Hi, looking for help with my three year old. Please!

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Hi, I have a hyperlexic three year old son (my own dx-- we haven't got an official one yet) and I am battling frustration on a daily basis trying to figure out how to get him to tune in and share attention with me. He has always enjoyed call-and-response kinds of games and songs, and has always made good eye contact during them. He has always had extremely long attention spans for activities that interest him. And he has always enjoyed sharing those activities with other people. However, it is incredibly hard to get his attention long enough to get him through doing something he isn't interested in doing. Like pulling his pants up, brushing his teeth, washing his hands, or paying attention to me long enough to figure out what I'm asking him/ telling him. He does all these things some of the time, so I know he has the ability to do it. The self-help skills in particular are a big annoyance lately. He paid attention and had great follow through while they were exciting new skills for him, but now that they're established he just zones out in the middle and doesn't finish. Starts scripting whatever his latest script interest is. Drops his toothbrush on the floor, wanders around with his pants around his knees, etc.

It is often hard to tell where the true disconnect lies. Is it pragmatic social language-- he doesn't understand that he's supposed to be paying attention when I ask him to do something? He definitely has problems in this area. Is is receptive language or language/ auditory processing-- he can't understand/ keep up with what I'm saying (I know he understands language itself just fine as he has a large vocabulary and can read, apparently with ok comprehension considering that he's 3)? Is it an attention issue? There don't seem to be any sensory issues at play here, and it doesn't seem like a stress response to me. I feel totally frustrated and urgent about this issue, as it's hard to see how we're going to be able to move on to make progress on any other fronts until we have made some progress on this one. I don't expect a total turnaround or anything, but I need to gain some ground here before I go crazy. I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to respond. So far, the only thing that seems to work is taking toys away while yelling and repeating myself a lot, and I HATE HATE HATE being that way with my child. I would hate it if he were NT, but that I do it to someone that is obviously having some developmental issues just kills me. And obviously it will be detrimental in the long run if I keep it up. But I don't know what else to do, and this just seems like a critical foundation skill that he will need before he can move on with anything else. Help please?

He's 3. He doesn't care about these things. Most 3 year olds don't, and many AS kids of any age don't.

But you do, and I understand why you do.

How do you find his attention span compared to other 3 year olds? If you do something like take him out to lunch can you keep his attention long enough to have a real conversation? I know it may sound odd, but my son loved eating out when he was 3, he was like this different child, so we used that to talk about things.

The reason I want you to think of situations where you naturally hold his attention is because AS kids are logic based. If you can convince them of the logic for doing something, then they will make the extra effort it takes to do it. If you can't, they won't.

Some skills will always be hard. My son is 13 and still totally unaware most of the time of what his hands are doing, so the concept of expecting a tooth brush to spend its life in the holder is alien to our household. I just live with that stuff, not worth the effort, because the big hurdles are getting crossed. On things that really matter ... we spend a lot of time talking, and always have. Sell, sell, sell.

You definitely develop a different world view of what really matters when your raise an AS child.

If you can rarely hold his attention, even with a special interest, then ADD or ADHD may be a play. That changes the protocol, so it's important to figure out if that piece exists.

I wouldn't necessarily assume that this boy is aspie/autie. Some neurotypical children learn reading early too. Autism specific hyperlexia is supposedly associated with low comprehension, which doesn't sound like it's the case with your son.

You seem to think there's just one "critical foundation skill" here. However, you mention a number of somewhat unrelated behaviors - pulling his pants up, brushing his teeth, washing his hands, paying attention to you. Which one are you focusing on?

He's just being a kid right now, and when he's ready to care about those things, he will. I was like your son when I was his age. Look at it this way. How many young people do you see walking into college with their trousers around their ankles? It helps to have a sense of humour about what you're going through.

