communication anxiety solutions?

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i am trying to generate some ideas to help my 4 yr old with talking to people. we had another good talk this morning about school. he likes school but he doesnt want to go, and for the second time he stated that its scary because other people will want to talk to him. as far as i can discern, the only reason he doesnt want to go is because other people talk to him. we usually get an "aww man!" when hes got to go to school, but he does go without arguing.

i hope to find some ways to help him with the anxiety and fears of having people talk to him. he is so bright and he does so well at school and has completely blossomed this past year since he started. i would hate to see the fears cause school to become a really unpleasant thing for him and cause him to fight going.

i am looking into social skills classes and pragmatics in his speech therapy, but what else is there? has anyone found other things to address this issue?

Help him pre-plan responses for when people speak to him as much as is possible.

thats a great idea, thank you. i can incorporate that into social stories to give him scripted responses to greetings and questions.

That sounds a lot like what I have to do.

you can teach him exit strategies like having 2 exchanges and than saying "excuse me, i need to go/do some stuff now" or similar thing on 4yo level.

Someone recently posted about giving the child a puppet and asking people to address the puppet instead of the child. IDK, maybe that sounds a little creepy (a little too much like the boy in The Shining)? Maybe it could be used as a stepping stone to getting more comfortable with people talking to him. Guess I'm not very helpful because I have the opposite problem, mine will strike up a conversation with any random stranger most days!

My daughter is 7 and I have been dealing with this with her. The problem with scripted responses is that unless the conversation goes EXACTLY like you have scripted it they don't work and she can't apply scripted things to general conversation. I just accept this and try to deal with it. She is in speech therapy which deals with talking in social situations but I have not seen progress (afterall how can they recreate the social demands of a classroom one on one in the speech office?). They have told me she has Mixed Receptive-Expressive Lang. Disorder-maybe that's part of it in your son's case too? It's hard to tell if that's what it really is with my daughter or if it's just anxiety. Either way, I have learned not to force her into it and most of the kids have learned by now that she'll talk if she wants to-in other words-they get used to it and pressure her less In a parent teacher conference for first grace the teacher told me that she was bribing my daughter with gummy bears to get her to talk. I freaked that any teacher would think it was ok to do that! My daughter hates school and a large part of it is the communication difficulties.

While I hear Mama to Grace's response, and those issues are there - we also had a lot of success with this - but it only applies if your child is either able to wing it or able to stop talking at a certain point. For instance, when DS was small, before we had any idea this was an issue, when we went to a playground I would pull him aside and remind him to say something like:

"Hi, my name is DS, what's your name?" "Do you like (insert special interest of the day, usually superheroes so it was OK for general conversation)?" "Wanna play?" This script has helped us all the way up to now, though even to this day he instantly forgets the other kid's name - but has no shame yelling "hey, kid!"

Another thought - could you offer him opt-out language? (I'm assuming its kids that want him to talk? Otherwise, you might have a word with the adults and let them know this is a genuine issue for him) e.g. "I don't feel like talking right now."

I talked through figures for a few years in my childhood. I could not recommend this. I don't think this does anything but further isolate from peers because it is, quite frankly, weird. I could only see this as good if the child can't communicate needs any other way.

I also wanted to post that I told my daughter to hold up her hand if people were getting too invasive/aggressive/chatty/irritating. I told her this because she wouldn't verbalize or go away, she was just get to the point of overload and then freak out. Well, she picked up the script of "Talk to the hand!". I was called into a parent teacher conference because the teacher was having other children/parents complain about my daughter "being mean" by always yelling "Talk to the Hand!" I told her it was that or she clobbers them so she was ok with the "Talk to the Hand!". After all, it was my daughter advocating for herself in a way, maybe not socially appropriate but it was her scripted way of saying "STOP. GET AWAY. I am in overload!"

thanks for the responses =) the puppet idea came up on a thread i posted a few months ago actually, which was the first time he told me about being scared of school because people talk to him. my son is extremely literal, and i dont think the puppet idea would go over well, he would consider it silly =) puppets arent alive, you cant talk to them.

momsparky and anotherone, those are good. i think he could handle a few lines and an escape clause. i think he'll probably go straight to the escape clause most of the time tho lol. at school he also has a set of pictures on his belt loop and one of those is "i want to be alone". i think i can tie that in with the escape clause, so even if he doesnt feel verbal, he can still escape.

mama_to_grace, my sons receptive and expressive language has been tested and is within normal ranges, but he has issues with pragmatics. basically, he cannot initiate or sustain conversation. maybe he has such trouble in this area because of the fear/anxiety? or maybe vice versa, he has the fear/anxiety because of the conversational impairment? i dont think its a completely causal relationship, but i am sure they affect each other to some degree.

ideally, i want to get rid of the fear/anxiety about speaking to people. maybe that will help with the conversational skills, maybe it wont. but its the fear/anxiety that worries me most. if he goes his entire life monologuing about his interests and never having a real reciprocal conversation, that to me is better than him being afraid to talk to people.

one reason this is a point of interest for me is because i see how this same fear/anxiety has affected his father. it colors so much of his life, even talking on the phone or ordering at the mcd's drive thru. he was never diagnosed and thus never got help with it, i'd like our sons life to not be so negatively affected in this way.