Managing Separation Anxiety Week 2 and 3

Separation anxiety is normal for toddlers and typically starts as early as 5 or 6 months and peaks at about 18 months. Separation anxiety is part of the 'growing up' process that all children go through but for some children with special needs this phase can be very difficult and stressful. With my daughter with ASD it triggered tantrums and incessant crying. We started our separation management with her dedicated therapists (see here: Managing Separation Anxiety: Week1) and I decided to write a collective post of the second and third week of our separation anxiety management frankly because I have been very occupied the past two weeks that I don't know which happened when haha!

The management have been very significant not only with helping her to be able to calm herself when I am going away but opened new opportunities for learning. Her ability to re-echo words of certain common objects slowly emerged. She was able to meet with her speech pathologist who comes in once a month and she was astonished that my daughter was able to say two-word phrases such as 'eat cake' and 'brush teeth' (with constant prompting) although it was inconsistent and blurted the words out in the middle of screaming. My self-realization was that she was trying to avoid learning how to say the words by using me to shield herself from the prodding and prompting of her therapists. By the second week her therapies started with almost the same behavior as she had with the first week but the wailing was eventually reduced to whimpers for 5 to 10 minutes at the start of the sessions. By week 3, she quit the crying but appeared irritated as they were about to start, however, she went out of the room happy at the end of each session.

At home, she doesn't follow me around all the time anymore and I can leave the room without her crying or running after me. Stress have been significantly reduced for me and I am pretty sure for her too. Whenever I leave the house, she cries for a while and then goes on to find something interesting to do a couple of minutes after. (I know because I conceal the car behind the fence and I make sure that she stopped crying before I leave. LOL) 

We pushed her limit a little bit higher as we adapted the management with her swimming teacher as well. During her swimming lessons, I left her in the caring and capable hands of her swimming teacher while I had to go somewhere where I can conceal myself and still keep watch of her swimming progress. Naturally, she was not cooperative at the start but eventually and gradually learned to accept the fact that it was going to be the setup from then on. The results that we had in her therapies were duplicated seeing how fast she was able to improve her skills in swimming, In fact, her teacher signed her up for a swimming contest in novice category. 

The most surprising improvement that was brought out by the separation anxiety management was helping her learn how to talk. Little by little she is learning how to voice out her needs. For me, my most important learning is knowing how strong my daughter is. She is young but she is already faced with many difficulties yet she is slowly overcoming each obstacle. 

To God be the Glory!