Plan of Action - Implemented

Well, he did wake us up at 6AM, like I thought he might. It was obviously a power play... nothing to do with nightmares this time.

We burned through stages 1-3 pretty quickly, and ended up in the car. By the way, I like using the car (the email comment a few posts ago gave me the idea) because it's a safe place to have a tantrum in. It's padded. He can't get out because of the child locks, he can't throw anything, he can't destroy anything -- it's Guy's car, which is a lot older than mine and the upholstery is nothing we need to worry about. Guy and I took turns sitting in the front seat.

When he started hitting I went into the backseat and held him down. I hate, hate, hate doing this but it has to be done. He'd struggle for a while, then promise to stop hitting, then I would let go of his arms... then he'd hug me and cry some more. I'd tell him, "I love you, I won't hurt you, but I will not let you hurt other people."

We told Sunny he could leave the car either when it was 7AM (his normal wakeup time) or when he apologized and wrote ten sentences. We ended up staying in the car until 7AM, but he did apologize.

I'm going to tell our agency that this has been going on and how we're handling it. I want to make sure we're covered and that I'm following all the discipline rules, which are pretty strict. As our trainer once quipped, "you can't lock them in and you can't lock them out." I would think it's OK to lock them in a car, as long as you're in the car as well.

I asked Sunny why he was doing this all of a sudden, but he didn't know. We also told him we were willing to do this every morning if necessary, and he was going to get to know the inside of the car really well if he choose to continue this behavior. He also lost all his TV time for today.

I'm proud of Guy... he kept his head and made it clear to Sunny that we're on the same page.

As soon as we got back into the normal morning routine, Sunny was in a great mood again.

Tomorrow morning might be easier because Sunny will have had swimming after school, so he'll be a more tired out. Guy is also planning to take him on a nice walk with the dog.

I'm just choosing to be very detached about this rough patch. I'm not going to let it emotionally exhaust me. We're thinking about getting his medication upped, but we're going to try and wait it out until he's well into his neurofeedback treatments.