Question about AS kid Acting annoying for no reason

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I have a question about something my AS son does. Everything will be fine, and then all of a sudden, with no warning, he will suddenly become really, really annoying. For instance, he'll say some silly thing in an irritating, high-pitched, grating voice, like, "Your face is a bucket!!" and then he'll say it again and again. The people around him will say they don't like it, and please stop, and then he'll start making even more annoying noises, like a really fake baby-cry. It's like he's trying to be as absolutely annoying as he possibly can, and he simply can't or won't stop until it is out of his system. Sometimes it helps to ignore him, but most of the time it doesn't. Besides, his little brother doesn't always have the maturity or ability to ignore him. Sometimes I don't, either.


Did any of you ever do stuff like that (or still do)? And if so...WHY? What brings about the urge to do that? And why is it so hard to stop? And how do we shut him up?

I don't mean that to sound unkind. I do try to be understanding, and I do understand that this is an AS thing. But it can be so irritating.

(At this moment, I am on hour three of having to listen to the neighbor's high pitched smoke-detector's low-battery alarm. It's so shrill and piercing, we can't tell exactly where it's coming from, but we suspect it's from an unoccupied house, so it will be going all night. It's got me completely on edge, and the last thing I need is my kid being obnoxious. Luckily, he finally calmed down. Now I just have that high-pitched beep beep beep piercing through the double glazing.)

You need to implement constructive containment. This is fine behavior for when by oneself, but needs to not unreasonably intrude on others. It is best to remove the child from current activity until they feel able to comfortably participate without annoyance to others. This should be done pleasantly, without blame talk, and with full explanation as to what conditions are appropriate for him to return (for instance, that he can comfortably discontinue the verbalizations).

If you are unsure whether he does it on purpose, for now, it may not be a good idea to make apology a condition for return.

If he can go to some place he likes to verbally stim, and he is not annoying on purpose, then if properly handled, permission to stim in his own private space is not a negative thing.

However, if he is annoying on purpose, the behavior is again, best handled by removal from the situation, on the same pleasant terms as above. But additionally, you need to really try to figure out quite why he is seeking attention of this kind (annoying others), - it may be as little as work to help him have more realistic expectations about how much attention he can have, or perhaps to express some particular kind of attention/interaction he wants but cannot quite explain, he might just be bored and need assistance learning how to 'self-amuse'.

I do it sometimes when I am tired or having a reaction to something I have eaten...or both..like yesterday, when I was hanging out at my friend's work, and could not get off the kick of (joke) threatening to scrawl his co-worker's name onthe wall in sharpie...and I just tthought it was the funniest thing in the world, and kept going in circles on the idea...till I got way past the point where my friend thought it was funny...I was both tired, and had just consumed cheese and white flour...

A lot of kids do stuff like this, ASD or NT.

They are often either:

a) Pushing their boundries, trying to see what you'll put up with, and what causes you to react in certain ways.
b) Bored, and trying to amuse themselves.
c) Signalling to their parents that they want attention.

The best way to handle it would be to not "reward him" for behaviour like that. Give him attention when he uses conventional language, not odd sounds or odd phrases. If he starts acting up in public, tell him that if he continues to act like that, then he won't get _________ (whatever game/movie/candy he would like). This kind of behaviour gets worse if parents give in to their kids.

My PDD-NOS 7 yr old son does something similar. Most of the time when he does stuff like that I'm pretty sure he's stimming. A phrase will get stuck in his head, and it's hilarious to him so he'll keep repeating it, the same with noises. (which I did do as a child) I think it is an added bonus to him if it irritates his sister in the process of all this. If he gets really loud I'll ask him to please go to his room to do it. I don't get angry, because I don't want him to feel bad about stimming, but he does need to learn that he can't occupy every bit of the sound waves around him when he feels like it. Other people need to be taken into consideration, too.

it also sounds like echolalia,though he may be doing some of it on purpose as well.

Sometimes it's just fun to play around with a word or a phrase or a sound... oh, yeah, and it can be fun to deliberately annoy others, if you're a little kid.

I've learned to keep it private, but a kid can't be expected to know that! No-blame teaching him to do this stuff when he's someplace where it won't annoy people could be the solution. This is assuming he can predict and/or control it, of course.