I am NOT a mind reader!

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my NT daughter is the younger child and she constantly offers to help me with things. my older AS son rarely does, but he's set a goal for himself to try to notice a few things he could help with then offer to do them. he even offered to help me unload the dishwasher one day, out of the blue. things like that generally escape his notice, so I thought it was a good thing that he offered and gave him praise for it even though I didn't want his help at the time.

he has chores, but I have to remind him. he just won't realize it's time to do them if I don't. not yet anyway. hopefully we'll get to the point where he's putting them in his PDA and obeying the alerts.

for dishes and food wrappers, I made it explicitly clear to my kids they have to put those things where they belong, that I won't do it for them and I'll get mad if their dirty dishes and trash are cluttering the place up. I still have to remind them sometimes, but they hop to and get it done because they know they're responsible for it.

I had similar problems, but in different areas.

Things were expected of me that I was never taught, so I've had problems in nearly every household that I've lived in because of this.

I keep telling people, if they want something from me then they should express it. I can't read minds! I almost always get laughter at this comment as if I am joking, like I seriously knew what they wanted but am playing around. Bah. Can I go live in a hole now?

A lot depends who it is. Some people - start with my mother-in-law - never actually ask. They hint [I hate hints] or less. "Oh, I need stuff from the store, but I am so tired" - and you are supposed to piuck up on that and go do it.

Others - my mother for one - she wants it, she says so. I never had to guess or get blamed for missing a signal. "Go buy milk".

For the Aspie, the hinter is a problem, especially if it is a reactive hinter.

My mother just FINALLY got that through her head. We've only known I have AS for about three-four years, in her defense, so I went through a lot of this when I was younger because she didn't realize there was a communication issue and I wasn't trying to be bad. Sometimes I have to remind her that unlike her, I have no way of processing social cues and if she wants to communicate something to me she has to use a direct method.