Friends upset with my HFA

[Anonymous]

I'm NT and I cannot recognize a face to save my life! Only after repeated encounters can I quickly identify someone. It has been troublesome.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here.
i don't mean to find a magic wand or a super solution for this, but it wasn't a one off. And yes, it is the social anxiety that comes with his HFA package :/

My kid with HFA doesn't learn social skills without explicit instruction and he frequently doesn't generalize a social skill from one scenario to the next. He never improvises if he doesn't know what to do. He just sort of freezes up and does nothing.

With my kid with HFA, we prompted the appropriate behaviors when we are with him. "Oh, hey, there's your friend Jack. Go say "hi" to Jack. Ask him what he did last weekend. Ask him if he wants to __________________(play on the slide, come over this weekend, play on the swings, whatever)."

If we missed it, we talk about it afterwards and rehearse what he could have done. "Oh, hey, Jack was at the playground. Did you say "hi?"" "No." "The next time you see Jack at the playground, you should say "Hi" and ask him to play with you on the _________________."

After many years of rehearsing and talking about it, starting at about age 5, it finally clicked in at age 12. He isn't socially graceful at age 12, but he is socially functional.

Being an incredibly literal person myself, I remember how frustrated I would get with people expecting me to somehow define from thin air the appropriate thing to say then getting mad at me when I didn't do it. So I much prefer prompting my son or giving him scripts to use. An admonition to "be polite" is too vague for him. We sometimes do an after action analysis to help him identify things that are rude, but it's not reasonable for me to expect him to extrapolate "be polite" means to go up to his friend, say hello, and ask to play. If that's what I want him to do, that's what I tell him to do.