feeling guilty

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Sometimes I let the pressure get to me of being a parent of an AS child. I try and Try and try to tell him that he is talking soooo much people just can not stand it. he talks all thru a TV show/movie and interjects with his theories. My husband at times says to me that Ryan is like Cliff Claven from cheers.. has input on everything and knows NOTHING.. and he insists that his theory/point is correct. I have learned that most of the time if I point out to him that he is wrong he goes off on a further tangent. so i have the catch 22 let him think what he thinks is correct and he seems pretty ignorant to most people or do I correct him and try to get thru to him some way? I think that it might seem pretty horrible from me to keep correcting him but I need to do this now so when he is an adult he will not grow up with this attiutude that he knows it all.. and truthfully it not only turns off adults it makes his peers look at him strange and this is where they pick up that he has issues and then he becomes the victim in their games.. so yes I feel bad that I am telling him all the time to be quite, let others talk, don't cut people off and use self control! he is not capable of talking to you.. he yells and yells.. the screaching at times just drives me mad.. sometimes I have to tell him that I can not deal with him at the moment and I need to go to my room and chill. do any other parents here feel guilt over not being a perfect parent????

Try not to beat yourself up over it. I'm new here so I don't know how old your kiddo is. Be glad that you are able to pinpoint when you need to remove yourself from an escalating situation instead of taking your frustration out in a bad way. My kiddo (a toddler yet) drives me to the point of exasperation in an instant....he and I are too much alike on so many levels.

Is there anyone at your child's school who can do some social skills practice with him? A counsellor, maybe? Again, I'm not too familiar with your situation although I gather this is more of a public school setting.

You are TRYING. That is what counts.

1. Pick your battles
2. On occasion I have told my kid (who does the same thing your's does) "shut up, Michael, you're ruining it for us." If that makes me a bad parent, so be it, but my sanity is just as important as his.
You are not alone.
He's a good kid when it really comes down to it, but he's going to be a very unpopular adult (which he will be in six months). I want him to succeede, he does not understand that, but as my own therapist said, "you're past the point where you can influence him. Just back off. If he's annoying you, tell him his behavior is annoying, not that HE is annoying, his behavior."
Hope it helps.

1. Pick your battles
2. On occasion I have told my kid (who does the same thing your's does) "shut up, Michael, you're ruining it for us." If that makes me a bad parent, so be it, but my sanity is just as important as his.
You are not alone.
He's a good kid when it really comes down to it, but he's going to be a very unpopular adult (which he will be in six months). I want him to succeede, he does not understand that, but as my own therapist said, "you're past the point where you can influence him. Just back off. If he's annoying you, tell him his behavior is annoying, not that HE is annoying, his behavior."
Hope it helps.

i struggle with the same thing with my daughter. she will go on and on and on~oblivious to the fact that others find her chatter annoying. i feel so bad that i am always correcting her..she gets upset that i'm correcting her and then goes right back to talking.she went to a birthday party on monday, and all of the other girls just stared at her as she went on and on and on. daughter was totally oblivious and just kept going. i just don't know how to get through to her.

TV watching & interrupting: I started interrupting his show(s) by standing in front of the screen. "Mom, move, I can't see my show" - then I explained that when we are watching and he's talking, it's the same for us. I had tried to do the chatter thing as an example, but he's very, very good at tuning me out. Another thing we've tried is turning up the volume to hear over him. We've done that enough that now he's learned and if the volume goes up, he'll grab something to read or leave the room. We used to tell him this is our time too and we have to turn up the volume - he's learning.

Lecturing & motor mouth: Again, we gave him examples of how it sounds (I will occasionally start lecturing on painting the dining room or some other dull thing). When his chatter and my chatter get to be too much for him, then I explain - well, nobody wants to hear 10, 20 minutes from you either. We then work on question/answer and I try to help him learn how to have a conversation. It's slowly getting better. We also try to walk every day and the first half of the time is his lecture time. He seems pretty good about understanding this is the time and once he's done, he's pretty much done for the day.

The professor: Oh boy, that was one of the hardest. I finally learned to let him be wrong and then help him prove it for himself. We would look it up, or we would try it and I would let him figure out where/how he was wrong. Then it's not a mom/dad vs. son power struggle. In those cases I just guide him toward finding the answers or proof he needs. Mom, the sky will be green today. Really? How do you figure that? Well, the atmosphere is flexible today. Really? Hey, let's go look at it. Sorta looks blue to me. Hmm, perhaps my calculations were wrong....

"Perfect parent": HAH!! You don't need a kid on the spectrum to discover child-raising is like working your way through a minefield and trying to avoid major explosions. Just keep the band-aids and pain reliever handy, listen to your heart, try again tomorrow and you'll do just fine.

I can't believe it all sounds like you are talking about my son, he is interested in politics and usually feels like talking about this right before I am ready to go to sleep, he will come in my room and talk about politics or the price of gas lol. I don't see him all evening long he stays in his room but when its bed time he wants to chat. lol and yes I do feel guilty. I feel more guilty about all the years we didn't know he had aspergers and we couldn't understand his "obsessions" and just thought he could just quit. That is what I feel guilty about. But he tells me all the time I am a good mom. I think parents, all parents, feel guilty about one thing or another.

The issue really is not like your son "knows nothing". He in fact does know things (from his persepctive) and wants to share them with you. So instead of trying to fix that in him remember that Aspies like rules. So, first make sure he has a clear understanding about the "rules" for conversations and practice those. And constant correcting verbally is probably not as entertaining for him to hear either. Some kids with AS perhaps may actually be focused so much on keeping on track of what they want to say that they are oblivious to verbal correction. So, I have heard from others that they gained more success by not verbally trying to interrupt their kids from talking but to set up some kind of visual indicator or signal that the kid understands. Usually reinforced first by social stories about the "rules" for conversation.

Right now my son often interrupts conversation but he is usually not that aware of the conversation going on around him and also with his language difficulties he is almost on a "delay" as far as being able to say what he wants to say in a timely manner. So proper rules of conversation right now are not the focus because that would really just encourage him not to engage in conversation.

So you want to make sure that you are not going to be giving the impression that you want him to be quiet because you don't want to listen to him. If you are successful in that than he may feel hesitant to engage in conversations with others and begin to feel anxiety about his abilities in public - like making him overfocused on if he is doing everything right or that no one will like him if he dominated the conversation. So make sure the focus is on wanting him to understand the rules not on him personally.