ASD Adults too lol, I find it almost paralyzing when I'm asked to do something that doesnt' make logical sense to me. I need to understand, not just be told, and this leads to yeah more "prep" time, but also allows me to adjust to the task at hand, and sometimes perform it even better than was originally asked. Not sure if that makes sense, but there it is.

I understand your frustration and sense of urgency. We went through similar stuff with our little guy. We used various little things to get him to do things like get dressed. We used a chart with velcro on/off pictures of the articles of clothing. Each time he put on a piece of clothing the picture came off the chart and went in to the envelope. He seemed to get a sense of accomplishment from this and by the time the novelty wore off, following through with the act of getting dressed was more of a routine and less of a struggle. He was also motivated by wanting to make me happy so we wrote a social story about getting dressed and at the end was a pciture of him dressed and me with a big smile on my face.

I also cut out a stack of little pictures of race cars and motorcycles (one of DS's interests) and hung them from a peg in the bathroom. He could flip to a new picture each time he went in to wash his hands. This too only worked for a few weeks before the novelty wore off but it helped get the routine established.

I have also made a concerted effort to realize that what I think or feel is important really isn't always that important. I have started to be able to say "So what if we're late for school, its not the end of the world." While sometimes it is really important that I get somewhere at a particular time, most of the time it really isn't as critical as it seems in the moment when you are struggling with your child to put on his underwear and you know you still need to make lunch and put the dishes in the dishwasher... As Cockney Rebel suggests, a sense of humor can help too. I get so focused on getting DS to accomplish a task sometimes that I just loose all perspective. When I remind myself to stop and I think of something funny to do that makes him laugh, it just breaks the tension and then what was almost impossible a moment before becomes easy.

I feel your pain. My son is almost 6, and although he knows how to put his clothes on, he has trouble focusing on the task to get it done. I have to stay right there and coach him through it, or he will continue wandering around the house doing other things that interest him. My son overall has trouble staying on task with a lot of things. I honestly think my son does have ADHD components to his autism. Over time, I just try to keep my patience with him to the best of my ability, and just keep reminding him what has to be done, and get him back on task. I think he is starting to understand what "focus" and "pay attention" is because he has been told so many times.

Rewards seem to work really well with my son on some things and also taking things away if he can't follow directions. I know that sounds harsh, but my son is fully verbal, and sometimes he just refuses to do things (for instance, going up the stairs to start his bedtime routine) We may ask him 5 times to do this, and he will just look at us or say "no" or run around singing and waving his hands. We do this every night, and he knows what we are asking. So the minute we threaten to take a privilege away, he will usually jump on board with what he is supposed to do.

Keep in mind though, that my son is almost 6, and your son is only 3. I think you are just going to have to give it some more time and be a little more patient with him. If he is on the spectrum, this will probably be an ongoing issue.

Best of luck to you! and Welcome to Wrong Planet!

If the one critical skill you're talking about is focus - he may never learn to focus on what others decide is important. Eventually, he may accept there are things that have to be done (like putting on pants) and it is faster and simpler to just get them over with.

But I still have trouble with focus, unless it interests me, and I'm fifty-two. In fact, if you try too hard to force him to focus, you may improve the short-term situation by doing long-term harm. I endured years of mind-numbingly stupid schoolwork (I was hyperlexic, and could read and understand the Readers Digest before I got into first grade) - but I am much less able to force myself to do things I consider boring and stupid, precisely because of the resistance built up by having it forced on me for so long.

Force doesn't seem to work in the long run with us, at least it didn't with me. As an example, I am now actively interested in broadening the range of things I can eat. But I've run into a roadblock. There's the stuff I like; that's fine. There's stuff I instinctively detest and always have, and I don't think anything will ever change my opinion of that. That was also the stuff my parents absolutely could not force me to eat; I would rather have died. But for the stuff in the middle - everything I was forced to eat as a child is something I really can't bring myself to eat except in an emergency (and every emergency only stiffens my resistance to it; I hate it more for every mouthful), while for all the things I try that I wasn't forced to eat as a child, I actively enjoy over half of them. And of the few things my parents ate they didn't force on me, I learned to like many of them, in time.

