Do your kids do this to??

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I was just reading the post cause and effect and it had me wondering.

When I ask my son J (9yrs old AS) how has his day been, he will always respond with however he is feeling right at that point in time. Example; he may have had a fantastic day but fallen over and hurt himself within the last 10 minutes, I ask him how was your day? He will always respond with "its been the worst day of my life". I wonder if this is one of those social emotional things, and where its very hard to recall past emotions? Sometimes if I can prompt him with reminders of other events that have happened I will occasionally get an "Oh yeah, I guess that was kinda fun". If I don't know what he has been doing threw the day though I will always just get the most recent emotion.

Do your kids do this to? Can anyone explain this better?

My kids are four and two, so not really. I have a tendency to live in the moment in terms of describing my day though.

I do not have children but now that you mention it I did(and still do) that and I am 17. So does my sister who is four.

Yea, I did and still do that. And my brother does it, though he's only three, so he's not much of a group to pick from. Mum does it as well.

Sis and dad, the NT's in the immediate bunch, don't do it nearly as much I've noticed. So it seems to be something to do with social anxiety problems, or other social problems I know I have.

Maybe this is part of the black and white thinking? I have also read that negative things tend to get etched deeper in the brain then neutral or positive things..I think this is a servival mechanism, (like touching a hot stove?)

Problem for me is that I don't recall things very well in general...so I do make the mistakes over and over unless they are really,really bad consequinces,(which maybe different according to each individuals idea of "Bad"). I know I made the same social mistakes over and over even though they were bad, but when it came to something that I was physically doing wrong...it seemed to stick with me longer.

When I am depressed or physically hurting it "feels" like I have always been this way and always will be this way...when I am not depressed or hurting, I can forget that I ever was...I don't know why, but I have noticed that pattern for myself. Sometimes it makes empathy more difficult because I can't just call up the "same" feelings, even if I recall them intellectually. I don't know if that is true for everyone on the spectrum.

I have a lot of problems answering any open ended questions...ask me specifics and I can bore you to death wth the details

Our son totally does this. You can't BELIEVE the drama (well maybe you can!) if something's gone wrong. It's the end of the world. He will never be happy again. He hates himself. He wants to die. Then an hour later, it never happened.

And he may have his best week ever in, say, math or something, and I'll never hear about it unless his teachers happen to mention it. But generally, most of the time when he comes home, and I say, "How was your day?" he will say "GREAT!" or "PRETTY GOOD!" and if I try to ask any more specific questions, he acts annoyed with me and wants to be doing something else.

I'm always fascinated/struck by what he thinks are "important" things, and what he doesn't. I really should start keeping lists...except the lists change.

I really disliked the question...."How was your day"...it always seemed like a trick question and I was always getting the answer wrong.

If I said..."it sucked"...I was first told to stop swearing and there might be an hour long lecture about that...then if I elaborated I was told how I did something socially wrong or had a bad attitude.

It took me a long time to learn how to just say...great and try and think of something positive to say and then later(around 15?), learn how to actually make up what they wanted to hear..."I met a new friend, Her dad is a cop and she gets really good grades and is popular" I wonder if they got suspicious when none of these new friends ever called me or asked me to go do things. ...Point being, might think about how your responses to the answers might make them not want to give details?


I think even as a kid I was less interested in chit0chat..."sharing" and when I tried to share my interests, I was ignored (because they had no interest in bogs and rocks ...imagine that.)

Do your kids head directly to their special interest(video games and the Internet)? Try and remember that they have had to spend the past 8 hours suppressing these interests. In some ways, it's like a junky that needs there fix. If you let them have a littel of that "fix" and then ask them how their day went using specific questions...they might be more receptive? (unless they are teenagers and then all bets are off...ask parents of NTs)

The question is really way to broad and non-sepecic to give a good intellectual and logical answer to. What the questioner is looking for is more of a social thing. If I ask this of my child I get a one-word answer “fine”. If I take the time to be more specific I will get a “real” answer (most of the time)

bookwormde

For the OP, yes my son does this and yes, I have a tendency to think this way (but don't verbalize it). I verbalize the opposite, "nothing much" or "Oh alright".


But yeah, a single thought (true or false) can ruin my day and/or week. My son's day can be ruined or saved by a mistake in a videogame.

As far as someone saying that "forgetting" events in the day has to do with black and white thinking, it's more likely due to lack of organizational skills and prioritizing events. Like if you ask me about my cross-country flight, I might tell you what kind of sandwich I ate or the two minutes of turbulence. I can't summarize well and give a fair account of a larger event or sequence of events.
I never got help with this kind of stuff and my son is getting specific help for it.

I think it actually is a trick question. If you say it was OK, then they wanna know why it was 'only ok'. I thought OK was an answer in and of itself. And if you say it sucked, they pick apart every part of your answer!

There is no right answer. There is no spoon.

If my son comes in the house visibly upset, or if he says he's had a bad day, I'll ask him what happened, and when it's something that happened in the last hour or so, we'll talk about that (a long talk about something like this, for him, is about two minutes). Then I'll ask him if anything good happened. Usually, after he's "cleared out" the bad thing, he can tell me something good.

When he was a bit younger, around the age of OP's, instead of asking how his day was, I used to say - tell me something good and something bad that happened at school today. Sometimes the only good thing might have been seeing his friend during recess; sometimes there wasn't really anything bad. but setting the stage for allowing good and bad meant both were "allowed" and expected, and we could kind of celebrate the good thing and commiserate about the bad thing. We could also try to figure out strategies for dealing with the bad thing, if it were appropriate to do so (e.g. bad social interaction). Since it was a regular question, it didn't catch my son by surprise, although sometimes he'd mutter, "I don't want to talk right now." Usually that was okay with me, as long as it was understood (out loud, specified) that we would talk later, at a specified time, like after snack.

He's a teenager, now. It's gotten harder!

And kip, it is kind of a trick question - not to tear apart the "ok," but to get a sense of what's going on with one's child during the hours s/he's away! And not to invade privacy, but to know whether one's child is happy or not, and whether there are things that, as the parent, one could help with. Also, if there are things to celebrate, parents want to know! My son, for instance, did not tell me he was getting a math award - his teacher had to call and tell me that! Parents don't want to feel entirely cut out of their children's lives as soon as they start school, after all.

I've done it too.. You can be going along and be having a great day than something bad happens.

jat, that sounds so easy but I never thought about asking in that way. lol, thanks!

My son is the same as yours. He doesn't seem to have wide emotional swings, but he just can't seem to formulate how his day went when asked "How did you day go?" He always answers that it was great, but later on I'll realize that something didn't go well, or it was boring, or something. If I want specifics, I really have to ask specific questions.

Kris

I have an issue where I have trouble remembering previous emotional states - so even if I know intellectually that I was feeling good earlier in the day, if I'm feeling bad now it feels like I've always been feeling bad and always will be. (It gets really frustrating sometimes.) Maybe it's something similar to that?

If someone asked me this question I would respond the same way "okay" and that's about it.

Who wants to think about work after you've stepped out of it? Things come out later if they need to. If not, then it was all good.

I usually just say "Did you have a nice day?" and he says "Yep" and then we move on. If I try to ask specific questions, he doesn't answer or is very abrupt.

Yes, he wants to pick up where he left off with whatever his interest is for the week.