Disciplinary Issues versus Self-Expression

This week Lawrence will be away on Wednesday, so he came on Monday instead. That was yesterday. Lawrence kept the computer on and available to Bow through the grid throughout the day, but the transcript is mostly blanks, with one possible contribution by Bow for the whole day: the single letter "E".

I can't force Bow to type. Neither can Lawrence. We have to wait for him to want to.

Some people are not convinced. They notice that Bow is potty trained, and there are rules for his behavior with people,  and there are rules about not wasting food, so they don't understand why I can't make him write in a way that demonstrates consistently that he is literate, if indeed he is literate.

"Obviously, the potty training was important to you," one person said to me once, "so you worked hard at it. If getting him to cooperate on testing were equally important to you, you might have gotten him trained to do that."

There is a certain amount of truth to this. If my goal were to have him type preset responses to preset questions perhaps I would have achieved that goal, as many others have working with non-humans and developmentally delayed humans. That was never my goal. My goal was for him to have language, and I believe the goal has been achieved.

My policy in raising Bow was similar to the way I was raised in early childhood. Nobody forced me to talk.  That came naturally. Nobody made me answer questions they already knew the answers to. I wasn't punished or rewarded for my linguistic achievements. Language is its own reward.

On the other hand, I was disciplined, but discipline was about what not to do: don't pee on the floor, don't walk and eat, don't make a mess and expect someone else to clean it up. I mean, I did make messes and other people did clean them up, but as soon as it was practically possible for me to minimize the amount of work others had to do to clean up after me, I was expected to cooperate in this regard, and there were consequences if I didn't.

Non-negotiable demands that I make on Bow are disciplinary. Don't bite people. Don't pee on the floor. Don't waste food. I enforce these rules because they make our living together possible. Bow isn't independent yet, and it makes sense that to the extent that he can, he help to make it easier for those who take care of his needs to do so with the greatest of ease.

Every once in a while, Bow tries to get around one of the rules. This morning, he left about three half eaten grapes on his plate and asked for cereal. I said: "Bow, finish the grapes."

He wouldn't, and, of course. I couldn't make him, so I just refused to serve him the cereal until he did eat them. I also explained the reason for the rule: "You've ruined those grapes for anyone else. No one is going to want to eat them. That's wasteful."

Did he understand? It doesn't really matter. He saw that I was not going to serve the cereal until he finished the grapes, so eventually he did finish them. And he got the cereal. And then he asked for a peach, and he got the peach. So everything turned out okay, and Bow did not starve, and yet the rule about not wasting food stood.

But how could I insist that he type something, if I didn't actually tell him what to type? And if I told I told him what to type, in what way would that be language? Wouldn't it be more like a dictation class?

Of course, he was spelling out words the whole time he was asking for food, but not on the computer. Why don't I just take down the letters from the glass and make the computer the only way to communicate? In my case, I have a good excuse: we would lose Hebrew. But what about Lawrence? Why don't we take the English letters off the glass and just leave Bow with the computer for talking? I asked Lawrence about that once, and he thought it was a bad idea.

Why? Because Lawrence comes once a week and has to wait for Bow to let him into his good graces. Because the current communication system works so well, and there is going to be a lot of frustration and anger on Bow's part if we deny him the security of holding our hands. But most of all, because we hope that Bow will want to use the computer in the same way that he wants to spell with us, so that he will use it as a mode of self-expression and not as a system of tasks and rewards.

This afternoon, Bow asked to go outside. I agreed, and I opened the door for him, but he changed his mind and would not go out. When I asked him why, he replied:

סתם חם שם

That means "It's just hot there." But it was an odd sounding phrase because all three words rhymed. A moment after spelling this, Bow added:

חרוז

"Rhyme." He was making a comment on the linguistic form of his earlier utterance.

This is the kind of thing that distinguishes rote training from spontaneous language use. I want Bow to do it on the computer, too. I just don't think I can force him.

Who brought the food?

Last Monday, when Lawrence was sitting with Bow, Bow asked him if he could have an apple. I was out with Sword at the time, so Lawrence went to look for an appropriate apple to give to Bow. Now, I keep apples handy out on the dining table, in big bowls right next to the bananas. And I keep other apples, the ones that are in reserve, in case the first apples run out, in the refrigerator. But it was around three-thirty, and Lawrence knew that we eat dinner at five, and he didn't want to spoil Bow's appetite, but he did want to comply with the request. The apples on the table were big, red apples and big yellow apples. The red apples had come in a large bag, and we were down to the last couple of them. Lawrence felt the apples in the bowl, both yellow and red, were too large for just a snack. So he went looking for smaller apples in the refrigerator. He found an unopened bag full of yellowish/red apples, and he took one and gave it to Bow.

Lawrence told me that he'd taken an apple from the refrigerator to give to Bow before he left that day. It was not a problem. So when I served dinner, I decided to give Bow one of the big red apples. And the next day at lunch, I gave him the last of the big red apples, while I took one of the smaller yellowish/red apples for myself.

Bow threw a fit! He would not finish eating his red apple. I came and looked at it, to make sure it wasn't rotten. It wasn't. It was fine. "Bow, why won't you eat your red apple?" I asked.

He gestured at my tray and then spelled: "Uncle Lawrence gave you those apples to give to me!"

I was shocked. "No, Bow, he didn't. Those are my apples. I bought them at the store with my own money. Lawrence let you have one of them as a snack, but he didn't bring them, and they don't all belong to you!"

It took quite a while to convince him. Because Bow had never seen any of those apples until Lawrence gave him one, he assumed Lawrence had brought them. He thought he knew all my apples and that those were not mine. However, I did convince him, and he did eventually finish eating his big red apple.

