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?
@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
@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.
@Kistaro That is an outcome I could be 100% okay with.
@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