Daughter Is Never Quiet

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You are not alone..my son is the same way He just loves to talk. He was diagnosed with AS, NVLD, ADHD and ADHD. Co-morbid disorders are very common.

The idea of excluding potential problem foods/items is a good one. And I HAVE had times where my mind was ALWAYS busy.

Mikomi,

Just realize she is your daughter and that you love her. That is great! Try to do nice things you both like. If she has strong interests you appreciate, try to join in.

DW, ASPlanet and Mage: Great advice.
My son does the same thing, he follows me around narrating, repetitively, constantly (no words from him, though, the minute we are around anyone but immediate family) and it really does drive me insane. I am trying to start young with boundaries such as "quiet time" now, or since that seems not to work "go play in your room, please", just so I can get a break.

I think the most frustrating thing is, most of his talk is non-conversational, so I have no idea how to reply. And if it's an actual question, and I don't give him the answer he wants, he will just repeat the question again. And again. Until I go out of my way to understand he knows the answer is "no" (which I do by putting the toy away, or closing the refrigerator, etc.) Not sure if this is an all kids (he's almost 4) thing or particularly an issue with spectrum kids.

Also - whoever said that about sensitive hearing, it's an interesting theory. I have an eval lined up to get my kid's hearing checked, just as a screening before his speech/language evaluation....the "basic" hearing test they asked him where the sound was coming from (they meant which ear) and he pointed to the sound generator, lol, so he "flunked". But the other day I had a song playing in my car so low I couldn't even hear it (he's taken issue with my music lately) ....and he started singing along to it. I checked to see if the "fade" was set to make it louder in the back seat, and it was not. I think my son has very sensitive hearing, doesn't realize how much his constant chatter affects other people, or that other people can hear him, and maybe doesn't realize how much he actually is talking (or not talking, around strangers).

Again, I think DW is right, get a babysitter. It's particularly cruel that spectrum kids tend not to be good nappers.

I have had the same problem many times (not constantly, thankfully). I even remember before I learned to speak my thought process... there were times when I tried to convey concrete thoughts but nothing happened.

I have met another autistic who exhibits similarly.

I have a friend (quite possibly aspie) who constantly creates some sort of disturbance in his environment. I believe he does that, and weight lifting, as a form of stiming. It could be similar in your child.

Though, that's not too far from classifying ADHD's symptoms as a form of stiming (which, think about it, makes a ton of sense).

All children I think go through some stage of constantly asking 'WHY?'

My NT 5year old is constantly questioning everything and even when I give her what is I consider a reasonably good answer she continues to question me.

Just today her 3yo cousin pushed a heavy wooden dolls house off the shelf onto my 5yo NT daughter. I've explained to her that she can not have any food for a couple of hours as I'm worried something in her tummy might be broken where the dolls house landed (she was lying on the floor at the time) and if she eats the food might make the broken bit worse. We had a discussion about how she can have something to eat tomorrow and for now she can have a bit of frozen medicine (frozen tube of hydralyte solution) but not too much. Still she continues to ask why and not accept my reasoning - which is kind of reassuring at this point because I know she can't be too hurt if she wants to be questioning me.

I think the constant questioning is a normal phase, particularly as children try to work out their position in the world and how everything around them works. I'm very much hoping that constantly questioning authority and the reason why things are done a certain way is health also.

He doesn't ask why, though.
He asks "Do you have Chex Mix?" "no" "Do you have Chex Mix?" "no" "Do you have ChexMix?" "no" and so on. It never progresses to "why".


lol.

Ahh now that sounds more like my husband.

Him - "Have you seen my pants"

Me - no. where did you take them off?

Him - "Have you seen my pants?"

Me - No.

Continue until I get up and find his pants. Most mornings that conversation occurs in some form in our house.

Heidi has not got to the asking question stage yet. However that Banana Phone song I mentioned before is still on constant loop.

I am starting to wonder if my son is ADHD without hyperactivity. I am ADHD as well. My son also is a bit OCD-Like, drives me crazy but it works well sometimes in the school setting (sometimes).

