Question about naive/gullible Aspie son

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Somanyspoons, I did NOT suggest Aspies need unemotional teachers because we are unemotional, but rather because having to deal with a teacher's emotions, on top of trying to learn something new, is an unnecessary distraction and stressor. I thought everyone was now in agreement that most people on the spectrum are TOO sensitive to stimuli, including emotions, which is why we retreat into ourselves or find other ways to avoid overwhelm.

BTW, I've noticed from posts on other threads that we two communicate particularly poorly with one another.

I'm an adult with HFA and like your son I am very much gullible. People take advantage of me all the time. I don't think there's any easy way to deal with this problem. I'm so gullible and agreeable that I had to cut advertising out of my life by only watching TV recorded by DVR or on Netflix, cancelling all magazine subscriptions, using an Ad-Block plug-in on my web browser, paying the subscription-fee for advertising-free satellite radio, etc., because I was wasting literally hundreds of dollars a month on junk just because the ads told me it was good.

Your son really needs support from the adults at his school, which can be difficult to get because a lot of people find the behavior of HFA people to be annoying. They literally just don't want to help because they don't like us. But in many ways, we're kind of helpless when faced by con artists. We are the ultimate suckers and marks.

This is sad to read because I relate strongly -- I was this same child who believed and trusted everyone, and I would be deceived and conned. The sad thing is, I'm now 54 and STILL can be too trusting, make a mistake, and get badly taken advantage of.

I'm like the folk story of the boy who brought home a different item of food from the market, but wrongly so it spoiled, and when his mother told him the correct way, he applied that to the next food item, feeling proud he'd "learned the lesson" -- but managed to ruin things in a brand new way......and on and on.

I've made new kinds of trust-based mistakes all my life and the learning feels like it may never end.

PLEASE do as LeagueGirl suggests and never stop reminding him that you just can't trust simply everyone.

Even when I've learned a harsh lesson about trusting someone -- I've trusted someone again, and was taken advantage of or made a fool of in a different way or even a repeat of a way I thought I'd learned about. It's no way to live.

I'm actually relatively high functioning and I'm not in fact stupid. you'll be surprised to read after reading the above.

I have above-average intelligence ------- except when it comes to being naive about other human beings.

Seriously, it's why I like animals better.

Would be very careful with the MA thing. I speak from experience (MA teacher for 10 years and practiced for 20) as it is uncanny how anyone who does not get beaten up ends up being blamed for any incident. It is also strangely common that the person with the disability comes out worst when dealing with NT's in authority.

I don't trust schools, full stop...

He is unable to know the value of a thing, because he is getting caught up, in their emotions.

But, appraisals are a kind of number and a system -- a strong point for autistic people and trivia hounds. A bluebook value is a feat of memorization. 2 values is a math problem.

Most grown ladies know something about collecting. Maybe, it's spoons for you? (Maybe, you're just an autistic guy talking about spoons. idk) Either way. show him how trading works, or examples of stylish, young people, like on Youtube, getting their money's worth.

My elitist "friends" (and, I use the term loosely) have extended the same logic to people, in other words, keeping score, to establish status.

Identity politics and, now, the alt right have been doing this.

Ideally, we would judge people based on their character, but this how the winner is judged, in the world of dog-eat-dog.

Wow, lots to respond to here since last I looked. As far as Martial Arts and teaching style, I've lived with this kid for almost 10 years now and I'm pretty confident I know what type of teaching style works well for him. Authoritarian and/or robotic does not really. He likes rules, and does best in a very well organized, but not harsh environment. I'm glad martial arts helped you and that you were able to find a teaching style that worked well for you, yourekiddingme3, but I feel my son’s needs are not quite the same as yours. Oh, I should also mention that his MA teacher was one of the first to suggest we should have him tested as she had worked with kids on the spectrum before. He did not have a diagnosis at that time.

Friedmacguffins- I'm not sure I understand what you are saying as far as knowing the value of things. My son definitely knows the value of the cards (he's practically got them all memorized). It was a simple case of being conned in the first incident. If the kid had given him 3 $10 Xbox cards that had not already been used it would have been a good trade. In the second case, he let someone else carry his cards and they stole all the good ones. He knows exactly which ones were stolen and has a list of them and their values.

Pieplup- He is very extroverted. He really really wants to talk to people, but only about the stuff he’s interested in, and he doesn’t really want them to talk to him, lol. He’s gotten a lot better about this with his social skills classes though.

Puzzlepieces1- I’m sorry you get taken advantage of. I can remember very vividly a unit I did in school in the 3rd or 4th grade that was all about advertising. They told us a variety of different methods that are used to convince you that you just had to have their product. It was an eye opening experience for me and I never looked at advertising the same way. I don’t think either of my kids have had a unit in school about that, but seems like it would be useful. Even being skeptical I still fell for some special clothes hangers (they broke right away) and Space Bags (they never arrived).

BirdinFlight- It doesn’t surprise me that you are both smart and gullible. My son is crazy smart as well. This is just a blind spot for him. It’s like, he doesn’t lie or break the rules, so he just assumes nobody else will either. On a couple of occasions where he accidentally broke a rule he went into a shame spiral that was hard to get him out of. So he just can’t project dishonesty onto someone else. I have a feeling he will have problems generalizing (this person was dishonest so in the future I should wait until trust is demonstrated/earned from other people) as you described for yourself.

As an update- I wrote an email to his school counselor with a brief summary, asking her to talk to him about how to prevent being taken advantage of and trying to gauge if he was being targeted as an easy mark or if it was just a random thing. She called him out of class today and he told me that she is going to ‘do an investigation’ and see if she can find the kid who took the last set of cards. I don’t know what else they talked about. I’m sure she will write me an email to let me know. So it’s good to know she’s going to help him out.

If your son has a friend/acquaintance at school, it may be worthwhile asking them to look out for him(or asking the school to ask them). I'm not suggesting that they be asked to hang around him all day every day, only to warn/discourage him if they see something, or something like that.