Speak to Me

One of the most difficult things for some people to grasp about most Autistic children is they are LITERAL. I mean they take every thing you say in a literal sense. For example if you said, "I feel like my head is going to explode!" meaning "I have a horrible headache!" they would take you literally. They would think your head is actually going to explode, they can't make the connection to your sarcasm. This can become very frustrating and at times make them angry because you are talking a foreign language to them.

For my son he takes everything you say in the literal sense and at times you don't even know what just happened till you look at it from his perspective. A good example of this is what some one told him they saw saw at a car show, "This awesome car that had some bad looking tires on it." Manni heard, "This nice looking car that had some horrible tires on it!" he took it in the literal form. I had to explain to him that the word "bad" in this instance was meaning good, but he didn't get it and became very frustrated with me. He wanted to know why you would use "bad" in a way that meant just the opposite of what you were actually trying to say. Another saying we had to drop a LONG time ago was, "Its raining like cats and dogs outside!" he actually thought it was raining cats and dogs. It took us a LONG time to get him to understand that it was a saying for it was raining really hard.

 I think one of my biggest heart ache for my son is he does not know when people are making fun of him. It is a blessing and curse at the same time and my heart melts when I see or hear what is going on. I taught Manni how to laugh at jokes when everyone else is laughing so he will not look or feel out of place as he gets older. To look at the people around him and if they start to laugh at a joke he should chuckle a little bit so he is not out of place. This has been both a curse and blessing for him! This year I found out that during lunch Manni would be sitting with a group of boys that were always telling jokes. Manni doing what I taught him would chuckle or laugh when the other boys did as a way to fit it. The problem is Manni had no idea that they were laughing at him or telling jokes about him. To this day I don't think he knows and I would LOVE to keep it that way. It was a blessing that he was able to fit in and not know what was going on but a curse as well because he didn't know what was happening. He was in the dark and it took a teacher hearing it a few times before realizing what they were doing to Manni and stopped it! Manni does not get jokes and probable never will and I am okay with that, BUT I am not okay with other people using that against him in such a way.

In our house we are careful to speak clearly and make sure we don't talk across the room at Manni. He has a hard enough time focusing on what you are telling him when you are near him let alone across the room. We also found that when we talk to Manni on the phone he has to be in a quiet room that does not have too many distractions or he says he can't "hear you". Even though he does not have anything wrong with his hearing he is not able to tune out everything around him to actually hear what you are saying on the phone. I have found that when I text Manni he is able to focus and SEE what I am saying to him. That way if he can't focus on talking to me at that point in time because there are too many distractions he will wait till he is alone and then call or message me back.