Teaching children with AS manners. Where to draw the line.

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I've noticed many parents of children with AS have difficulty distinguishing bad manners from rudeness due to their children's inability to understand/analyze the social situation and this has caused many parents a good deal of difficulty in deciding when to punish or correct.

I think the best way to deal with such things is to start teaching the manners while the child is young, partially through stories and such.

I used to receive a Highlights magazine in the mail, and they used to have moral stories called Goofus and Gallant which I think can be useful for young children with AS. My parents also were very big on explicitly teaching things such as the concept of nice and mean, treating others how you would like to be treated, saying please and thank you, and being good.

It's not that I never slipped up. I used to be quiet keen on pointing out the obvious in front of people, no matter how negative, but this was simply because I didn't see these attributes as negative. They were simply attributes that set them apart from most people.

This is going to sound a bit strange but I think I also learned a lot from my older sister, who could actually be quite mean and loved to think up new insults to call me. I'm not proposing you insult your children, please don't as it's much different coming from a parent than a sibling, but had she not been so horrible to me, I wouldn't have known the sting of mean comments, and I think I thought a little more before I spoke because of her.

I wish my parents and teachers had taught me social manners in such a nice manner. I was just yelled at all the time and punished for "being stubborn" and "acting out." Most of the time, I had no clue why I was being punished or any idea what I did was "wrong". It made no sense to me. Oh, yeah, my mom would always yelp at me to "stop embarrassing" her between the ages of 8 and 12 but had no clue what the concept of "embarrassment" meant.

I sometimes wonder if I had gotten diagnosed at an early age if I would have been taught the same social manners in a friendly manner- see my story "If I had been born in 1996 instead of 1976" http://www.myaspergerslifestory.com/if_ ... _1996.html

role playing helps....so does reverse role play...like how would you feel if I did this to you kind of scenereo.


Alliekat: I feel your pain...I was born in 1977. Although I was diagnosed with PDD when I was 8, I did not know that PDD was on the autism spectrum untill I was 28. go figure.

We have a pretty easy time with rule based manners. Please, thank you, cover your moth when you burp, say excuse me, stuff like that - All easy and we started before they could talk. The subtle stuff, much harder and haven't really figured out when and how to fix.

I'd forgotten about Goofus and Gallant! Sesame Street has a number of shorts on social skills, fairly recently there's a claymation series involving cavemen who have to solve a problem together.

We're in the same boat as Kailuamom - anything that's a rule, DS can understand pretty well, when he remembers at least. However, we really struggle with DS when it comes to rules that change situationally: he's figured out, for instance, that many things are considered appropriate by his peers during lunch at school - unfortunately, almost none of those things are polite nor are they appropriate at home or at a restaurant.

My parents did good not yelling at us for being bad. Mom always told us to stop when we be acting up. She always corrected our behavior like "elbows off the table" "feet in front of you" "Knock first" "Ask first" when we be rude or inconsiderate. I do remember the time mom yelled at me when I was six or seven when I took something out of my aunt's fridge and I got scolded but she explained to me you do not take other peoples food when you are in their home, you ask first and told me to ask my aunt if I can have it. She did the same to my brothers too. Sometimes she yell at us.

Mom also explained to me why I got spanked or why I am grounded. But I usually knew anyway because if I did something and then mom told me "go to your room" I knew it was for that action. I remember the time I got into an argument with my mother when I was eight, I said "Duh" at the end and mom told me "Go to the stairs" and I knew it was for saying "duh" and never said it to her again. but I thought it was a bad word because I got punished for it. It was a new word for me then and I didn't even know what it meant. I just saw it was a new word and kids were all of a sudden using it and then my friends and they say it to me when we argue. So I learned how to use it.


I can remember Temple Grandin talking about in one of her books that she used to watch TV shows in the 50's and they all taught children social skills. I don't think she said she watched them but I am assuming she did because she mentioned children shows used to teach them back then. She also mentioned how people were direct back then but I realize they still are because kids tend to be direct. When she got obsessed about something someone got, she kept talking about it and kids told her to knock it off. Those were children who said that to her, not adults and even if adults did tell her that then too, she was a child and they were just correcting her. That is what grown ups do. They are the teachers. I sense Temple hasn't quite figured everything out yet about social life and the NT rules.

