Won't talk about school

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I've found with all my kids that I have to have specific questions about school in order to get information, although they will all sometimes spontaneously share information about the day. My very social NT daughter generally reports things about other kids and the interactions. My scientific NT son reports about other kids' projects and work and interesting things he's learned. My aspie son reports about something HE did in class (like when he explained a math problem and his teacher didn't understand, but when she finally did understand, she said that was "very smart" of him).

When my aspie son was 2nd grade, his teacher was giving very inappropriate consequences to some of the students. When it was discovered through a child's complaint to her parent, some of the students were questioned. My son was the first questioned, as he makes a good witness in that he can accurately report what happened, but I was shocked he never mentioned any of that to me. When I asked him, he said "well, I never got into trouble, so he never did that to me." I am absolutely certain his NT siblings would have reported the situation to me before it got to the point of a school investigation. In my son's mind, however, nothing happened TO him, so it didn't affect him.

I don't blame him. Aspie kids (and aspie adults, to a lesser extent) get falsely accused of things so frequently, it's sickening, because the false accusations happen due to things like poor eye contact, inability to "correctly" verbalize things, stimming, etc. So he doesn't report what happens to other students not because he doesn't feel any moral obligation, but because of a sense of relief that he wan't the one accused or because he's afraid he'll be accused if he says something. He's basically learning to lay low; not a bad skill in general, but it's sad when an aspie kid is forced to rely on it on a regular basis.

I'm not sure where you're from, but in America, the legal climate is just horrible. Accusations, both true and false, fly in all directions. The legal climate is so toxic that even verbally skilled NT adults have trouble defending themselves when accused of something. What's to say about aspie kids? Lawyers make huge amounts of money helping people with what the society makes it hard for them to do: defend themselves against accusations. And sometimes, they're so good at doing that, they find ways to make truly horrible people be declared as innocent with the way they present facts (*cough* OJ Simpson *cough*).

Back to your situation. Your aspie son is afraid of speaking up because seeing bad thing happen to classmates and not getting in trouble is a lesser evil than speaking up and getting in trouble because of the way he worded something.

I also want to say that I can totally sympathize with your frustration.

I complained about my son with high functioning classic autism not being able to tell what went on at school, even when I asked specific questions, like, "What did you eat for lunch?" or "What book did you read at school?" or "What did you do at recess?" However, the school counselor, kindergarten teacher, and special ed teacher thought that it was just typical boy behavior.

I told them that they didn't understand. It was like he was in a closet all day everyday--made no comments about his school day, could answer no questions about his school day, and demonstrated no new knowledge.

The fact that he was doing his worksheets, looking at the teacher, and was well-behaved was not enough for me, and I was angry about being treated like a neurotic mother.

Then, he took a standardized reading comprehension test at mid-year which required him to orally retell a story that he had read, and he could not do it at all.

After I called the central office and got the IQ test done during the middle of first grade, the examiner was not surprised by the poor result on the information retrieval portion of the test and said that the difficulty was typical for most of the kids with autism that she tested. (I do not know if she was including Aspies when when said this).

Imagine trying to talk about your school day if you have trouble retrieving the memories, you have some speech difficulties, and you were not presented with the information in such a way that it would be easy for you to understand and retrieve it.

One day, my son came home from kindergarten, and the teacher had actually written me a note about what he had studied in class--the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, whom we had never studied at home. My son did not remember his school day at all, but when I asked him if he had studied Martin Luther King, he thought that he had heard a lesson about his best friend in the kindergarten class, a white boy named Martin.

I had been begging the teachers to send me home information, to use visual aids, to write down the most important things that he was supposed to get out of a lesson. (My son could read). However, my concerns were trivialized because my son was doing his worksheets and behaving.

Oh boy can I relate to all of this!

My son is now in 1st grade and gets so pissed if I ask him about his day. Luckily I have a chart that tells me if he's having music, art, gym etc so I can start breaking it down to something like "What did you get to play in gym today?" or "Did you paint in art?"

He's getting used to me asking and will still give me the initial anger response but will sigh and answer a short quick answer. I'll be happy with that for now, it's better then "Nothing, I did nothing all day, don't ask anymore!"

I think at this point it's more about helping him know how to deal with people asking him questions then actually finding out what he did in school.

His kindergarten teacher was really great at emailing me, his current 1st grade teacher is getting better on the emails then in the beginning of the year, now that she's dealt with some of his meltdowns she's more open to emailing me for information, imagine that, lol.

There has been a lot of great advice posted in this thread that I'll keep in mind for my son, thank you guys.

Just wanted to add that patience and keep practicing little by little and once our Aspie's get used to us wanting/needing this information they can start to ease up their anger over it a bit. Not saying they will be the information bank we wish them to be, but at this point I've realized it's all about helping my son feel comfortable in his world, and knowing people out there are going to ask him questions one of my jobs is to teach him how to accept that people ask questions and to not be angry about that.