Ep42-PWS Behavior Management with Lisa Graziano

I recently attended a conference on PWS Behavior Management, put on by the Prader-Willi California Foundation and facilitated by Lisa Graziano. Lisa was gracious enough to make her first podcast appearance on Walking with Freya – in this last PWS Awareness Month episode – to share some of the tools and understandings on PWS behavior with us. We talk about anxiety and oppositional thinking, two things very prevalent with PWS, what fairness actually looks like and the issues that come up between siblings, how perseveration and repeated questions are often linked to anxiety but can also be a sign of 'non-verbal learning disorder', how structure and routine, especially in the early years, can produce kids that are better able to be flexible in life and how this is the first step to reducing anxiety. Lisa walks us through the build-up to a temper tantrum – how to implement Empathy in the moment to let the individual with PWS know that we understand their feelings and to hopefully get them thinking. And then we talk about the sometimes inevitable meltdown, when Empathy and other strategies have not been successful and our kids have a complete loss of ability to control behavior – an unfortunate symptom of the syndrome. I hope you find this episode insightful and helpful.