he does.not.listen

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How do you get one to listen to the words that another is speaking, and process those words and then act on what they have heard?

My son is FAMOUS for not listening to waht someone is saying, rather doing what he wants. I know he hears the words casue if I ask him WHY he didint respond, he will say, "I was going to..."

Example, one of a million:

DD: PUT ME DOWN!! !! (while DS is carrying her thru the house)
DD: louder: PUT ME DONW..NOOOOOOOO (as he continues to carry her)
DD yells and cries put me down to no avail....

ME: Jayden, put her down now. (no response from him, she still screaming put me down as he carries her)
ME: LOUDER: JAYDEN PUT HER DOWN NOW!! ! (at this point I am yelling)

he puts her down and runs away.

I ask him why he didnt put her down when she asked the 1st time. he said he wanted to put her down in another room. Ok, thats good, but when someone is screaming and crying and you are carrying them against their will for no good reason, WHY CANT HE LISTEN?? he didnt listen to her, he didnt listen to me until I was screaming.

he also didnt listen when I asked him to go in another room and sit down (the other room isnt really another room, jsut a couch seperating us, and I needed him to go so I can talk on the phone, I told him he wouldnt go.

he also didnt listen when I said please leave your sister alone I am doing her hair. He kept jumping in her face making silly faces and noises. I asked again and again, please go inside, please go inside...he didnt until I YELLED it. And asked him why I had to yell to get him to follow thru?? He said he wanted to make her laugh. Again, OK, but I am talking to him and he just doesnt even respond, acknowledge that I have spoken or anyone for that fact. He HAS to carry out the act or thoutht or idea in his head and it is sooo frustrating. You have no idea how many times DD screams and creis casue he refuses to hear her words.

I just dont get it. He is extremely verbal, and god help us if we dont respond to him IMMEDIATELY. "Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom..." but he cannot respond to us.

HELP!! ! What to I do? How do I battle agains his need to play out his own desire rather then to listen to tsomeone screaming as he carries them against their will????

I am at a loss....its been ALLL MORNING of me having to repeat requests over and over and over and sometimes have to yell to get him to stop or hear me. His hearing is fine, was tested every 6 months until he was 5 (cleft palate related) and has always had prefect hearing...we have always had this issue with him, nothing new.

Anyone???

More than likely, your son has a verbal processing delay; that is, he might be hearing, he might even be listening, but he has to TRANSLATE everything in the kind of manual way you have to piece out a foreign language if you're using a phrasebook.

We have this one (these days, DS will yell back "You didn't give me TIME to react!" He's right. Grrr. )

Can you come up with hand signals and also teach them to your daughter? A visual cue may help. You know, like hand-out-for-stop, or hands-in-a-t for time-out, etc. Sometimes you need to direct their attention with a light touch or tap, too. Something to get him to stop and wait until the verbal processor catches up. I also have DS repeat things back to me to check whether he actually processed it or not (if you do this, you can sometimes actually SEE the delay...DS will immediately repeat the first two words, then say he forgot, then the rest of it will come to him and he'll have the whole thing.)

Probably, you also need to make a very literal house rule about picking up his sister or otherwise doing something that would prevent her from using hand signals to communicate with him. (And I'd suggest putting it in a visual social story.)

Good luck! I know it's frustrating and it seems like deliberate misbehavior - but I am guessing this is what you're really dealing with.

Since your son said he wanted to put her down in another room, it sounds like he did hear, but had the scenario played out in his mind of how this was going to play out. I think this is a case of bedrock brain. At least that is what my husband calls it when my son does this stuff. He is stuck on doing it his way and won't listen to anyone else. In most cases, we just talk to my son, but when it is physical with another person, he gets into trouble and punished because I am very serious about him respecting other people's bodies. That may sound harsh when I know this is an Aspie thing, but when it comes to respecting other people's bodies, I need him to have very clear boundaries. I want my son to have no doubt that when someone says stop touching me or put me down, he needs to always listen.

For me, I find it hard to shift gears when I've made up a plan of what I'm going to do. So someone will say something and I can't process it because it goes against my plan. I've been working on recognizing this and overriding it, but it's not easy.

That definitely sounds familiar.

At this point, I'm just used to yelling. I have learned that it's perfectly possible to raise your voice in a loving tone. Too bad very few others see this. Also too bad it does nothing to teach the use of an inside voice, since these days my inside voice is pretty much good for calling in hogs.

I stumbled into some luck. My dad always said kids were like dogs, and he seemed to get on well with kids and dogs both. So I started getting his attention with his name and a one-word command. "Buddy! STOP!" Child freezes. "Thank you! Put your sister down now!" "Thank you! Don't do that again!"

I am hoping to build it into teaching, "Stop. Think. Think again. Then act." This is, basically, using cognitive skills to compensate for the social intuition that will never be there.

I made a little "stoplight" visual to combat this problem. I printed out a picture of a stoplight on a index card sized paper and put it in a location where I could always grab it easily (I taped an envelope to the wall in the hallway where it was always close at hand). When DS was in the "I can't hear you!" mode and I really needed to get his attention, I would hold the stoplight picture in his field of vision and say "Red light". If he responded immediately, I would let him pick a sticker (I kept a sheet of stickers in the envelope with the stoplight card) to put on the back of the stoplight card. Of course we talked about this before hand so he understood what I expected from him when I said "Red light" and what he would get for making the choice to pay attention to me. He would acknowledge the visual + verbal cue at times when he would not respond to verbal-only prompts at all.

