Our little boy repeats same things and does not focus

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Hi everyone. I am very happy I found your group. Our little boy was diagnosed with autism and he is very smart and verbal. He has memorized books and videos about clouds, the moon, and sun and repeats these facts jumbled all together all day long. When he is working with his ABA Therapist (who is wonderful and got him talking and opened him up to the world) he will respond to her and then go on and on about the clouds, sun and moon. When he is home with us if we are eating together he will say I want pancakes and then go on about the sun, moon and clouds. He seems to enjoy repeating these things but we are seeking help for ways to teach him ways to talk about it only at certain times and to focus on what is happening at the moment with appropriate talk. Please help! Any ideas are much appreciated!! !!

I'm not a parent but I think appropriate advice depends on the reason why he is repeating this stuff. Is he trying to communicate or is he stimming?

I think that he loves the topic so much that it gives him pleasure to talk about it and he likes the sound of some of the words like cloudy. But I know that he is capable of responding to other things but he is not as interested.

I do think that sometimes he is stimming because when he repeats these sentences he is in a world of his own.

Other times he is genuinely excited to talk about it and share what he knows.

So is there a way to help him limit the stimming in order that he is able to switch gears and focus on what is going on at the time?

How old is your little boy?

He is 5 years old

According to Jason Lu, a member of this messageboard, and author of an interesting book on Child Autism called Eikona Bridge:

One form of stimming is repetition of words.

"There are two detrimental things that adults can do in response to their children's repetitive behaviors. The absolute worst thing to do is to try and suppress these behaviors. The second worst thing to do is to ignore these behaviors. The children are pleading with you to come into their world, and you are ignoring their pleas!"

Stimming time is Learning Time. It is their time of maximum attention.

IMHO if he talks about the clouds, sun and moon then pass down to him all the knowledge of the world on the clouds, sun and moon that you can get your hands on. Let him evolve into an expert, a little professor.

This feels like a really good stage for an autistic 5-year-old to be at, if you ask me! He's communicating fluently and happily, which is a major achievement in itself. He seems to have hit Hans Asperger's "little professor" stage ahead of schedule, and to feel positively about talking to people (which many of us really, really don't....) It's good to keep prompting him with other topics of conversation, but don't get too frustrated if it takes him a while longer to take you up on them.

I know from my mother's responses to my autism assesment that when I was very young, often she could only get me interested in something if she made it about numbers, which I was obsessed with. I wonder if there's some way to work sky and weather symbols into other subjects? The weather makes good metaphors for emotions- that might interest him.

Good quote Jimmy.
Laurieaba, please don't discourage him from stimming. It's a form of self-care. If he isn't able to do it he will likely feel more stressed and be prone to more meltdowns.

Hopefully, more parents will respond.

In a video I saw about the family of an autistic boy who was always talking about wolves, they set up clear restrictions on how much he could discuss his topic. So you could, for example, try telling your child that he can share only two or three new things about the sun/moon/clouds at breakfast time (or whenever the family is together and he won't stop talking). If he has the same issue at school or other activities, his teachers/staff can set limits for those situations as well.

That takes care of the communication part. For the stimming part, you could try telling him to only think (not talk aloud) about his interest when he is with other people who are talking. Or he could silently mouth his thoughts. And he can verbally stim all he wants when he's by himself or not supposed to be engaged with other pepole. It seems like he can stop and pay attention when you speak to him (the thing you mentioned with the pancakes), so maybe he's not really having problems focusing, just problems stopping the chattering.

Hi Laurieaba

Yes, your boy sounds like our daughter when she was 5. While I don't subscribe to the Lovaas method of ABA (which is the only evidence based intervention for extinguishing undesirable behaviours in autistic children) There are some basic underlying principles that worked for us.

1. Encourage repetitive behaviour if it helps the child to develop some type of skill. For example my daughter was hyperlexic and enjoyed scribbling complex words and math from the age of 2 over and over again. She also enjoyed reading the same books etc...verbal stimming and piling blocks one on top of the other can be ok.

2. Discourage repetitive behaviour that s harmful. Stimming may be cute but if it's not benefiting the child and is psychologically or physically harmful then use operant conditioning methods prescribed in ABA to discourage this type of behaviour. Our approach here was to gently, persistently and patiently continue until the behaviour is extinguished.

Thanks cyberdad. How would you suggest I encourage his interest in clouds to develop a positive skill? He knows alot about those things but that is all he will talk about......even when he has other things to focus on. I enjoy watching videos and talking about clouds with him but I also wish there was a way for us to share other things as well. So that he could experience other things and not be constantly repeating memorized facts about clouds. It seems to be all he cares about......

It's impressive for a 5 year old to have multiple memorized facts on a subject matter. Provide him with the resources to continue building on his knowledge. Even if he just sticks with repeating the same facts, you should be very proud of him.

Jason has some very interesting ideas in his book (particularly about engaging with your child) so I encourage reading his book.

But at the end of the day he's a parent of one child with autism not a psychologist who has worked with hundreds. He makes some broad generalisations that don't necessarily apply to all children and he seems to subscribe to the philosophy of "let your child do what they want" which doesn't make sense to me.

Hi Laurieba,

This is certainly tricky and I honestly don't have all the answers.

In the case of my daughter I can give a couple of examples - she was obsessed with a child's toy that made three musical notes. We took advantage of that to draw the notes and move her on to keyboards. It didn't happen overnight but eventually (over quite a long time) she was able to read sheet music and developed a keen interest in piano. It would have been easy at the beginning to ask her stop getting obsessed with the toy as it was terribly annoying to hear it for hours on end

We also used her obsession with screen time to introduce brain training games and programs on her ipad. Would your son be interested in some type of interactive program that involved clouds on the computer/ipad?

Actually Jason has two children that are autistic and he is autistic himself. IMHO an Aspie/High Functioning Autistic (HFA) knows more about the condition than NTs. They can relate. And the only measure that really counts is the ability to move a low/medium functioning autistic child (non verbal) into a high functioning autistic. And it appears that he has a measure of success in this area.

I think the best thing you can do is ask him why he talks about it so much. It will show him that you care, that you're trying to understand him, and that you want to know him better. They may represent something important to him and you'll never know if you don't ask. If something was important to me and I kept talking about it with someone but they never asked me why I'd think they didn't care about me.