self-reflect?

Post Reply New Topic

Are your kids able to reflect on their thinking? (metacognition)

My son appears to be very self-aware for an eight-year old.

He seems to be able to think about his thinking. He knows that if he talks about his fears/intrusive thoughts, they will diminish. But, I trained him to do this. Isn't this CBT?

I had a school psychologist tell me that a child with HFA/AS would not be able to do this, and he referred to this as perspective taking.

Are your kids on the spectrum?? Sounds to me if they are you are installing Theory of Mind into them! Well done. They are experiencing empathy!

My son is highly self-aware. I don't think it's inconsistent with autism. But, heck, I only know the one

Aut=self...seems to me that I was always more aware of what I was thinking then what anyone else was?I was also raised in a religion that promoted that(Christian Science)so maybe that was an aberration? One thing I Do know is that kids understand much more then they can verbalize. I recall,clearly thinking at 5, that my parents were hypocrites when they were nice to some one to their face and then talked badly about them to someone else(something that bothered me a lot about peers and made me ostracized when I wouldn't contribute to their attacks of a person not there to defend themselves...yeah,I was real popular ). I didn't know the word for it but I understood that there was something wrong with it and it made trusting them more difficult. I could never have verbalized this but I was aware of it.


I think we are "logical thinkers" so anything that is explained logically(does not have a lot of contradictions) seems more effective in helping us understand how our thinking in a certain way impacts our emotions and consequent behavior. I got a lot of benefit from Rational Emotive Therapy as an adult but I don't know if it would have been effective as a kid...I was very black and white thinking. Wrong was wrong. You could talk me out of a "belief" if you could use logic to do so...but saying things like..."Tell yourself that you are beautiful" wasn't going to fly for me. Telling me to "tell yourself that you are not that attractive and your life might be easier if you were but you still have value as a person because of other positive qualitites"...that worked.

Sadlly there really are not enough professioanls who fully understand us and still insist we are all "text book style" untrue of course, as knowing one person pon the autism spectrum is just one, we are all different just like NTs..

I like my son, like to call this "over thinking" things,we tend to worry to much and over think what we say - this can lead to us not wanting to express and say things we would otherwise...

So its great you recognize this in your child and help them to express themselves..