Nice! Mom friends are the absolute best! I’ll do my best to keep sharing and hope it’s a source of encouragement and support for you. And you can always email me back and share what’s going on in your life too! 🙂
Talk to you soon!
Candice is a mom of 3 who has been homeschooling since 2013. She has an A.A.S. in Early Childhood Studies and cares deeply about helping other parents get the information and resources they need to help them homeschool their children with confidence.
I’ve recently learned something about the Autistic brain. It’s MUCH more visual that I realized. I’ve always tended to be much more on the scientific side, but my son spends his time in the world of Transformers and the like. It drives me to distraction. His therapist gets thru to him so much better with cartoon type drawings and turning action and functions that robots would do. She related how the Autobots have engines that need fuel, and spent oil needs to be gotten rid of. Then drew an outline of a humanoid and eating going thru the organs of the body that needs to use the potty. That he seemed to grasp.
She conveyed to me that the robots and like are what’s real in his world, and if I wanted to get thru to him, I should weave the stories that way. I finally realized, that’s his ‘language’ of communication. In the North, we call them peanuts, but Southerners call them goobers. Same thing, just a different language. I can’t say that I am comfortable working this way natively, but I’m at least starting to understand. My parents never encouraged me to fantasize, no Unicorns or Easter Bunnies growing up. I was told from 4 or 5 how children were made, etc., for which I always appreciated the truth. (Child of a Doctor and Nurse … some of my earliest memories were a love of chemistry and math. So trying to delve into the make believe is hard for me, but I now understand a little better WHY I have to do this.
–Leslie.
Hi Leslie,
That’s wonderful that you’re learning to communicate in a way that makes sense for your child. 2 out of my 3 children think in a way that’s very different for me, so it can definitely be an adjustment when teaching. It might not come naturally, but as you learn new ways to communicate visually and through things that your son connects with, I bet you’ll get more confident. When you start to find some things that “click” for you both, you can start to build on them. 🙂