Monologues

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My son will tell me the whole plots of cartoons, movies, and stories that he makes up. It ends up being a monologue where he will talk at me nonstop for upwards of 20 minutes per story. Interuptions frustrate him. He complains if he thinks I'm not paying enough attention, but he mostly doesn't catch on to the times when I zone out.

I feel like I'm walking a fine line. On one hand, I want him to feel like he can talk to me. But, other people are not so patient with him. He is not good at conversations, just monologues. Does this get better with age? He's almost 10.

He needs to be taught the fundamentals of conversation. It's a difficult task to teach. Unless he is taught, he may never really catch on. Do rest assured that some self-centredness is age-typical. However, with his being AS...I'm gonna guess that it's way above what should be expected.

make a game of it and challenge him to condense his story into 1 minute.


boy meets girl fall in love get married live happily ever after, then end.

boy meet girl get pregnant, get married, get divorced the end.

bot meet girl, falls in love get married have children, are happy the end.

Maybe practice with a stop watch? Make a deal that for every minute he talks, you get to talk back the same amount (and he has to listen)

This is the classic subject of speech therapy: pragmatic speech.

My son was taught to get to the point, that no one would listen if he rattled on. We practiced a hand signal to tell him when the talk was extending beyond our interest level as listeners. He learned it pretty rapidly. It has helped him socially and in class.

I do think he misses it, however, that extended talking. Something he said the other day made me realize that.

The next level is learning to fill it all back out, when you have an interested audience.

My son , now 11, had to be taught when to stop talking and let someone else get a word in edgewise. He really didn't know. He also didn't like to be interrupted -who does? but it doesn't help him to not teach the rules. We HAD to interrupt him and tell him "Now it's my turn to talk and then it will be your turn next" He is a pretty good conversationalist now - he knows how to give and take, will ask questions of the person he is talking too and can hold his thought until it's his turn (this is very hard for him - he is full of facts and opinions and thinks everyone needs to know them. Of course, he does not always do these things but he's improved a lot. Repetition and constant reinforcement of the rules of talk should help your son.

I'm a Speech Therapist ( pathologist - what ever you would like to call it ) and this is something that needs to be dealt with - in settings outside the home this kind of conversational faux pas is not going to win him many friends.

1. He needs to learn that not everyone will be interested in what he has to say, even if he is interested in it.
2. He needs to learn that you cannot talk *at* people and expect to hold their attention - unless he is in the fortunate position to be a lecturer
3. He needs, in short to learn conversational rules about turn taking, appropriate topic choice according to who he is speaking with and what clues will let him know someone is not interested in what he is saying and needs to either stop talking or change the topic.

If he is desperate to get the information out somehow, encourage him to keep a journal, make a movie,.. draw a cartoon etc about his topic of choice. If he likes to write stories and come up with plots etc, find a good outlet for his creativity that he can work on, and then understand that people will be more interested in his stories if he presents them in a more interesting way than just "telling " them.

I would strongly recommend getting him some speech language therapy around this and asking for some specific strategies that you can use with him. But please do not leave this unattended.. although it is only a bit painful now.. as an adult if he has this style of communication it will lead to a lot of difficulties with social and work relationships.

What about suggesting he has his own blog ? if he likes to type

Last edited by Saffy on 24 Sep 2008, 1:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, I dont think he will ever grow out of monologing. I still do it for 2 or so hours per day, but the difference is that I am only talking to myself because nobody else cares to listen. Its not a bad thing to monologue, it helps him to clarify his thoughts, and think more about a subject. I know that my monologing helps me to place my thoughts in order. While something might make sense in my head, it will be useless if I cannot figure out someway to tell others about it. Talking to myself allows me to create an outline about a subject, so that I can talk about it better and explain my opinion if the need to communicate arises.

Talking about something that interests me, even if it is only to myself, also helps me feel less cluttered. If I dont get the information out of me, then it just goes around and around in my head. Putting it all in order and expressing it in words helps transfer the information from my short term memory to my long term memory. It basically allows me to stop thinking about it, yet still have the information available when I need it.

Overall, you dont need to teach him to stop monologing, you just need to teach him that not everybody is interested in what he has to say. Give him some other way to get the information out, such as a journal, or tape recorder. He will probably record things then never play them back, but keeping a physical record isnt what is important. What is important is actually making the recording. If you dont give him any other outlet he will probably do what I do, which is pace back and forth talking to myself. It may look weird, but it is effective at what I need to do.

P.S. If you want him to write a journal, let him use a computer. Don't be like my evil English teacher who forced me to actually write things out with a pen. I detest writing by hand.

Thanks for all of the game suggestions. Those are good and I will try those.

Tracker, what you said about yourself might actually be what my son is doing. I never thought about that. I know he has trouble with transferring information between working and long-term memory. I will get him a digital recorder and see if he would like that. I bet he would. Like you, he detests writing anything out with pen and paper.

