not recognizing people

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While we were traveling, my son twice hugged complete strangers, thinking they were me. (One was sitting next to him at a soda fountain and he hadn't realized I gone to the bathroom, one was also wearing a red shirt.) Luckily, both times the women were amused. It scares me to think how they might have reacted if he weren't still young and cute, though. I hope I don't have to teach him not to hug me in public.

what's a soda fountain?

i love hugs too - and i don't get why i can't hug people in public - especially if i barely know them.

there are some stupid twats in this world - and they're the ones that need educating.

You might want to look up something Tim Page wrote in PARALLEL PLAY. Coming from a small town and moving to New York, he figured out that in his small town, anyone who looked like his friend Stanley was in fact Stanley, but that wasn't necessarily the case in New York City! So, Tim had to make a point and learn a new skill (really a whole set of skills, without pressuring himself, being a coach to himself, etc)

So, maybe your son has the recent background, anyone who looks remotely like you IS you. And in public, in a busy place, that changes.

There could be for other reasons, but it might be due to an inability to recognize faces, a.k.a "prosopagnosia." There's probably threads in the archives on the subject (too busy ATM to find and put up links).

I was very bad at recognizing people when I was little. (But being cautious, I usually erred on the side of assuming someone was a stranger and showing no familiarity until they proved they were my family by something more reliable than face.) Teach him to be very, very cautious about that. I got better at telling people apart as I got older.

Oh yes, I already knew that he didn't recognize faces. My husband and I are both very bad at ourselves in fact, so it's not surprising. I just never really thought about it as something to worry about before.

One thing that has helped me a lot is "eye slit area." kind of scan or softly look at the eye slit area, and kind of take in the rest of the face in my peripheral vision (yes, kind of, one thing I've had to accept is that a lot of it, by its very nature, is inexact. That if I'm trying to 'excel,' I'm missing it. That a lot of this is scanning, skimming, the whole zen flow of everyday life as it were. Yeah, tricky stuff!)