I'm pretty comfortable that my son is never intentionally rude, but when it comes to social graces, he totally does not see the point. So, we write rules that we are lax on at home but use prompts to remind him about in public. He's always liked being out and about, enjoys eating in restaurants, etc, so we learned early on to use it: if he wants to be in public, he must follow the rules, or we cannot be in public. Since the rules have been clearly explained and talked about at home, it only takes a gentle nudge or quiet signal for him to change the behavior. Usually he just wasn't aware.

I really think he's a good kid, and that helps our relationship. It's just startling sometimes how distorted (to us) his perceptions can be.

The funny story here is that for years, when he was a toddler, we didn't try to teach manners. Many parents had told us that kids pick it naturally as long as the parents consistently model good manners. Of course, that was before we knew we had an AS child! Anyway, one night as we all had dinner my husband and I realized we were eating like toddlers instead of our toddler eating like us, ie instead of him picking up our good manners, we had started to emulate his convenience eating, fingers and all. We had a good laugh ... And then changed course.

Something that we do is when my daughter says something rude, I just say "What you just said came across as rude. Were you intending to be rude?" She does answer honestly, so she'll say yes if she was being rude on purpose. If she says no, I explain why the statement she made was rude, and help her figure out the socially acceptable way of communicating what she was wanting to communicate.

I got a call just today from the ST about a couple of things my 12 y/o autie kid did today. His teacher is out of state at her father-in-law's funeral, so the sub and the other fifth grade teacher thought it would be a good idea to have all the kids in her class make sympathy cards. Apparently my son said in his card that he wasn't sorry he had died. In his mind, he didn't know the man and he wasn't actually feeling any sorrow related to his death, so what was the point of saying he was sorry?

So now they all think my son is a horrible jerk who is glad that his teacher's father-in-law is dead. I understand where they are coming from, but they know my son has autism. If they don't know that autistics have a tendency to be very literal and blunt about things, shame on them for lacking knowledge they ought to have. The ST chewed him out about it pretty thoroughly and when he came home, he was on the verge of tears.

At another point in the day, they were doing some kind of roll call and when one name was called and it was said that that child had moved away, my son stood up and proclaimed his joy that that child had moved away. So he lost recess.

Some days I swear the hardest part of parenting an child on the spectrum is teaching them when it is appropriate to lie and dealing with the consequences when they are inappropriately honest.

It makes it hard to work on these things with him when people are being so overwrought about it -- he feels misunderstood and upset and then he gets resistant because he knows he didn't mean anything bad, but he's being treated as though he did. Unfortunately, this is a problem that isn't going to go away. *sigh*

I read somewhere about a school of thought that says you should teach your child more assertive statements such as "I'd like..." or "can I get...", rather than "please", particularly when dealing with service workers. (It still teaches the importance of "thank you" and daily greetings.) After all, it's what most adults say when ordering food, asking for an item from behind the counter, etc. Among adults, "please" is most often used when preceding an order or a request, or an order masquerading as a request, like "please come in for work at 9:00am this Saturday". So, according to this, why teach children a different set of standards when they'll have to relearn it as adults. (Well, NTs will pick up on the "new" standards intuitively, but aspies run the risk of sounding pedantic when saying "can I please get a number 1, with Diet Coke", because that's what they've been taught.)

Just wanted to know what everyone's opinions on here are about this school of thought.

We have always just explained social context as a routine thing - we never really put much thought or emphasis into it. To me, at least, it was clear that my daughter wasn't trying to be rude - she just botched the delivery or the content. so, a correction, and explanation and, if applicable, suggestion that an apology might be a good idea because of how it made the other person feel. When she was small we did lots of coaching on pretending how she would feel if someone had said the rude thing to her. it took a few years but she did catch on once she had more real life practice in school.

Personally, I think it is just a bad idea to teach kids on the spectum that lying is bad. That just confuses NT social behavior even further. I've found explanations about the different types of lies to be much more helpful. My AS daughter is a stickler for the rules. She is just beginning to catch onto the context of different types of lies - lying to deceive is bad. lying to keep from hurting someones feelings is ok, etc... It removes the conundrum and let's her focus on how to apply the 'real rules'.

Truth is a much harder thing to teach filters on. Finding personal examples that she can relate to has always been the best teaching tool but this is hard because all situations are not the same. We need to impart a concept - not just a specific strategy. That is, and may always be, a work in progress. but still, we keep explaining in plain language where it went wrong and how it would be better to approach it with lots of reassurance that we are not angry. Our daughter is particularly sensitive to making mistakes so that is always a consideration in how we approach any correction.