My son does this. I think it is effective for him on several levels, also satisfying the need for something physically repetitive. It's his number 1 self-calming mechanism, to pace.

Although he adds bumping into the furniture, waving hands, and other things to the process.

Still, it seems so important to him, that we allow it. It took us a while to figure it out, that this was a real need, but we have.

My son physically cannot write, and is now working on his keyboarding. He had this interesting excerise for school, where he had to tape his thumb down so he couldn't use it, and see how his tasks went (the whole opposible thumbs/human development thing). Well ... he could write just fine with index and middle fingers. As he noted, it wasn't any harder than it usually is. That was really an "aha" moment for me, to really understand how hard writing is for him.

Bumping into furniture is half the fun. You get to bounce off things and sort of pinball around the room.

By the way, how would you use your thumb for writing? I dont see how not having a thumb would make it any harder.

You hold the pencil with your thumb on one side, and your index and middle fingers on the other. When done the "proper" way. The middle finger is like a resting cup for the pencil, and your index finger/thumb balance it. Come to think of it, I don't think my son does that. How do you hold a pencil to write?

The pinball thing drives me crazy, but it is really important to my son, so ... But sometimes my husband (also AS) really can't take it. He doesn't try to stop it anymore, but it stresses him.

I basically hold the middle of the pencil between my thumb and the base of my index finger. Neither my index finger or thumb move, they just hold the pencil there, and act as a pivot point. My middle finger holds the tip of the pencil, and moves it up and down. The side to side motion comes from my wrist.

Without a thumb, I would just hold the middle of the pencil between the base of my index and middle finger, and again use my middle finger for the up and down motion while my wrist moves side to side. The only way its different is that I moved the pencil from the outside of my index finger to the inside of the index finger. It still pivots around the same point. I can also write with the pencil between my middle and ring finger, and almost as well if I hold the pen between my ring and pinky finger.

As for the pinballing, just ask him to do it in his room, or some place else. He is probably too busy thinking to worry about what location he is pacing around, its not like the area really matters.

But the area does matter, to him at least! He says his room isn't big enough.

We joke that someday when he's gotten rich off of some incredible invention he will no doubt come up with, he can create a giant padded room in his mansion. He's got to be the only person I know who dreams of a giant padded room. With padded obstacles. Too funny.

I would say he writes much as you do. So that would mean the thumb really isn't functioning as it is supposed to, isn't it? I wish I could get my brain around WHY this happens, since it is common with AS but not PART of AS.

And sorry to the OP for the digressions.

I'd agree that your son needs to learn the principles of give and take, but on the other hand, talking is one way to connect with others. I have a tendency sometimes to talk too much when a subject matters, but for years it's been hard to talk at all. I've been shut up and dismissed too often. That really hurts and then I feel like no one really cares. I think it would have made a huge difference if my family and partners had just listened even if the subject bored them. But no. So, talking doesn't feel safe and I feel disconnected.

Both my son and I have tendencies to this. My son does a lot of pacing and gesticulating in accompaniment to his story telling and thinking on his own in his room, ( which is big but rather cluttered with his layout of the Lego Mars Mission Base activities!! ), but when talking to anyone else the pacing and gestures are reduced in ampleur.

But he does go on rather. And I have started to explain to him that unless someone is as passionate about the subject they will only want to listen, outof interest in him, for a short while. I think he is getting it, but unfortunately any active encouragement is then seen as an invitation to carry on for ever.

I occasionally find myself doing it when I allow a subject to outweigh company/relationship in importance. But for a long time in my late teens and twenties, as someone else said, I learned to completely prioritise company/relationship in all my interactions in order to be accepted, which was false for me, and meant I felt completely disconnected from my inner "me" in company. This was not good. And when I "exploded" into self-expression again I was often very intense/heavy about it.

I do seem to need, ( my son, too ), to be able to "tell" my ideas/preoccupations. That is why finding WP was so important, as a place to "tell". And why I have hundreds of pages of scribble that I rarely if ever look at, except to weed now and then, from 18 years now of "telling" like that.

I think the most difficult part of it for me is the AS one of finding a balance, because I have an all or nothing tendency. Either all "other-person"-focussed, or all me/my thoughts. And why it is so precious to me when I meet people who impose enough with their ideas, interest me enough with their ideas to create a dialogue.

I realised just yesterday that perhaps the best basis for a relationship/friendship for me is one of learning, in which my desire to know something from the other balances my own need to tell/inform. Which is why I have so much difficulty getting to know most people; they don't know enough ( on subjects that intrigue/fascinate me) to interest me so that I spontaneously shut up out of a desire to listen! What happens more and more as I get older is that I simply can't be bothered with conversation at all, or if I do it is lame and forced, as I try to satisfy social customs about reciprocity.

Yesterday I met someone here who had interesting things to tell, and wanting to know more, to hear/listen, was a wonderful feeling.

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