Overcoming Black and White thinking

FranticFrummie

Tue, Nov 13 2018, 1:20 pm

I trust OP on this. If she says he looks confused, then that's not just him being "clever". He sounds like he really doesn't get it.

DD was just like this. One time I was thinking, and DD says to me "What are you doing?" I told her I was "just staring off into space." She looked really hard in that direction, and said "Mama, there's nothing over there." I thought it was adorable, but she was genuinely concerned for me sanity!

She ended up getting 3 years of speech and language therapy. That, combined with social groups and free play, she finally got the hang of things and outgrew it, but it took a while.

I did have to be very precise with her, not joke around and tease her, and I had to explain every figure of speech. For example, if I said it was raining cats and dogs, she'd run to the window, and then look disjointed. "No it's not, it's just plain rain!" Then she would want to know what cats and dogs had to do with anything.

Sometimes it was hard not to laugh at the cuteness, and I had to always remember that it's not funny for her.

ra_mom

Tue, Nov 13 2018, 2:21 pm

amother wrote:

Chiming in here as a speech language pathologist. He may have a pragmatic language disorder. You can look up some books by Michelle Garcia winner on the topic of social thinkingfor ideas of how to address these issues on your own. Perhaps an evaluation with a speech langauge pathologist would be of help here, but please note that not all SLP's are experts at this area! In Lakewood, I would suggest Devorah Himy, although I am not sure that you live near there!

Much Hatzlacha!

This.
Before this was officially classified I had one therapist who told me to look up the phrase pragmatics of speech and I was then finally able to begin the process of understanding.

But now you can find a lot when you Google the officially used names of social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SCD), semantic pragmatic disorder, semantic-pragmatic disorder (SPD), or pragmatic language impairment (PLI).