My child talks so much. We were worried when he was 2 1/2 because he hardly spoke at all. Shortly before three he just started to talk. He hasn't stopped since. He will talk about everything in his environment, everything and needs to mention how things work. It seems that my son often doesn't even realize that other people can hear him. It is one of the many ways he processes information around him.


leechbabe - are sons are so similar!!

Just a thought here, from my dim and distant past. In this situation, the response that would have shut me up would have been "Why, do you want some Chex Mix?" Or, perhaps even, "No, we have no Chex Mix and I'm not going to buy any at the store because it's junk food" or even "no, why do you keep asking about Chex Mix?" I was not capable of changing my inquiry to get the actual question that I wanted addressed out there. It was that I'd learned one move in the verbal conversation related to Chex Mix, and it was the only one I had to use. Kind of like playing a game of chess, but only knowing the move that the knight could make and none of the others. I had to keep using it in the hopes that the response would vary to the one I needed to hear to continue on with where I was trying to go.

Then again, at other times I would have just been fishing to see how far the conversation would go - would the answer always be the same? That really wasn't about Chex Mix, it was about testing the sameness.

And yet at other times, I was "conversing" with someone. You make a verbal move, and then I go, and then you go, and then I go... I was "interacting" with the person. I was "being social." NO way I'm going to be able to explain that here, I guess. It was practice.

I remember my parents saying they were terribly concerned about me because I didn't speak until late, but then they could not shut me up and wished they could. I would go on and on and on. A lot of it was that I was trying out sounds and things in my head, except that they had to be actually spoken so that I could hear the sounds. I used to "turn off" other people's existence when necessary - hence, if I was talking and making noises to myself nonstop I was not even considering that there were other people on the planet at that time.

Later on, and even to this day, I will be having conversations with myself in my head and then slip and pop out with something verbally that seems a bit "out of the blue" to those around me. (I hate it when that happens, it's hard to explain.) Just brush that off with an "oh, just thinking out loud" and they usually buy that.

I also do logical progressions in my mind of the interpersonal communication around me, sometimes in parallel (I'll have two or three streams of thought going on at once that are related to the actual verbal conversation going on) and they don't necessarily "fit" neatly into the spoken conversation. Very rarely I'll slip up and actually speak the thoughts. For example, if someone is talking about lemon pies, I might be following the conversation and thinking also about the production lines/machines used to create pies,the socioeconomic conditions of the fruitpickers who get the lemons, to the uses of vitamin c - lemons are high in vitamin c, and the effect of the recent hurricane on the lemon groves. There might also be something going on about how long lemon extract lasts on the shelf and how the color of lemons might look if I painted the kitchen cabinets with it. If I'm very tired that day and someone asks what I think of lemon pies, I might go into a short semi-speech about the economic effects of lemons on the State of Florida or the cost of paint at Home Depot if I'm not careful. People who know me know I'm just verbalizing the processing of the idea streams. People who do not know me tend to think I'm "a bit eccentric." Normally I can manage the "oh, I like 'em just fine" response that people seem to want, but some days....

Oh well.

My daughter didn't talk a lot when she was very young. She seemed to be appropriately conversant later on. But she did go through a phase, at about age 9, where she just would not shut up! She followed me everywhere, talking nonstop. I had to lock the door when I went into the bathroom or she'd have followed me in there as well! There were times we would be in the car and she would be talking nonstop and I'd tell her - please, stop talking for five minutes! Just say nothing for five minutes, ok? And she wouldn't be able to do it. Just getting her to shut up long enough for me to place an order for burgers and drinks at a drive-through wasn't always a given. If she went into her room, I could hear her talking in there as well. Alone. Part of that was, I think, stress - we moved across country and EVERYTHING changed for her. Once she settled in that behavior pretty much went away. I do remember buying her a cassette tape player at about that time and letting her make tapes off of my vinyl record collection. She took to that like a duck to water, making her own mix tapes. And while the music was on, she was quiet. The tape player came with headphones. It was really glorious when she discovered she could listen to music through the headphones. Which shut off the talking.

You might want to look into the relationship with stress in her life. Might not be productive, but it might. And stress can come from the simplest things - like the food being in the wrong place on one's breakfast plate or one's shoes not being in the right place on the floor.

Good luck on it!