No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!
"Collecting No's"
An Effective Alternative to Time Outs For
Children With Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
©2003 Vickie Horodyski
Over the years we’ve combined different strategies to find what works for each of the kids we’ve had to help them stay in their rooms until they’ve calmed down. We had to use all of the strategies for our now 17 year old because she was doing the same things that parents say their children with FASD are doing. Here’s what we came up with:
You go to your room until you are calm and WE decide if you’re calm enough to come out. “If you can ask to come out in a calm voice and then follow that by showing us calm actions, you can come out. But we have final say in whether you’re ready or not.”
We used counting in helping her get to her room.
We collected “No’s” when counting didn’t work. (“Collecting No’s” consists of counting how many no’s they give you in action or words by saying, “That’s 1 no, that’s 2 no’s,” etc. When we collect no’s, we can give the no’s back to them when we choose and they never know if that will be for something important that they want to do or something minor. They never know when they will come back at them which is unsettling and they want to avoid them. Our 17 year old could easily give us 30 no’s for us to collect when she was really angry. We were very selective in what we used those no’s for and the faulty memory came in very handy here because there was no way we could ever use all of the no’s. We would just sort of forget the final count at some point when we were sure she had gotten the point. Eventually we were able to just cue her with, “Do we need to start collecting no’s?” and she would immediately comply.)
As long as she wasn’t destroying her room, we didn’t care what she was doing in her room.
We empowered her by sitting down to make a list of what she could do when she was angry. We contributed our ideas of what we thought would work and then ask her what she thought would work. Of course she chose reading which we were sure would never work because she would have to already be calm in order to read but it went on the list any way. She is very stubborn. When she was angry, we would direct her to choose from her list and she would choose reading. She would go to her room to “read” and she actually did read to calm herself and it worked!
She would slam her door when she got to her room so we put weather stripping around the door which muffled the slam to a whoosh. It took all of the fun out of slamming the door and it quickly stopped.
We didn’t discuss what got her to her room except when a similar situation would come up we would remind her of what happened the last time and did she want to repeat all of that. Sometimes she could stop and calm herself without any interventions from us.
At 17 she takes herself to her room without a word from us. It’s taken 10 yrs to get to this point. Now we have to work on getting her to come out of her room to discuss whatever she was trying to avoid talking about.
Vickie in Fairbanks
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!