Jacob started school in September of 2017. Lily moved into Y1. Of the full academic year Lily had attended school, I received one phone call the whole time. This phone call was to say she’d been awarded Citizen of the Week for the whole school for how kind, caring and mature she was. This is again to be significant later when, as seems to be the case time and time again, I was blamed for Jacob’s “bad behaviour”.
The second he started school, with it’s constant demands, his anxiety ramped up and he became almost uncontrollable within the classroom. There was an incident with scissors and he cut his own hair followed by another incident when he cut another child’s hair. The other child’s mother was understandably concerned by this. I had asked the school after the first incident to keep scissors away from Jacob but the response was that it wasn’t fair to make them unavailable to the other children without them having to ask for them.
Then the constant phone calls began… Jacob has refused to line up; Jacob has climbed the climbing frame; Jacob has ran across the field. At one point he ran across the field and was cornered by 3 members of staff. He was 5 at the time. He stamped on one of the staff member’s feet and at this point received his first Fixed Term Exclusion.
The phone calls continued until they developed an anxious response from me and I jumped every time the phone rang. It got to a point where I would answer the phone with “what has he done this time” rather than “hello”. During this time, I was pregnant with the twins. I was classed as a high risk pregnancy due to having multiples, a previous premature birth (Isabelle was born at 30 weeks) and I had had 2 previous c-sections.
At this point, I requested a Home/School book take the place of the constant phone calls for the relatively minor transgressions of him not lining up etc and requested they only call me in the event of a major meltdown.
School called in the Educational Psychologist during his first year at School and even before seeing her report I had a major inclination that Jacob had autism.
#pathologicaldemandavoidance #PDAAUTISM #autismfamily #autism #senparent #senparenting
Jacob and his 4 sisters 