"Lets talk behavior" week 3

I can tell you right now what BE's inappropriate social behavior is, which breaks my heart that I need to try to curtail... He SCREAMS when he is excited. He SCREAMS when he is successful at something, when a peer is successful at something, when he or a teammate even attempts something, when he wants to do something. He is a screamer. It is so flipping cute that I don't want to tell him to stop, but I realized it was a problem twice this week. Once when our group was bowling. BE knocked a pin down (only one pin, he is seriously the most optimistic kid!) and he SCREAMED in excitement. His peer, L then covered his ears and made a comment that it was really loud.

That is when I realized expressing his excitement like that doesn't bother me and plenty of people probably think it is super cute, but it does bother some people and he should probably work on a more appropriate volume. The second time was when we were in the pool. BE loves to play this game called motorboat where I spin him around really fast and really slow. He never knows what speed is coming so he gets super excited in his anticipation. I use it as a reward after he has worked hard to accomplish something he doesn't love doing. We were playing it on Tuesday and he was SCREAMING again in excitement and I probably had 3 WSU students look at me like, "what are you doing to this poor kid, you must be torturing him." Because it sounded like he was screaming out of terror or misery. That is the second time that I realized that his screaming can easily be misinterpreted by people who don't know him and don't know his personality to scream when he is excited.

When he screamed and L made the comment and covered his ears I tried to get BE to realize that his volume was a little loud and I had him say something to L to apologize or something (I can't remember now what I said exactly) and then in the pool I explained that people thought he was screaming because he was upset and I asked him if he was upset or excited, and he replied that he was excited. So that is for sure something we have got to work on. I love that he gets so excited. I love that he is so optimistic. He could get that excited about a fly landing on him. He just seems to love everything about life. So I hate the thought of trying to calm him down when he gets that excited because I don't want to curtail that. But in all honestly it is an inappropriate social behavior. He needs to find more appropriate ways to express his excitement.

SO that was one of my objectives for this week... To try to get him to express his excitement at the very least at more of an appropriate level.