He just doesn’t interact with other people, as far as I can tell.
I have two children, a daughter who is 16 and a son that is 14. My daughter is, at least by comparison, a social butterfly. She’s always going over to visit friends, having friends over, going to parties or other social activities. She’s also a bit of a geek, her high school concentration is in math and physics. She’s an artist, who loves drawing, painting and plays the guitar and ukelele, plus makes geeky short films to post on YouTube. Oh, and an athlete, competing in soccer, track and now cross country in school. She gets good grades and is usually sweet and pleasant.
By contrast, my son does almost nothing. He plays video games or read books all day, broken up by some occasional TV. He likes to watch Psych, Top Gear, the Mentalist and was a big fan of House and Monk when they were on. His main video game is World of Warcraft, although he also finds various free games on the Internet to play, and sometimes plays X-box. His tastes in books tend toward stuff like Harry Potter and Hunger Games and that genre tending towards kids/young adults. He gets along pretty well with his sister, and her female friends all fawn over him when they come over, but he really has almost no friends of his own. There is one kid, a bit of a goof, that lives in our neighborhood and occasionally he’ll get invited and go spend the night, where I believe they mostly play video games or watch movies. He never initiates this, and sometimes declines offers. He played baseball until 6th grade, then decided to stop in part because he says he felt stressed since practice took so much time, but in part, I believe, because of coaches who were making the game not be fun. His favorite class the last couple of years of middle school would normally be PE; he loves to play softball.
He’s always been shy and is pretty much the definition of taciturn. He is polite, quiet and generally very affectionate towards his mother and our dog, and to me as well, albeit with less cuddling.
Oh, and he’s pretty smart. When he was younger he was mostly ostracized (not picked on, afaik) by other kids because his vocabulary was generally much more advanced than theirs. In fourth grade the teacher ran out of (age appropriate) things for him to read, he’d read through her whole catalog. He can read much, much faster than I can. In other words, he’s probably like a lot of folks are here, at least to see people describe themselves as youths.
Next week, he’ll start high school, at the same school as his older sister. She’s really wanted him to go there, because she feels he’ll fit in. It’s an IB magnet school, targeted to more academic kids, and many of the kids are a lot like him.
My concern is that he get there and still not really fit in with any group. Then what? I’d love to hear from anyone who has lived through this and has advice.