I think of it as somewhat like a balky mechanism - you may be able to force it a few times, but every time you do, you increase the chances it will break - and once it is broken, you have no way of fixing it...

You will probably hate my advice, but the most successful areas of my life are those where I was left alone until I was ready to proceed. If you just let him ignore even the "important" things as much as you possibly can, until he gets to the point where he is ready to take that next step, I think in the long run you'll have much greater success. The bigger an issue you make of things he doesn't at the moment find important, the more you risk triggering a stubborn resistance that will make long term progress much harder.

Another thing that helps is making sure you give very specific instructions. Also, counting. We will say to our son, " I am going to count to 20, and I want you to be at the top of the stairs by then" Or if he continues to ignore something I am asking him to do, I will start counting "1, 2, 3, and that seems to get his attention. I agree with the Wanderer, sometimes the more of a deal you make of something, the harder they want to resist.

Thanks for the replies. I can see that I didn't formulate my question very clearly, and you guys got it anyway, so thanks for that, too. Yes, my concern is gaining focus for activities that don't interest him. I'm not talking about sustained attention here, just focus on things that take a minute or so. That is why I used putting pants on as an example, but any number of everyday activities would do just as well. Generally, he more or less pays attention to things like that while he is in the process of learning them. So, a few months ago, he would try and try to button his pants, accepting no help and persisting long after he was really too frustrated to continue. But now that he can do it, he isn't interested anymore, and so his focus disappears after literally 2 or 3 seconds, if he even makes it that long. My big worry, which I didn't really spell out before, is that, because he tunes out so quickly, it's hard to attract his attention long enough to make an impression with something new. I'm worried that we'll be unable to make much progress with speech therapy, for example, until we find a way to enlist his attention a little more reliably. That's why I said the thing about the foundation skill. And, though maybe this is overstressing a bit, I'm feeling the pressure of the "critical window" and "early intervention" thing, and since his most obvious problems are with language development and nonverbal communication, I feel frustrated that there's this roadblock to just getting down to work. And I feel frustrated that I don't know whether I should be interpreting the roadblock as being, itself, due to his communication difficulties, or something else.

@DW_a_mom, CockneyRebel, angelbear
Yeah, he's 3. I know that's at least part of it. I probably just need to relax and wait for him to be more open to logical persuasion. Right now it's still pretty difficult to tell what he does and doesn't understand. He's still using a lot of scripting, or delayed functional echolalia, and doesn't answer very many different kinds of questions.

@angelbear
Counting works sometimes, and since he's obsessed with numbers, that usually works to get his attention. I haven't found a way to get it to work very well for multi-step procedures yet.

@psychohist
I don't necessarily assume he's definitely aspie/autie--but he has definitely had autism-red-flag type language development, including super memory and massive amounts of scripted tv show stuff, along with poor functional language, poor body language, poor conversational eye contact, etc. Basically, he matches the majority of the hyperlexia checklists I've seen perfectly. His poor language makes it difficult to evaluate his reading comprehension, but he definitly gets that the words are supposed to mean something, and I *think* his reading comprehension is at least as good as his verbal language comprehension, and possibly better. He doesn't seem to have any other autism issues besides these, though, so I think the question of whether he's on the spectrum is going to hinge on whether the communication stuff alone (plus preoccupation with symbols) ) puts him there. Either way it seems like it's probably related in some way. And some of my frustration is due to the fact that I just can't tell if what I'm seeing is autism spectrum related or not. He is just a hard call, I think.

If he's hyperlexic, have you tried writing instructions down and pointing to each step as you ask him to do it? Pictures might work, but since he seems interested in reading, a bulleted list might do better.

It could be ADHD. Maybe you could help his language skills through his interest for reading. From your introduction you should also look about giftedness, it could be that (With learning and language difficuties) rather that hyperlexia.