Won't talk about school

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My son is in Kindergarten and he gets perfect behavior on his chart everyday. (said for a few days but that was just a rough week, a while ago) and he says that he loves school. His teacher says he is a great kid.

The thing is, if I ask him about his day, ask if he had speech therapy he tells me that he can't tell me about school because I'm not his teacher. It is so hard to get him to tell me ANYTHING about his day. Only if I see something in his folder will he answer me. He says that its not for me to know only his teacher.

Was wondering if this is an Aspie thing or just a quirk?

Thanks guys!

This may be a clue to his "theory of mind", how he projects what someone else may be able to mentally understand. Perhaps he thinks that you cannot understand what he would say about his school day because you were not there to see it; only his teacher was. When you see something in his folder then he can tell you about it.

I caught a glimpse into my aspie godson's theory of mind when he said, "If I were to disappear, no one in my school would know who I was. They'd say, who was that kid, Mark?" He didn't know that every kid in every class knows who all the other kids in the class are by name. I think that he doesn't know all the kids in his classes by name and naturally projects that onto his classmates.

Likewise perhaps your son cannot imagine human interplay which he has not directly seen and participated in and projects that onto you. (His teacher was there to see it, not you.)

He might not like such an open ended question. Maybe try asking more specific questions. "What did you play in gym" or What was your science lesson about?" Then probe for feelings questions.

Make sure he has down time before you ask.....he's just spent all day being "on" and might need some time to relax.

Thanks guys I will try more specific questions. Another funny thing that happened was his computer teacher lives right next door to my parents. We saw her and she said hello to him and asked if she could call him Joey since he wasn't at school. He goes by Joseph at school. He said no and got upset because he said she has to call him Joseph because she is from school. After we walked away he was confused at why she has a house when she should be at the school. I explained to him how I don't live at my work so neither does she and he seemed to like that answer. But he DID NOT like her calling him the "wrong name". But I'm allowed to call him anything I want he says.

He also gets very very upset if you call someone a different name. Like of I joke around and call one of our dogs something different he gets mad. Everything has to be his way. If te clock says 9:00 and he wants it to be 10:00 he will say that's wrong it's 10:00 at my house! He is really clever and always comes up with a story. Samething if he spills a drink or something he WILL NOT admit to it, he will say something like the table made me do it. He gets really mad and i have tried to explain to him that I won't be mad and he insists that is what happened. Sorry so much just a lot on my mind.

Kids that age really do have a hard time understanding that teachers are people! It makes it even more strict for him because having definite labels is how he understands the world.

You will help him learn how to be more flexible as time goes on. You can write a social story about nicknames....make it fun and about other kids/characters. A social story is a great way to introduce new "rules" to his world that will help him make sense of things in a more flexible way.

Funny! I was just debating similar questions with my son today. So, unfortunately I do not have any great advice for you. My son is 4 1/2. He constantly tells me 'I don't know' when I ask him about his school day. When I ask specifics, he often just yells, 'no!' or gets huffy and puffy and hides. Very complicated to figure out from him what is going on. And we are dealing with a language barrier with teachers too.
I guess the best thing is to find/make sure you have a situation where his teachers communicate very well with you. And then, as others said, slowly work on social stories to bring him towards talking to you more. I guess most Aspies are not so good at 'small talk' and not surprising our kids would be no exception.

I am pretty sure lots of kids say "I don't know" or "nothing" when asked about their school day...I know I did!

This is very astute of you. I think young children often have this problem because they don't understand that adults have experience they can draw upon in order to understand a situation where they were not present. But children are often much more literal, and can only understand something from personal experience.



I'm an adult and I tend to be like that if you ask me about my work day after I get home. I agree that time to unwind, and then perhaps casually asking about the school day (as opposed to strong questioning, which may seem like a police grilling), may let him open up easier.

Another suggestion might be to arrange a visit to his classroom, spending some time there getting to know what the routines are, and what he is doing, so that when you ask him about his day, he may feel you will understand things because you were there, and now know what he goes through.

We have three questions in my house to elicit "how was your day" answers. At our house they are questions for everyone in the family to answer around the dinner table or time we are sitting and talking so they are not just about one person. The questions are:

1. What did you learn today that you didn't know yesterday? (this doesn't have to be about schoolwork and at times can become quite silly)
2. What was hard about today? (or sad or bad or difficult or made you angry)
3. What was good about today? (or made you happy, or made you laugh, or made you smile)

You can't say the same thing everyday and you can't say nothing, or I don't know. Adults participate too.

