Question for my #actuallyautistic peeps -- my son is also autistic, 7 yrs old, and seems to almost have object permanence issues? Like if he doesn't hear or see something he insists it didn't happen. Even if I'm saying "yes, I heard this" he'll say "no, you're wrong, it didn't happen."
Has anyone experienced something similar? How can I support his experience of the world while helping him understand that things outside his direct experience can still be real?
@Kistaro Thank you! No he hadn't. We had a brief talk about "I perceived..." and what perception is and how sometimes you can know something happened even if you don't perceive it. We didn't connect it directly to earlier discussion, but he has the idea now so we'll see what happens going forward.
@jessmahler Yay! And then if you need to show the difference, performing things he can't see but can know happened - like showing a piece of paper, bringing it under the table, folding it in half, then bringing it back out - can give him chances to think about the difference between "happened" and "perceived". Be careful, he's going to get really fascinated with figuring out things he can't perceive and suddenly 20 years later he has a microbiology degree
@Kistaro That is an outcome I could be 100% okay with.
@jessmahler Look into autism and theory of mind and the sally-anne test.
My autism was never like that, but it's a very common thing (professionals cling a bit too much to it for my liking though, but that's just me not falling under it)
@jessmahler I understand the experience, but I wish I had useful advice. I don’t know if there are kinds of activities or stories you could do to explain how persons A&B can be doing one thing and at the same time persons C and D&H are doing another thing and then they all meet and talk about it later. For me, I just sometimes realized that I couldn’t trust anything I hadn’t seen or heard. And so I would just reject it.
@jessmahler I don’t know if for him it’s an issue of object permanence or trust though. For me it was definitely about trust, because I had realized that people might tell you things that aren’t true. And it was very important that things be true. And I was the only way I could be sure things were true.
@jessmahler but if for him it’s more about object permanence, that I don’t have as much perspective
@bravelittletoaster I don't THINK it's a trust issue--I'm the one he alwasy comes to to verify if something is true. If his teacher says something he doesn't believe or his father or a friend, he comes to me and asks "Is it true that...?" I don't think he' do that if he didn't trust me to tell him the truth. But I'll keep in mind as a possibility.
@jessmahler That's common in autistic kids -- google the "Sally-Anne test". Sadly the interpretation of it has always been that we lack "theory of mind", which is crap.
Not sure how to deal with this, as I have no kids myself, but @miss_s_b is an autistic parent of an autistic kid -- Jennie, any ideas?
@stealthmunchkin
I think kistaro windrider has had good ideas here
@jessmahler
@jessmahler Looks like a not really developed "Theory of mind", the issue is that he need to learn that for himself, you can't help him with that.
@jessmahler has he had an opportunity to learn "I perceived" as a concept? It sounds like he has understood "X happened" as equivalent to "I perceived X" and if he learns the latter then he has a way to understand a difference between "I perceived" and "X happened" because they now exist as separate concepts