Irony (or Tragedy)

Last night I was telling one of the other children about Mike’s latest choices. We were talking about his FASD and it suddenly hit me. Two of the major difficulties people with FASD face are that they have difficulty learning from past experiences and difficulty understanding cause and effect.

So, basically, people who can’t learn from past experiences and don’t understand cause and effect really don’t understand how actions relate to consequences.

And yet this morning I am going to call the “Consequential Program” (that’s the name of it) to check on my FASD son and find out how he is doing. The idea everyone at the Group Home is that they will send him there and he will learn his lesson (learning from past experience) and thus realize that if he wants to come back to the group home and be successful, he must change his behaviors (understanding cause and effect). I hate to sound pessimistic, but it “Ain’t Gonna Happen.”

We have also learned from parenting him over the years that this type of behavior management has the opposite effect. When he is given a consequence and threatened with more, he just figures he has nothing left to lose and spirals and spirals until he hits bottom. It scares me now what bottom might be.