^This was about what I was going to say, it happened to me and the OP could have easily been me. Not only that I was a real stubborn immature ass about it too, I likely would not have accepted help or just blown it off.
The “real world” taught me pretty quickly and harshly, BUT there was a purity in it that you can’t find when you are butting heads with someone trying to change you. That kind of pure education is like being dropped in the Sahara with little water, you will learn pretty quick to conserve water and there is no one to blame for failure but yourself eventually.
At that point I decided ok I want more out of life, lets learn and play this social game. Girls helped too, you want to be laid you play the game. It got easier and easier with practice, I still have oh crap akward moments but I can mostly pass as a human being…mostly
Everyone is different, and I am not advocating harsh treatment. Just that eventually your son WILL want more out of life and to get it he will have to swim.
I more or less taught myself by reading way too much Sherlock Holmes. I had to get old enough to understand why Holmes thought it was useful to read the agony columns before it really clicked, but it turns out that the combination of paying attention to details and learning about past situation which are similar to the one you’re stuck in for the present really does work. Some people seem to have an inborn knack for it, but you can learn a lot of it as an academic skill.
There’s also an element of showmanship, which most people don’t realize. Right answers count, but so does presentation.
I wish our op would return and answer the now several times asked - how much does this bother him?
The discusion seems really to hinge on that. There are quite a few posters here who can easily identify with having had different interests than kids around them growing up; that was not something wrong with them that needed fixing. They perhaps could have benefited from parents who appreciated them and their less common interests and who helped them find others who shared them. Some of the posters here were also socially awkward kids and had to grow into themselves, which many then did, and by self-report, some are still waiting to accomplish. Less of a need to remediate and more often some acceptance will be more useful. But there are kids who really are not reading the social cues (both verbal and non-verbal) that are obvious to everyone else around them, who really do not only fixate on one subject at a time but drive others away wanting to make every conversation about it and only it, and who are sad, frustrated, and lonely as a result.
Is this kid one of the latter or one of the former? Is this his problem or more his parent’s? The what to do really does depend on that. If the issue is that he is a round peg who is placed in a school of all square holes that’s one thing, and the response of a parent is one thing. If he really is lacking in an ability to recognize the rules of social engagement and is sequentially fixating obsessively on various narrow interests that he cannot get that others do not share, that’s another, on both counts.
I’ve been trying to figure out how the comment to the OP.
I was a dork and a doofus when I was 12. I was the kid who’d sit in the corner and pick paint off the walls, singing to herself. My hair was always wild. I didn’t socialize enough to be that annoying, but I didn’t try very hard to fit in. Intellectually I knew how I was weird, but I didn’t care enough about other people to change myself. I was resistant to both familial and peer pressure. Social skills training would not have helped me, if my parents had been inclined to get me that kind of help. I didn’t want to be social. The trade-offs involved with not being social were not that serious to me.
I do not look back on that time proudly, but honestly I can’t see how anyone could have intervened.
It sounds like the kid in the OP is kind of like how I was. Weird but not unhappy about it. Probably aware that his thought processes are more non-linear than the norm and probably glad about it. He probably does NOT like the harrassment that he gets from his peers, but it’s not enough to make him change. Just like being called crazy wasn’t enough to make me stop singing to myself.
That doesn’t mean the OP has to encourage him in all his ways. I used to ask my mother bizarre questions that I KNEW were bizarre; I just wanted to engage with her on something that wasn’t serious and was on my level. (I still do this, by the way). Sometimes she’d be a good sport and we’d have a good conversation. And then sometimes she’d say, “You keep asking me silly questions, girl!!” And I’d know I needed to back off and be “normal.” You can be direct with someone without squashing who they are OR making a big deal about their personality flaws.
I agree that a lot of this revolves around whether Ben is unhappy, and whether he wants to change. Showing a happy Ben the new advantages he can get from learning social skills would seem to me to be very different from helping a desperately-unhappy Ben who knows something is wrong but has no idea what to do to fix it.
Personally, I am glad the OP is recognizing that this could be a problem. I work with an adult who acts much like her son. She regales us with endless chatter about topics that generally only interest her, or only interest others for a short while (her daughters, her daughter’s school, the weather, her motor scooter, Bigfoot, etc.) She seems to not be able to recognize the social cues which indicate that a person is no longer interested or that the topic of conversation has gone on to something else. You can avoid eye contact, turn away, or actually start talking to other people and she just keeps going.
Where I work, we often eat lunch together as a big group, and someone in our group felt sorry for her sitting alone one day, so they invited her over to our table. She has sat with us absolutely every day since. We’re all too chicken to “be mean” and just tell her to go away (telling her to shut up has not worked very well…works for a day at best). Basically, my workplace is like high school, and people make fun of her behind her back. It’s really made lunchtime rather uncomfortable sometimes. She has been placed in an area where she largely works alone because no one could possibly stand working with her for eight hours a day.
One of my coworkers actually went to school with her, and said that she was like that in school, too, and was ostracized for it. If there is some way to help your son now recognize that awareness, I believe it will help him so much in life. Maybe he’s oblivious to the teasing…but you can’t really be that oblivious, can you? And how terrible is it if your career options are limited because no one can stand to be around you?
And on that note, when I finally embraced my nerdiness/weirdness during senior year, I realized how unhappy worrying about being weird was making me.