Does he listen most of the time in other situations? In the past, I have found when DS9 was focused on something and I asked him a question (like do you want bacon or sausage), he would often not answer, but now he is much more likely to just blurt an answer without actually thinking about it (b/c he knows he should answer and if he doesn't someone will be upset with him). So I end up making the bacon (or whatever he blurted out) and then he would tell me didn't want bacon, and why did I make for him Yes he does hear me and can respond, but he never really processed what he heard.

I believe it really is a processing issue with him. I am learning that if I can remember to say his name first, wait a second so he has time to direct his attention to me, then ask the question and count in my head to 5 (giving him time to respond - and he usually takes the whole 5 counts), then he gives me a answer he has thought about. I don't have to do this all the time, but it really helps if he is focused on something else.

I know this doesn't help when your son is carrying is sister, but like a PP mentioned, I also find that when I end up yelling, it is much more effective if I yell my son's name first, then give a one or two word direction.

I am not sure why he wanted to pick her up. I am also not sure if it matters. It may or may not.

He may feel like if he is going to put her down in the next room it is almost the same as doing it now. He may not understand the urgency since he does not understand the reasons. She does not like it is probably a not good enough reason to him. A "now means now" social story might help as well as a social story that explains that he needs to respect his sister's person and space.

great ideas!
m thinking its more like brainlock...as he hears me and can immediately tell me what I was saying (or his sister) and what that meant, but he always says why he didnt do it, and it is alwyas becasue he had an idea that he needed to follow thru on.

I like the stoplight idea, it will work for me, might be hard for my 3yo to do or have access too.

I think its a starting point but the bigger pic is to teach him to not only hear but understand that he has to respond and follow thru when others speak!

We are facing something similar right now. My son is a tall 4 and daughter is a short almost 2. He wants to play with her all the time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We have been working on teaching him that she is a person with feelings and rights. If he calls her a baby, I ask him if he is a baby. When he says he is not a baby, I then tell him she is not a baby, she is a person. I go around the house and point to all the people and identify them as persons. If he is bothering her, I tell him that she is a person and he is a person and she has the right not to play whatever game she wants to play. If he doesn't listen, he immediately goes into time out for a few minutes.

He now looks around to see where I am before he goes after her. Once I speak to him, he listens. He knows there is an unpleasant consequence for not listening. He does have a language delay and I thought he wouldn't understand at first, but I was underestimating him. They still fight though, but at least we can stop it with words, instead of timeouts.

I would like to chim in on this I don't know if this matches the situation alittle.

I have those moments were I can't stop doing something until that thing is done or I will become sometime upset if interrupted. I think of it as a computer program has to complete before you can enter new program can be entered. Kind of like the old commador computers were there was not multitasking and you had to do the commands end or stop to exit the program then you can do another program from a tape or disk. The reason why I use this example because our brains are like computers.

I think this is right on target when it comes to my own daughter. She *hears* what is said but she doesn't want to alter what she is already set on doing. So, until you disrupt that plan (unfortunately as the OP put it by yelling or other drastic means) nothing "gets through".

I have made some progress on this with my own daughter. She LOVES the ipad. It is her absolute favorite activity/thing to do-play on the ipad. So she has to earn time on the ipad. After 1-2 times of asking something I will say "this is not how to earn the ipad" and that is usually so shocking to her (the equivalent of yelling without the effort ) she stops what she is doing and pays attention or asks "what???".

I am curious, is this more pervasive than situations with his sister, or mostly in situations with his sister?

Because, honestly, you could have been describing my two kids with each other, one AS one NT, one 15 one 12. They aren't anything close to that obtuse about other things, just each other. Or, at least, that is how it seems.

And then there are the times they register it immediately and do something inappropriate, like literally dropping the sister.

We've talked about it so many times, and my son doesn't really have what I see as good explanations. "She wasn't really protesting." "She asked me to pick her up." "I didn't know that was what you meant."

The only thing that works is going right up to them and giving very precise instructions: "please lower your sister to the floor and then let go. NOW."

I honestly think there is something overwhelming, in a sensory and emotional sense, when they are in each other's personal space, that makes processing what is being said to them more difficult.

Oh my am I glad that my son doesn't date yet; that scares me to death.

No kidding.

Every time I see him devil a sibling, I imagine the sexual assault charge.

No dating. We are going totally Duggar. No handholding until after the engagement.

OMG my DD5 is exactly the same, never ever listens, but can hear perfectly well! Ive found one way to get through to her is not to work up to a shout, shout the first time and totally take her by surprise, if it genuinely makes her jump she does it lol! If shes about to pick something up that she shouldnt for example she will jerk back if I suddernly bark at her not to touch that. Obviously cant do that every time, but I know theres no point in the first 3 requests, its only the final demand that gets through if it gets through at all! I dont waste my time asking nicely and saying please anymore. It was hard at first, felt like I was treating her like a dog but I honestly think it doesnt bother her. I prefer to use more polite language but her behaviour has led me to be a different parent to the way I would naturally parent :/ I will then start talking to her normally and show Im no longer angry and she gets over it just as quick.

My son does this with most things, not just his sister. He has twice popped her elbow out of the socket, so there is always the fear that she will get hurt. And if she is yelling he doesnt respond. And I tell him he may be hurting her, but he just has to follow thru the thought in his head. With me he doesnt respond or will do what he wants when I just asked him to do something different, something else or doesnt respond at all. It is very frustrating!! !

He does it with everyone, me, his dad, some friends parents, defenitely friends. I just worry that he will continue down this path and he can possibly hurt someone and get in trouble, hurt himself, etc...he doesnt heed warnings, he just has to keep doing the thought in his head!

thanks for the insight and ideas