Misconstruing what others say?????

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Okay, I'll keep this as succinct as possible. 8 year old Aspie son. Diagnosed little over 2 months ago. Also has ADHD. Meds Focalin and Intuniv. Yesterday he sat in his dad's chair and picked at a loose thread until there was an orange sized piece that had the fabric off. When I asked him why he did it, he said he didn't do it that it was like that. I said No, it wasn't and he said I was lying. I just let it go and colored it with a Sharpie marker. Thank goodness it was black and men sometimes don't notice those things so maybe my husband won't. Thing is he says kids at school are always calling him a liar and I wonder if it is for things like this. Is this common behavior? I am at wits end and this train ride just started. I have an appt. with therapist myself Monday. He seems to be getting worse not better?! I'm reading like crazy and have joined local Autism chapter but I need a support group. May have to start one myself. Thanks for reading and if you respond.

I wonder if there might be quite a few layers here. The thing is, many kids at age 8 lie, usually for self-protection, in any of it's various forms. To be seen as the people they wish to be instead of who they are, seems to be common. Kind of an extension of the fantasy from the toddler years, where a child seems to believe that if he repeats information often enough, it can supplant the truth.

So, his insistence this one time may have nothing at all to do with his AS. It could be more developmental than anything.

But you are going to start seeing the more tricky issues with lying that seem to be common among AS, and that is confusion about the whole concept. AS kids are highly literal, yet we tell them to never lie on the one hand, while teaching them to fake thanks and other things as social niceties on the other hand. To an AS with maturing thinking, it is easy to reach the conclusion that people lie all the time, and that they are almost expected to join in. When that happens, the child may take on lying as a full blown defense mechanism, but I think 8 is far too young to have reached that conclusion or made that decision; middle school seems to be when AS kids really hit the wall on it (just based on what I've gleamed from these boards over the years). I don't think you are there yet; I think you are in a more normal childhood stage of testing boundaries and realities, but you have to be careful when you talk to him about lying so that he'll properly learn some of the nuances involved.

I think it was when my son was 9, maybe 10, that he got a great real life lesson in the tangled web lies can weave, when he said something at school to a friend to ease a social conflict. I actually had to refrain from laughing as I was trying to help him unravel it all, because it seemed so Shakespearean at the time. He vowed never to lie again after that experience, and he has stuck to that pretty well.

So ... your son still has some road to travel on figuring out what happens when one lies. My preference, and it worked with my son, is to keep a fairly light touch on it, as in not using harsh consequences, but also making it clear that the lie has failed. You can't let the lies succeed; best that they learn lying doesn't work than that they start to believe it might. But you have to stick to things you can prove, least they start to feel you don't trust them ... one way to work it is to ask question after question, building on their answers, so that if they are lying they are almost forced to create this amazing tangled web, and they start to feel the weight of it, at which point they may run from it and you get to have a constructive discussion about why lying is not a good thing.

Tricky, eh? And more so when the child is AS, because of their literal thinking.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Kind of tired today. But see what happens if you ask more questions next time something like this happens. "Oh, really, I hadn't noticed. How long would you say it has been like this?" And so on.

As for what is going on at school with the other kids - that may be completely unconnected. You need to ask him to repeat every element of the conversations that led to the accusation to figure out what the kids mean.

Oh, and on the thread title ... our kids often misconstrue meaning. Very much a part of AS to do that.

I have a 10 year old son - ADHD. No ASD. He's taking Vivance.

I don't know what the deal is or why they do it - but I think it's just something some kids do. Mine was ALWAYS telling people things that were totally made up. the first Parent/Teacher conferences of the year were waaaayyyyy interesting. OMG! The things that kid could come up with were just mind boggling.

He was a total liar too. Like your son, you could WATCH him do somethng and he'd still deny it! It was so frustrating too. Telling him he was not being truthful really didn't sink in, it just didn't seem to matter to him. We did talk to him about, told him that people would not believe him when he did tell the truth because he lies so much. Warned him that the kids at school would start to 'call him out' for his BS and it was going to embarrass him and make him feel bad.

He's pretty much 'out grown' it as far as telling the 'tall tales', but it did take a bit of 'do unto others' to break him of the habit of lying to us. When we asked him if he'd done one of his chores (the kid does not have a lot of chores, and certainly nothing too overwhelming for him to do) along with a warning that we will know if he lied to us, we'd let him say yes or no (and then go do it) and leave it at that. Later, when we had a snack or had sort of planned to do something he liked - we'd skip it. When he asked about it - we'd tell him we did it. HUH? No we didn't! "Well honey, you do that. You tell us things that aren't true so it must be okay." But that's not fair! "No it really isn't fair when someone lies to you." But I didn't mean it! "Neither did I but I can't go back and change it now. Maybe we can start over tomorrow." He'd think about it - well - he'd fume about it for about 10 minutes, whine about how life stinks and how he was the most unhappy child in the world - then he'd get over it. It only took doing that a couple of times before he 'got it'. I can see his face twisting a bit sometimes - he really wants to lie - but he tells the truth now. Usually with an elaborate excuse as to WHY he couldn't/didn't do what he was supposed to. We thank him for being honest and tell him to get crackin' and do whatever it was that he was supposed to do.

Strange - my AS daughter just won't lie. Even 'little white lies' - she just won't do it. And that's a totally different story.

Around ten or eleven I would make up stories about my "friends" just to see if lying was actualy possible and because I liked to tell stories. My mum says she dosen't know weither or not I truely like her clothes or cooking because I always say I do. Sometimes I mean it other times I don't but I try to be nice and say I liked it even if it is hurredleously ugly or tastes revoloting.

I realize I forgot to mention another common issue with AS kids: remember, there is no "you know what I meant," and there is no generalizing. The question, "did you brush your teeth?" can be truthfully answered, in a literal sense, if the teeth were brushed yesterday. So the question has to be, "did you brush your teeth tonight?" Pay close attention to the precision in your questions and the precision in his answers. These are not lies to the AS child and should not be treated as such, least you end up inadvertently teaching the child that the world really does lie all the time.

I have found that AS kids have a natural aversion to lying, because they are so literal. Either they are going to buy into it big time (particularly if they believe the whole world does it all the time, which is easy for them to conclude), or they are going to avoid it. Still, they aren't immune to the normal phases of childhood, and your child is at an important age for getting the lesson straight.