My son had a hard time with these questions at first, but knowing that they would be coming, he got better and better at noticing and remembering his day.

Inflexibility and inability to generalize things from one situation to another are definitely Aspie traits. Someone else here recently commented about her child's need to compartmentalize different parts of the day. In other words, school is school and home is home and the 2 should NOT mix. It's the same for all of us to some degree. When we adults who work in office buildings go to work we don't expect to find a building full of children running around and it would probably be somewhat disconcerting if that did happen. So you can kinda see where he might be coming from.

It is possible to work on flexibility. Some things that help us are that my 5 yo's K teacher emails me on a regular basis about things that happened during the day so when I ask DS about them and he says it didn't happen or something like that, I tell him that Mrs. P told me so and he knows that I talk to her a lot so that has sunk in with him that I really DO know what is happening at school. Also, I volunteer in the classroom one day a week and this has given me the chance to get to know all the kids in the class so that helps me communicate with my son because we have a common frame of reference about the people he interacts with. Another thing that helps is that I sat down with the teacher and she told me the schedule that they follow each day of the week. We made a visual schedule that we keep at home and do every morning. If you can find little ways like this to break down that rigid barrier between home and school, you might find it a little easier to communicate with him. I think this is important because there are bound to be situations that come up that he really does need to be able to tell you about and if you start laying the groundwork for that communication early on, it may be easier for him to talk when it really matters most.

It's deffo an aspie thing. I am the last person to know anything about what happens at his school! . I ask the school to email me regularly with anything important or his progress. I sometimes used to get told about things he enjoyed . I usually end up reading through his books and keeping in touch with his form tutor helps.

Yeah, I've wondered if it's an Aspie thing or just a boy/girl thing or personality thing. Could be a combo. Because my daughter (20 months younger than my son) will give me all kinds of detailed things about her day when I ask. "I play with my friends. I paint. I put toy monkey to bed." "My 'other' teacher wasn't there--she was sick and go to hospital." Etc. I don't get ANY of that from my son!! He gets very annoyed with me too for asking any kind of details and will hide or avoid me or get mad.

Sounds EXACTLy like my son.Particularly the annoyance with me asking questions!

This is what I thought it might be from the thread title (although reading the post I'm no longer sure). I struggle with open-ended questions, and "How was your day?" is always going to be answered with "Good." unless I have something specifically in mind that I wanted to tell someone. "Well, what happened?" "I don't know." I do know, it's just for whatever reason an open-ended question doesn't draw up the information. Specific questions will get a much better answer (although do take care not to flood him with questions, that can get a little overwhelming).

My older son with high functioning classic autism had this exact problem throughout kindergarten, too.

He was verbal at the time, with some speech difficulties that would not have prevented him from telling me about his day.

I had it put in his Individual Education Plan that the teacher was to communicate with me weekly in writing about what was going on at school--what he was studying and how he was behaving. (I never got updates that often, but this is something that you could request.)

About a year ago, the school district gave my son a full IQ test over the course of several days. The results?

He scored a 70 on the information retrieval part of the IQ test, and did particularly poorly if no visual aids were used to help him learn the information or to jog his memory. (100 is average; 70 is borederline mentally deficient).

He scored an 86 on the short-term memory section and an 85 on the general knowledge section.

He scored well above average on all other sections of the test, for an overall average IQ of 98.

When given a full speech evaluation at the same time, he also did very poorly on anything involving information retrieval or retelling, he scored in the 25% for expressive speech, and scored way above average in other speech areas, such as picture word vocabulary.

My son has received extensive tutoring, therapy, and is on meds and has made improvements in many areas. However, his improvement and abilities are very uneven.

Now, at age 7, he is doing a little better at telling me about his day, but he will usually focus on a perceived conflict with another student (which may have happened that day, weeks ago, or may have actually come out of book or movie) and not tell me about academics.

The teacher this year sends home a homework folder, and I call her classroom (she is normally there for a while after school) for clarification and to hear about what is going on as needed. Also, I can ask my son specific questions about what the teacher has told me he is doing at school, and that will often get him to remember something about his school day.

Another problem that I had in kindergarten was that my son came into kindergarten with a lot of the basic kindergarten skills already mastered. He was not getting the right kind of help and not being taugtht with visual aids. However, he was able to coast for the first half of the year based on prior knowledge--enough to do worksheets, etc.

When the class started to get into new math concepts more advanced reading and writing skills--things he had not yet mastered--things began to really unravel.

I think that parents of special needs kids sometimes learn more in kindergarten than their kids do.