Use your words

[msagara]

In the comment thread of the previous post, aanna_t asked:

When my kids were very little, I often had to ask them to "use their words" rather than just glowering. That really clicks with what you explain about your son

Comments

[lyssabits]

He would eat one bite of anything. If we were lucky, he would eat two. So if we had twenty-five different things at a meal, he would get enough food. Oddly enough, we didn't. Food was an issue.Argh, my one-year-old is like this. I know my husband sometimes worries, there's a hot spot of austism here in the Bay Area that he attributes to the concentration and inter-breeding of all his fellow techies in Silicon Valley. (He's half convinced he may have a problem himself, but I think that's just a result of being the only introvert in a family of extroverts and being told for decades that he's abnormal.) I'm not worried as much about what it might mean about his mental development as much as I am about his physical development. Kid's about to fall right off the weight and height curves if he doesn't start friggin' eating... Oddly enough, I also don't provide 25 different things for him to eat. ;) Who has time for that?? The day he stops breastfeeding is going to suck, that's pretty much the only thing he'll eat reliably and happily. And

[lyssabits]

Yeah I'm not worried about him being on the spectrum. ;) If for no other reason than he clearly lacks the motor development delays that usually accompany that based on how I found he'd climbed up onto the arm of the couch so he could lean over and grab the votive candles off the MANTLE. At 13 months. Little monkey. He started walking at 11 months, so he seems fine. ;)

I am worried about him being short though, so it's good to hear that your picky eater grew up to be tall and healthy. It's just been hard to watch him steadily drop from being 20th percentile when he was born to 3rd percentile at a year. Someone has to be 3rd percentile, if he had started small and stayed small I wouldn't care but.. He's been a terrible eater since he was born. I can only assume this behavior will continue. *sigh*

[domynoe]

My understanding is that food is an issue for most autistic kids-it's one of the sensory issues they deal with. I remember when Taz only liked maybe half a dozen things, and now that I think about it, most of them were soft foods: mac 'n cheese, pb&j sandwiches, etc. His reaction to food changed over time, but we had to insist he try things and eventually food didn't become such an issue. The first time we knew we were making progress is when we bought a bunch of taco specials and he ate nearly two dozen. No, seriously. We were laughing because he was on the last one and was having so much trouble that we finally told him he didn't have to finish it

[iamshadow]

As an Aspie adult, a highly verbal one at that, can I just say that when I am agitated or upset, being asked to verbalise what I'm feeling is often counter-productive. High emotion or frustration causes what is in essence a traffic jam between brain and mouth. I literally can't force the words out. And being asked to talk, being asked to verbalise, compounds my frustration no end, because I know if I could say what I'm feeling, it would make things easier, but that pathway is broken at that point in time. Repeated questioning is a sure-fire way to provoke a meltdown

[beccastareyes]

As an Aspie adult, a highly verbal one at that, can I just say that when I am agitated or upset, being asked to verbalise what I'm feeling is often counter-productive. High emotion or frustration causes what is in essence a traffic jam between brain and mouth. I literally can't force the words out.

This. It's one reason why I'm thankful all the psychologists I've worked with don't mind me waiting to speak or babbling because I can't figure out how to verbalize things. I'm not always aware of why I feel the way I do, so it helps in the long term, but I can't make it go faster, so it's kind of bad in the short term.

[kuangning]

I am not Aspie -- or at least not diagnosed Aspie; I looked at my Aspie son and know perfectly well where many of his behaviours came from -- and this describes me too. I can tell you perfectly well what I was feeling and why, once I'm past it. I can describe with high accuracy how some future situation will feel. But when I'm highly upset in the moment, you will get no spoken explanation from me. To this day, I prefer to have emotional discussions in text rather than speech; my fiance hates it, but he's learned to work with it, because it's better than the alternative, which is me raging or crying silently and not responding to questions.

[finnyb]

Yes! Yes, to all of this! (Is partly why I prefer the internet to talking to people in person or on the phone--typing or writing to get words out makes it far more likely that what I actually want to express will appear, than talking does.)

[anonymous]

おい、るる。

[chrysoula]

"You want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into a real square."
These days I've started saying, "Who wants it?"
"/I/ want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into a real square, /please/."
"Ok, I'll make you a peanut butter sandwich."
"A peanut butter and JELLY sandwich cut into a real square!" (or sometimes a 'special square all sealed up')

At almost four, he still doesn't understand the question 'why'. He now has an answer for when I ask him what he's thinking about, but since it's usually 'planets', which he's fixated on, I'm not sure he understands the question.

I wonder some about the difference in diagnostic criteria between 'high functioning autism' and 'Asperger's'.

[msagara]

At almost four, he still doesn't understand the question 'why'. He now has an answer for when I ask him what he's thinking about, but since it's usually 'planets', which he's fixated on, I'm not sure he understands the question.

The "Why" question would send my son into a meltdown for years. It had a 50/50 chance of sending him into a meltdown when he was eight. It was, of all the questions we could ask, the one he loathed the most.

In retrospect, this makes sense. Why implies an understanding of internal causality, an ability to both follow the steps from the beginning to the end (action, reaction) and to explain them to someone who isn't living on the inside of his head. The need to explain to someone is something that doesn't even make sense until you've developed theory of mind.

The good news is, theory of mind does come, and my almost-eighteen year old is actually pretty damn good at answering the Why question, now. But, well. 18 seemed like an incredibly long way away when he was four.

[zingerella]

One of the really useful things I got out of one of the parenting books I read when I was trying to get a handle on a challenging phase was the notion that "why" is a difficult question for most, if not all, kids to answer, and that asking it just plain doesn't work up until they're about 8 - 10, depending on the kid. So it stands to reason that it would be an even more difficult question for a kid whose theory of mind developed more slowly.

Apparently "why" is a grownup question. I'd never really thought about that.

[joycemocha]

As near as I can understand, much of the difference comes down to significant pragmatics language dysfunction. While "Asperger's" was used in relation to my son's diagnosis, in reality, based on his level of dysfunction (at age five, speaking in very short, uncomplicated sentences, pretty much subject, verb, object, bottom 1 percentile on a language pragmatics test), I'd say he was high functioning autism, not Asperger.

I read this to understand younger kids

[capplor]

Quite a bit of what you write, I recognize as happening with 2 -4 year olds. For that age child, people expect "strange behavior" but most don't consider that it might be perfectly logical and possible for an adult to understand. One thing that fits, that you haven't mentioned. At one point we were getting frustrated, because the kid KNEW she was supposed to ask (permission or something) but seemed to have no concept of whether the adult being asked was in the room, or paying attention, or capable of understanding a whisper/mumble. Theory of mind? (You ever see that with your son?)

Re: I read this to understand younger kids

[msagara]

At one point we were getting frustrated, because the kid KNEW she was supposed to ask (permission or something) but seemed to have no concept of whether the adult being asked was in the room, or paying attention, or capable of understanding a whisper/mumble. Theory of mind? (You ever see that with your son?)

Until my son was four and a half, he did not acknowledge us when we came home from work (or anywhere else). We would still, of course, say hello and give him a hug, but unless he was specifically waiting for one of us to get home because he needed us to do something Right Now, he didn't turn, didn't say hello back, didn't smile.

He knew we were home. When we were leaving, we had to say good-bye; he also didn't acknowledge this. BUT, on the one day my mother insisted I leave without saying good-bye "because it's not like he notices it anyway" -- and I did, against my better judgement -- he ran to the door when it closed on me and then stood there screaming his lungs out for an hour. (And after that, my mother never, ever let me