Hi Winnie, I wrote a long post for you with my Kindle then my son got out of therapy and I accidently deleted all of it! ARRRGGG Hope I can do better now, lol
I am so glad you found us, partly for selfish reasons, (misery loves company???, no not really).
I hope you find this group as emotionally uplifting as I do. Even if stories or advice is hard to hear, I have not met anyone here who has not had their full heart in it. I have had people here who happened to be up very late bail me out of despair, while fighting in an ER for appropriate placement for my son....These folks really do get it.
And there is certainly a group of us who have kids who have assaulted us. I am among them.
My son is also on the spectrum and he too has adaptive scores very very significantly lower than his ability. Unlike your son, my son tests borderline cognitively though. Still his adaptive scores are lower than the fourth percentile and even compared to his ability he is very very low. I totallly agree that life skills and adaptive behaviors are far more impactful on their life and future.
I was meeting with our home psychologist yesterday and we were talking about some things that you might relate to. He had just gotten a referral for a child who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the message said, .... Hi, my son has ODD, ADHD and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)....and went on from there. He has since talked to her and the county is hiring him to coordinate the providers. Why???? Because his company works with kids like ours, who have multiple diagnosis. and serious behavior challenges. He said after talking to this mom it is clear that the focus of treatment has been on treating the symptoms (the ODD, the ADHD) and no one was looking at the big picture issue, the FASD. You and I do have services for our kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) but I wonder if you, like I have found that if you ever have to have services in the mental health system, they feel obligated to add another diagnosis. Last year, after a medication reaction requiring hospitalization, the doctors felt compelled to add possible mood disorder to his diagnosis. Well, moodiness and the up and down swings that he has are classic symptoms of the brain injury he has as well as his Autism diagnosis.
What our home psychiatric said is that regardless of the diagnosis....they have had better success when they help people see that it is not that these kids actually have ODD or ADHD as a separate diagnosis ( not always, just typically) but rather that they have a developmental condition that has oppositionality, defiance, aggression, mood swings, attention problems, hyperactivity, etc. as symptoms. Sometimes the symptoms are also related to other symptoms that go along with those diagnosis...like motor planning problems, auditory processing problems, etc.
He did NOT say we dont address those issues. He said that every single source working with the client has to work from that umbrella perspective. So, the behavior people, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, the speech therapist, the Occupational Therapist (OT), the vocational person...everyone...has to work from the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) perspective (in our cases).
That has become once again very very clear for my son. Last year things fell apart everywhere. And the only places I could get help were panicked about the increased aggression so focused on that and forgot about his inability to understand and all of his sensory integration issues, etc... and life stunk. The aggression kept increasing because the treatment/behavior plans kept becoming more and more punitive.
So, I got him into as may new things as I could, a horse therapy program for kids with autism, a support group for brain injured young men where they hired a staff to use visual supports to help him to participate in the group from an Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) perspective, he enrolled in an autism center which develops social skills (next session is how to handle when things don't go as planned or if things are not going your way, taking another perspective)...he also has a one on one there since he was aggressive, but now after finishing his second session....all those that said he can't be with peers have toe at their words. I said over and over, if you go back to Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) programming, things will improve. AFter our first session he was getting lower marks for how he used his words, and several skills commonly hard for kids on the spectrum...by the end of this session they said he is actually a role model at times! It is so amazing to me and I could cry thinking of it.
He also switched schools and is in a program that has many kids with high behaviors but he is not in the autism program. They put him in the FASD program because they also use Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) strategies but have more flexibility for his brain injury....(he doesn't have FASD as a diagnosis and even though his social report pre adoption said his mom had been monitored even before she was pregnant with him, who really knows....still he had a brain mass and surgery and his symptoms more closely match that brain injury and FASD is a brain injury too). We had a glitch at the beginning of the year but since that first month, things have only gone up. He has days for sure that are not great, but overall, he is making progress both academically and in behaivor. (only two kids in the class, three adults and it is ahuge school, he does lots of vocational training and he is doing a stellar job in that area, huge self esteem boost)
He still has times at home he gets in my face, pushes me around but he has not been hurtful in his aggression for some time.
We also got a service dog for him in Sept. and after nearly not being able to go places in our car anymore due to his aggression, we now have almost no issues when traveling.
It sounds like you, like I have had the benefit of options of finding many services, for me, sometimes they ahve not been the most appropriate, but at least we had some help.
I fully agree our kids have no business being in the justice system. They would be killed, they could never figure out the social codes. And certainly they wouldn't learn much...much good that is.
For my son, I will be seeking guardianship so he can be in supervised placements in teh future. I can imagine that may be harder for you if your son fought it because he is not as cognitively delayed as my son. Cognition alone would not be enough for my son though because he is borderline. But I have been told repeatedly by doctors and legal advisors that his adaptive scores and medical history will mean that the judge will approve it.
Is that an option you are considering? It wouldn't have to be forever. Is your son going to go to transitional programming in school until 21 or is he going to graduate and accept his diploma?
I'm sure I didn't make a ton of sense here...feel free to ask questions. As IC said, most of us could fill a book with our stories. You have found a home for sure. It is pretty hard to explain how it feels to love someone, know they have some challenges that may make them not be able to control their behavior fully, but we still have to teach them to do better, and we still are human and feel angry at them when they hurt us. It is a weird life.