Conversing with DS

[bullkin]

DS who has Autism, has a lot of obsessions, and does a lot of repetitive talk as well as echolalia. He has a reasonable vocabulary and understands most of what is said to him. at this point we are unable to ave productive conversations. They are typically about his obsessions, will repetitively say or ask the same things over and over again and repeats what was said to him sometime ago as a conversation starter. we are yet to start speech therapy and are hoping that these will be addressed. in the mean time we are feeling like we wat to do something. Does anyone have any pointers? Thank you.

[karstmama]

how old is your ds? i ask because it has taken until my ds is 5 to occasionally get some true conversation without too much 'blue's clues' thrown in.

[MamaKath]

Originally Posted by bullkin

DS who has Autism, has a lot of obsessions, and does a lot of repetitive talk as well as echolalia. He has a reasonable vocabulary and understands most of what is said to him. at this point we are unable to ave productive conversations. They are typically about his obsessions, will repetitively say or ask the same things over and over again and repeats what was said to him sometime ago as a conversation starter. we are yet to start speech therapy and are hoping that these will be addressed. in the mean time we are feeling like we wat to do something. Does anyone have any pointers? Thank you.

Are his obsessions anything that you can start with and move out from there with? DH has done great stuff with getting ds to converse using his interest in specific topics- pokemon, star wars, etc. I can't seem to because I have no interest in those topics and it shows.

[bullkin]

While being quite uninteresting to most people (traffic lights, signs, trains, buses) esp to have a conversation, we already do that. However, we are unable to steer him away from them and he repets more and more of the conversations that have those thongs to talk about and since the subjects are not really interesting to most people conversations do end quickly.

[annex]

Is your DS an early reader? Sometimes (not always) I can get my 4 1/2 yo autistic DS out of his conversation rut by writing down what he wants me to repeat/talk about. Then he seems to comfort himself by reading what I wrote instead of repeatedly engaging in conversation about it.

I can also sometimes used the favored topic as a reward. e.g. "first, we're going to read books about this non-preferred topic, then we can play/talk trains," etc. His SLP team at school worked very hard early in the school year teaching his class "first ... then" as a way to get them to stay engaged on non-preferred tasks.

HTH! I know how hard it is. I still seem to spend 99% of my day talking with him about his favorite topic, and it's enough to drive you bonkers.

[Gena]

DS was around 5 when we were able to have anything close to a conversation with him about any topic.

Even now at age 8, he often tries to redirect the conversation back to his preferred topics. We keep working on it at home and at school. He always has an IEP for taking conversation turns on a topic of someone else's choosing.

[crl]

Ds got a lot of speech therapy over the years and much of it was aimed at pragmatics--conversational skills. Therapy helped immensely.

In general I found that it helped to put consistent limits on whatever ds was obsessed with. For example, I made the rule that he could only watch Thomas on T days, so Tuesday and Thursday. He gradually stopped talking about it so much and eventually stopped watching it altogether. I have also made rules like, you can only talk about x until we get to the four way stop, then we will talk about something different. Or you can only sing that song one time during our walk. All of this was a lot more effective starting around age four. Before that he was more difficult to redirect.

And this is still a work in progress; as far as I am concerned, he is still weak in conversational skills--or at least he is unwilling to do the work a good bit of the time.

Catherine