Palo Verde, it’s very possible your desire for your son to be “normal” will just make him angry. He very likely is normal and it’s you who has to get over it.
He can be normal and annoying. Monopolizing conversations and rambling about inane topics is like someone who chews with their mouth open. It doesn’t make you abnormal, just annoying. It can be fixed, and should be fixed. Pausing to let others speak does not change who you are. If you think so, get over yourself.
Eventually, with luck, he’ll become an attorney and get paid for being bossy and interested in extremely obscure and boring knowledge. It worked for me.
I have a coworker who is exactly like this. I can turn my back to her, put earbuds in my ears, and start singing Broadway musicals at the top of my lungs while rocking side to side like Stevie Wonder and the girl will continue talking to me about Boring-Ass Shit I Don’t Care About.
And she’s clueless about this annoying tendency of hers. The other day she remarked that she was glad she and her fiance are on the same page about quiet time. “Silence is good”, she said. I almost choked.
He’s 12 for crap’s sake. Have you ever hung around a 12 year old for an extended amount of time? It’s a nightmare. Even the “normal” ones have topics of conversation they want to spend hours discussing that would make an adult’s eyes bleed.
I suggest Boy Scouts. You can ignore all the political stuff at the top of Boy Scout policy when you’re at the troop level and a few steps up. I’m a lesbian, which would mean the BSA policy would exclude me as an Asst Scoutmaster, but troopwise who cares? They’re glad to have me.
(I’m trying to give a disclaimer there because I don’t want to derail the thread into a BSA-bash.)
Anyway, the Boy Scouts is great for my son, age 13. He was never socially awkward, as a matter of fact he’s kind of the “hip dude” in his class, but he loves Boy Scouts.
A lot of the boys in his troop, whom we have known for years now, are socially awkward. I think that it’s good for them to be in a BSA atmosphere because
It’s not self-selected. It’s a bunch of kids with all sorts of different things going on, some popular, some not, but they all have a loyalty to each other. There are kids in my sons’ troops whom he would never in a million years hang out with at school, but whom he’ll support and remain loyal to because they are Scouts together. This gives the kids many behavioral role models around their age who are guiding by modeling and not rejecting them when they “spaz out.” You know what I’m saying.
Troop leaders have some excellent methods for dealing with behavioral quirks. Most of it is passive, but very effective. It’s much less direct and critical than what we parents can use in modifying behavior. The Scoutmasters stop what they’re doing and smile a moment when someone crosses a line. Naturally, the Scouts all look at the person, though just to see what he’ll do, not with nasty expressions or anything. When necessary (ie, if the behavior is repeated), the Scoutmaster says something directly but mildly to the Scout. I love to watch it work. It makes a great parenting model.
So it’s like the group is self-regulating. No one wants to spoil the troop experience (esp since they’re planning a hike or a trip to DC!), and kids respond amazingly well to the accepting atmosphere. My son pointed out once, If you want to join Boy Scouts, we pretty much have to deal with you.
I think it is really good for the boys socially, on the small scale and the large. And I am sooo the “Hip Mama,” so don’t think I was predisposed to the whole thing!
That’s the other thing. EVERYBODY knows at least one adult who acts like Palo’s son. I know this woman who jabbers on and on about her kids, her extended relations, the SOs of her kids, and old high school friends she gets together with once a month for coffee. I have never met any of these people but I know her daughter doesn’t want kids, her cousin is a drug addict, her son’t ex-girlfriend is a lying whore, and her friend from high school is cheating the government.
But she doesn’t have Asperger’s and if I felt like being an asshole, I could probably tell her to shut the hell up. Palo should try to help his/her son, but don’t tell him there’s something wrong with him, leave the siblings out of it, and just keep it simple (“Dial it down, Palo Jr.”).
Many teachers will tell you that lack of sleep and no breakfast are huge obstacles to overcome on the average school day. I have read that some schools (elementary) are considering supplying breakfast and adding a “nap time” for kids throughout grade school. (I mentioned this to my employer…)
I put my kid down for a good 9 hours every night, and it used to be more. When he has the unusual night with less sleep, oh boy, you can tell.
There’s a big difference between teaching someone not to do something that others find actively disruptive, and demanding that someone choose specific non-disruptive behaviors in order to fit in to a pre-selected social group. In other words, if he walks up to random classmates and begins talking about llamas whenever he feels like it, preventing them from concentrating on their worksheet and even following them to continue when they give the customary social signs of not responding, not making eye contact, telling him to shut up, and/or walking away – then he needs to learn that llamas are not as important as homework in the eyes of his classmates, and he needs to respect that’s how the other person feels about it.
If it’s just that he and one or two of his close buddies can talk about llamas for hours, and his lack of interest in talking to anyone else about anything other than llamas has led the other kids to stop approaching him socially, then there’s nothing wrong with him that a membership to the Llama of the Month Club wouldn’t cure. You cannot make the other kids like him, and you cannot make him like the other kids enough to change for them. What you can do is do your damndest to teach your kid how we behave in when we live in civilization, and to reinforce the notion that you will totally have his back if somebody else’s kids are obviously not learning that lesson.
Palo Verde, you’ve asked this question more than once, and you got pretty much the same answers both times. You’ve never told us if the way things are bugs your son or not. Is it because you’re not sure? If you’re afraid he’s not owning up to his real feelings for some reason, then taking him to see a counselor a time or two might help you get to the bottom of this.
