Oblivious!

Well, that's a broad title to give an article about the many facets of autism...oblivious!  To typical people, autistics might seem to be oblivious to many things, and sometimes they are, but other times they're just taking in information in ways unfamiliar to us.  In fact, I'm still not sure how it happens, but I am sure that it happens differently for each one.

Dylan is like that.  He uses his peripheral vision to input visual stimuli.  He will not, voluntarily, look you in the eye.  When prompted to do so, his body shifts like a crab ~ a bit sideways ~ as he attempts eye to eye contact.  This is almost always the case, but not always!

His behavior changes around girls!  Doesn't that just figure?  And he doesn't discriminate for or against any girls ~ regardless of age or color ~ he likes girls.  Whether you're 3 or 33 or 93, if you're a girl, it's likely that at some point, you will draw his attention.  It's the same for color: he makes no distinction among girls, whether they're African-American, Asian, Hispanic, caucasian or somewhere in between ~ you're just a girl to him.  And he will attempt to look at you eye to eye and to engage you in conversation.

Thus the title of this post: oblivious.

As the responsible adult, I cannot be oblivious to the sometimes obvious discomfort Dylan causes when he talks to little girls.  He's over 6' tall, and despite the fact that he makes no distinction based on age, the little girls and their parents very often do.  As a result, his behavior though never inappropriate, is troublesome.  So, I'm thinking that a new Social Story might be in order.

This time, though, I decided to use real pictures instead of line drawings.  I'm no artist.  Trying to draw the developmental nuances among really young girls, teenage girls and older women was just beyond my simple line-drawing expertise!  I started out with pictures of females who were familiar to Dylan.  A friend's 5-year-old daughter, a pre-teen we knew from baseball practice, my friend who's in her late 30's, our neighbor who's in her 50's, and my aunt who's in her 70's.  A pretty good range of female subjects to represent different age ranges.

So, I started the story out by saying that Dylan likes to talk to girls.  I described the situations in which he might meet girls he wanted to talk to: school, church, baseball, zoo, bus, restaurant, etc.  Then the story told him that we talk to different kinds of girls in different ways.  I went through the rest of the 'book' using the pictures and descriptions of the different kinds of girls and then how to talk to them.  The little girls should always be with their mom and/or dad.  The pre-teens might talk back, and they might not.  If they did, he was free to talk to them nicely; if they didn't, he needed to understand that they just didn't feel like talking and leave them alone.  This went on up through the rest of the 'girls'.  At the end of the book, I reminded him that girls at different ages should be talked to in different ways.

He was and still is oblivious to the concept of age.  For anybody!!

I tried describing girls by how tall they were.  I tried describing them by what grade they were in (this was incorporated as a question he could ask them when initiating the conversation) or where they worked.  I used pictures of complete strangers taken from the internet and just taped the new pictures over top of the original pictures in the original book, so Dylan would have a library of pictures for each age range.

But none of this worked!  He would still go up to little girls and talk to them like he was their age!  When friends came to visit, he sat right next to our friend, Debbie, and fussed over her the whole evening.  She's in her 50's!  He did the same thing when his grandma came to visit, and she's 85 (though, to be honest, I don't think he knows that she's his grandma because he's only seen her a few times in his life).  This is a conundrum.

He still has the Social Stories book, and we look at it every now and then, but I'm convinced that his brain just doesn't register the developmental differences that indicate age.  For the time being, I'm using sign language for "NO" along with a head shake when we're out in public and he's walking a fine line with younger girls.  I don't want to verbally scold him in front of strangers.  He gets upset and does the 'tongue pop' thing, but it is an effective strategy.  Having said that, I won't be with him forever, so the problem solving and research continue!

Perseverance.

~ D