her: "i’m not hungry!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Me: 🤡


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in reply to @noahtheduke's post:

this is an oblique strategy (and i'm not a parent) but: if you're not, consider getting therapy. i only say this because my wife is a therapist who works with a lot of young autistic adults and she regularly mentions that they would be so much better off if their parents were able to better regulate their own emotions

i did like 5 years of therapy before having kids, but covid and then kids stopped that and i haven't been back since 2019. thankfully, i'm not to the point of yelling at her, raging or screaming or breaking things like my dad did, just a lot of internal pain and letting it roll over me like i'm caught in a wave.

If you can find a good parenting class, take it. The one my spouse and I took was organized by the preschool, and we still use some of those techniques a decade later.

One big lesson was that kids will do almost anything for attention from their parents, and if misbehaving is the only way to get attention that’s what they’ll do. So it’s really important as parents to find ways to give our kids positive attention, so we’re reinforcing the behaviors we want not the ones we don’t want.

in reply to @noahtheduke's post:

not a parent, and i don't want to overstep, but would it have worked to let her not eat but bring some food to the playground? you know she's going to be hungry and get to be the hero by having through to brought food, and she never has to do anything she doesn't want to. and (hopefully) she gets a little closer to the lesson that "if i want to feel good, i should eat before doing things"

We pack plenty of snacks, just hard to give kids eggs (or tacos or spaghetti or whatever "big meal" we're eating) when we're in the car or at a play place that doesn't allow food or wandering around the mall etc.

I'm a parent of 2. One of em definitely has some stuff going on (don't want to be too public with it at this point). I read a book and have started implementing certain ideas from it, and so far I'm liking the direction our mealtimes are heading in.

The book is helping your child with extreme picky eating. I don't know if you'd classify your kid that way, but the strategies are broadly useful. I find parenting books useful to help give me perspective on how kids operate and how my behaviors can affect them, not always to solve specific issues.

Anyway, sorry if that overstepped. Good luck to you. We are all just trying, aren't we?