No Idea What He's Talking About

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I have no idea what my 6 yr. old is saying most of the time. When I ask him questions, I get the weirdest answers. He is using real words and his sentence structure is more or less correct, but his responses often seem to have nothing to do with the question I've just asked him.

For example:
Me: Did you pick up your Legos?
Him: There's a robot and it's like 'blam blam blam'!

Now, after more questioning I might be able to figure out that he is talking about a robot he built from Legos. It may be one he built and dismantled a week ago, or an hour ago. Then again, he may be talking about a robot on tv, or just in his imagination. There may not be ANY discernible connection to the question I asked.

Is this normal 6 year old speak or not? I try not to even ask him anything anymore unless it's absolutely necessary.

I get this a lot from my almost 6 yo son too. The way one doc put it was that what DSfinds relevant in this world is not necessarily what we, his parents, find relevant or what we would like for him to find relevant. And, if DS does not find what I am saying to be relevant, he is likely to completely ignore it. In these situations I have to make a choice. Do I REALLY need the information from him that I am asking for? If so, I have to take steps to break into his little world so to speak and get him to come in to mine. I will sing his name or say things like "I know that you can hear what I am saying and I need you to respond to me now please". Repeated often enough, this will sometimes get him to respond. Another tact I use which can be more time consumng but generally less frustrating is to engage in the conversation he wants to have so that I am letting him draw me into his world, thereby becoming relevant to him. Then once I am there I can steer the conversation around to what I needed him to respond to in the first place.

If I decide that I his response is really not that important, I let it go and walk away. Sometimes I can come back after leaving him alone for 15-20 mintues and he is in a different frame of mind and ready to interact more.

It's so frustrating when I have several other things I'm trying to get done, and I ask him a question that only requires a "yes" or "no", and I end up having a ten-minute interrogation instead.

And forget about finding out what's going on at school. Sometimes I ask him how his day was, and he tells me about something that happened last year in kindergarten! I think he may have gotten in a fight in gym class last week, but it may have just been a game....can't get a straight answer. I just know he "won" and that the other kid was his bully, and that no one at the school has contacted me about it, so I guess I'll not worry about it. He said, "I found out I'm a lot stronger than **** today!"

We have started to have some success with DS drawing about what is bothering him or about confrontations at school like the one you describe. It is mostly hit and miss but I have been trying to remember to ask him if he wants to draw or write about it and sometimes this has shed some light on the situation. I feel your pain though. My DS had an issue with another child in gym class recently and I just couldn't figure out what happened. The gym teacher did not know. It obviously wasn't what the teacher would consider a disciplinary situation but DS was distressed about it. Our OT can often be helpful in getting to the bottom of some situations. He is almost like a therapist for us!

If all of his speech is like this, he might have semantic pragmatic disorder or something similar. However if it's primarily when you ask him questions, it could be that he is just responding with the first thing the question made him think of.

When my nearly four year old does this, we remind him to turn his ears "on", and we reach behind both ears and make a clicking sound to turn them on for him. Bizarrely it seems to work!

Our SLT brings out her 'listening ears' sometimes as well - a pair of Shrek ears on a headband. It seems to remind DS to listen to what we actually asked rather than what he thought we asked.

Not sure if that would work if your child's issue was more about what he thought was relevant in the question, but possibly worth a try.

My 6 year old does this most of the time. I think he is concentrating on whatever little movie he has in his head and when I interrupt with a question or statement, he responds to whatever he is doing in his head instead of me. I also have found that he thinks I know what he is thinking. It is helpful to ask him what is going on inside his brain. If he tells me something relevant to what he responded with, I will remind him that he has to tell me because I can't see what he is talking about.

I have a six year old --- closer to seven, at this point--- and he has done this for a long time and is just now getting better with using more appropriate responses.

I didn't know the trick about "listening ears." I may need to steal that.

I have noticed that my son has spent is spending more time outside his head than he used to. That does not means he won't do what your son does and effectively change the subject by saying something that sounds like a non sequitur, but he is more likely now to precede it with a transition.

ex:
Me: <Whatever question I asked>
Him: I don't want to talk about that now. <Launch into brain dump about whatever is in his head.>

He used to just go into his brain dump right away. Now that he transitions, it is easier to address because I know he heard me, and I don't have to repeat myself, I can then decide if I want to make him revisit my question before changing topics or if I want to let him go first.

He more frequently will let me go on a train of thought for awhile before changing topics, so I look at that as an improvement in reciprocity.

@ "brain dump" That's exactly what it is.

So is this just a kid thing, or an Aspie thing? Sometimes I don't know what is Aspie-weird and what is just
kid-weird. If something is just kid-weird I tend to let it slide (because if it's a normal part of development, what else can you really do?) whereas if it's an Aspie thing I try to look for ways to address it.

I think its a bit of both. It seems to me that all children (especially young children) do this to some extent, only when you add in a special interest, a delayed or lack of theory of mind (perspective), and difficulty reading nonverbal social cues then you could have an increasing problem as the child ages and social expectations increase. What you do is provide the perspectives, point out the nonverbal cues and help them to develop this skill with time.

I recently listened to Look Me in the Eye on audiobook and John Robinson did a great job explaining what went on in his mind as a child when this very thing happened, and what happened to him when the adults did a poor job explaining, and how he learned the skill of what to say as an adult. It helped me be a little more patient with my own DS when it feels to me as if he is just not listening.

I agree with Eureka-C it probably is a bit of both. The difference I can see between my two boys (1 NT 8 yo and 1 ASD almost 6 yo) is that it will sometimes be difficult to get my NT son's attention when he is involved in playing with something however, he recognizes that when he doesn't respond it irritates me. The ASD son doesn't get that when I tell him to put on his shoes, we have to leave now, and he keeps talking about bakugan, I get increasingly annoyed.

It sounds to me like he needs speech therapy, specifically a lot of work on answering "wh" questions.

My older son with high-functioning classic autism required extensive therapy in order to learn how to answer questions appropriately. He needed both vocabulary work and practice answering the questions. His therapy was home-based, using homemade materials (flashcards, books, and slideshows) such as you can see in the "uploads" section of my free YouTube Speech and Vocabulary Channel. See www.youtube.com/user/vids4autkids3.

You can also take him to private speech therapy or buy materials that you can use to teach asking and answering questions. Good sources for these materials are superduperinc.com, difflearn.com, teach2talk.com, and babybumblebee.com. Some of the materials available at these sites is available cheaper used at Amazon.com and other shopping sites.

Finally, I have a whole lot of playlists on my free Speech and Vocabulary YouTube Channel also (stuff made by others and uploaded onto YouTube and then arranged into playlists by me). Many of these playlists will soon end up on my free website, www.freevideosforautistickids.com, which I am currently overhauling to incorporate my YouTube Channels and to organize things better.