It's true that many times people do bring by food just for Bow. Once Rex the welder and his wife brought shiny red apples that had grown on their own trees just for Bow, and only Bow got to eat them. Lawrence does sometimes bring special snacks just for Bow. Tracey brought sweet potatoes he had grown himself just for Bow, and only Bow got to eat them. Bow received a shipment of pears a few times as a present, and we were so anxious to honor Bow's property rights, that when he refused to eat them, we let them rot. But the second time that happened, we decided that if Bow refused to eat the pears when they were overripe, then others could do so, because it is really very wasteful.

As a firm believer in property rights, I have raised Bow to be aware of what is his and to claim it. However, it was really disconcerting to be mistakenly accused by my little boy of stealing what he believed to be his apples!

"It tastes like cat."

One of my friends who read yesterday's blog entry commented that it was a sign of successful parenting that Bow helped enforce the rule of serving one item at a time during meals. I had to agree and was feeling quite pleased. However, Bow is  not unaware of what is going on with this blog. I read him every entry out loud, and I think he must have felt it was time to let me know he wasn't quite that obedient. He still wants to see what he can get away with, as far as wastefulness is concerned.

This summer, Wednesday is going to be my "free day", thanks to Megan and Lawrence. The way it works is that I get up at 6:30 and help Bow in the morning, including breakfast and potty duties. At 9:00 am Megan comes in and takes over. At noon, Lawrence relieves Megan, and he does lunch with Bow and stays until 2:00. At 2:00 pm Megan relieves Lawrence, and she stays until  5:00 pm, when I come back, and Sword and Bow and I have supper together as a family. I still put Bow to bed sometime after 7:00 pm, usually around 7:30. So, even on  my "free day", I am with Bow about five hours all told. Still it's much less than my usual twelve hours. During the year, I don't have a "free day", but it's really a nice thing to have, and I think Bow enjoys the variety of companionship, too.

Anyway, I don't know whether it is due to my blog post about waste or not, but yesterday it seems that Bow decided to play finicky with Lawrence at lunch. I wasn't there to hear about it from Lawrence, but he left me a note:

LUNCH JUNE 9, 2010 (with Lawrence)

* I gave Bow a second apple which was green. He asked for it as usual, but one bite and he told me: "I don't like this apple." I asked"Why?" He said: "It tastes funny." I went and got him another apple, and he ate it.

*   I gave Bow a small portion of my ravioli on his table. He asked: "What is that?" I told him, he asked for it, took one bite and rejected it. He said:"I don't like it." I asked:"Why not?" He said: "It tastes like cat." I asked: "Did you ever eat cat?" He said "No."

Funny, the stuff that goes one when I'm not around!

He doesn't like me so much

Bow's been misbehaving, off and on, all day today. Maybe it's the weather. It's suddenly so hot outside. Sword got out of school at 12:30. This is her last day. Waiting for her school bus to bring her home, I picked some ripe cherries off our tree. Seeing that the bus was late, I brought the cherries back and showed them to Bow. "Be good," I said, "and you can have them as soon as she comes home." I understood by now that the bus driver must have taken the kids to the store to buy them sodas and snacks. When Sword got home, she handed me the giant snickers bar she had gotten. "Because I love you," she said. And though I did not want it, there was nothing I could do to make her take it back. She knows I'm not happy about the local custom of having the bus driver treat the kids to unhealthy snacks without a parental consent form.

I went back to Bow and was going to give him the cherries, but he had intentionally thrown up on the floor in the meanwhile. (He can regurgitate at will. When he's being nice, he keeps it in his mouth. We call that chewing his cud.)

"But why? Why did you do that?"

"I don't like you so much," he spelled.

Well, that's okay. Some days I'm not so crazy about him, either. But I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here in the pen with him, till he changes his mind.

So the Snickers bar and the cherries are on my computer table, uneaten. Eventually, Sword will let me give the Snickers bar back to her. Eventually, Bow will have the cherries. None of it is going to waste. And nobody is going hungry.

Some days are better than others. But we manage to muddle through all of them.

Bow and Money

This morning, at breakfast, Bow spelled: "I heard that it's hard for you to pay." He was talking about a conversation he overheard between me and Lawrence. Lawrence had suggested some improvements that could be made at Orchard House, and I had to tell him that I had no budget for anything like that. I am hoping to generate more income, and everything I am doing these days is geared in that direction. "If I had that kind of money," I told Lawrence, "I would spend it on care for Bow, not home improvements."

Does Bow understand about money? Yes, and no. He knows what it is. He's handled money. He's smelled it. My father used to say pecunia non olet, "money doesn't smell." But clearly money does smell, and Bow likes to sniff it and learn about all the people who have handled it. What he's not interested in is earning any for himself.

At one point I tried to set up a system of rewards that would include money. If Bow completed a task, he would get paid, and the money would accumulate in his piggy bank till there was enough for him to order what he wanted from a catalog. It didn't work though, because Bow refused to say what he would like to order, and he was not at all motivated by Mammon.

The one time Bow asked me to give him money was when he felt jealous that Sword was buying me a present and he had nothing to give. "Give me money," he said. "How much money do you want?" I asked. "22," he spelled out. "Twenty-two dollars?" "Yes."

I have no idea how he came up with that number, or whether it meant anything to him. But when it came time for him to tell the current intern what he wanted her to purchase with the money, he wouldn't say. Eventually, the intern gave that money back to me.

Bow currently has a balance of nine dollars and thirty-one cents in his piggy bank, but he has never spent any of it.