Autistic child with the repetitive "I don't know" answer

[Granta_Omega]

I'm a middle school education major and I've been working with a couple small groups of children with different levels of autism.

There is one kid that the resource teacher and I have lunch with, and I can't really gather any information on how to make our time more interesting to him or get him to talk or elaborate on anything. He talked to me a little bit last week on how he got into a lot of trouble last year after a physical altercation with a teacher, and I was able to help him out a bit with that, but that's about all I have been able to do to have an open conversation with him so far.

The only topic of interest to him is Nascar and racing. That's the only thing he has ever said he has any interest in. Unfortunately for him, it is something I know nothing about.

I've asked him different questions such as what are some of his plans for the future, what does he like to do in school, would he like it if he had some friends, would he enjoy joining a club, etc. It is the same answer all the time, "I don't know."

I kind of want to try and steer him in the direction of developing some better peer to peer social relationships, but given his lack of giving any information about his thoughts or feelings, I don't even know if that is what he wants. I'm afraid that if I start giving him some advice, tips, and plans of getting to know people he can enjoy being around and discussing his interests with, it is only going to be frustrating and unrewarding for him if that isn't what he wants. He said he stays with relatives up north during the summers, and they often bother and pick on him because he doesn't wanna play any games or do anything with them, so I am not sure if he even wants to make any friends or connections.

If casual friendships aren't of his interest and he just needs to learn to better cope with dealing with others, I would be happy to try and give him some friendly input with that, but I don't have anything. This is the first high functioning autistic child I've worked with that doesn't like to talk about anything. Many are really hyper and love to talk about their interests and play games, but he doesn't seem to be giving me any clues of what he needs at all really. He does have some behavioral issues, so I've been trying to help with that as I indicated above and he also gets frustrated easily, but he doesn't generally like to openly talk about anything.

I'm just wondering if I should ask the resource teacher if there is a point to me meeting with him or something specifically they are trying to improve for him. I know there are probably a lot out there, but this is the first child on the autism spectrum I've met personally that I generally found to have not much in common at all with.

 

[Etzelaire]

It looks weird him not wanting to talk about his obsession cause that's the only thing we can go on talking about for hours I think. That's what we like to explain (I guess). The kid has a motivation and you know which one it is, I know nothing about school procedures and stuff but for me the best way to get his attention would be by trying to connect every class with something he needs to improve his knowledge of nascar and whatever else. In every discipline you teach you can work a connection to what he cares about, even though it's a lot of work.

 

[Ylva]

Alexithymia is pretty common in us, so maybe asking fewer feeling-related questions is a good place to start. Even plans for the future would involve some sort of emotion.

Not sure what you can do, though. If he won't tell you about Nascar until you feel you could get into a race car and drive it, that is.

 

[Granta_Omega]

My goal honestly wasn't generally to ask a lot of questions. I was trying to make the questions open ended so there wasn't as much need to pester him with questions to get information I'd like to know about him, but he just keeps saying "I don't know" so I don't get anything from even one open ended question.

 

[Ylva]

I don't know about the other kids you teach, but personally I find a lack of specificity to be horribly annoying.

 

[Ereth]

I don't know about the other kids you teach, but personally I find a lack of specificity to be horribly annoying.

Specificity about . . . ? Forgive me, but I'm lost.

 

[JohnH]

Those questions sound like I'd be likely to answer them the same way. I hate being endlessly quizzed about something when I have told them that I don't know the answer to their questions.

For example - what are your plans for the future? Not everyone plans for the future, lots of people just sort of deal with it as it arrives. It is not a specific enough question to answer.

What do you like to do in school? Maybe it never occurred to him to have likes and dislikes, there are just things you have to do. Maybe he doesn't like any of it. Maybe he has no strong feelings either way. If you asked me that about work, my answer would be "going home when it's done."

Would you like it if you had some friends? That's a problem question on several levels. If you haven't had friends before, you have no basis for judgement. If you are fully aware of what having friends entails, maybe you are aware that there are both benefits and drawbacks to it, and that you can like and dislike it at the same time.

Would you enjoy joining a club? How would he know if he would like it or not, if he has never been in one?

Many Aspies take questions very literally, and answer very literally. It's why the typical greeting of "how are you doing today?" can seem like a pop quiz requiring you to stop, fully analyze how you are feeling, convert that into sentences, and then start communicating to them, meanwhile trying to gauge exactly how much information they really want, and how much you are comfortable sharing.

Some of your questions come across the same way to me. Suppose he has never stopped to think about how much he likes or dislikes each thing you are asking him about, and doesn't want to or know how to perform that analysis of his feelings on the spot for you right then.

 

[Ylva]

And questions about general stuff. If you ask what my favourite book is, I'll say "Gödel Escher Bach". If you ask what kind of books I like, I will um a lot, stutter while trying to explain that while Fantasy has its merits there are also physics books and dictionaries and… while you nod along sagely and I get more and more lost trying to figure out what type of book I prefer and whether or not cross-categories count. And how they count. That's why I hate open-ended questions.

 

[Granta_Omega]

Closed ended questions just lead to short answer and end of discussion though.

If he isn't a socializer, that is fine, but I'd like to at least find something he'd be interested in. He couldn't answer yes or no on much either. Asked if he liked board games, if he liked reading books, if he liked video games. Mostly the same I don't know. I can't even really think of an activity he would like very much.

 

[May Black]

My best advise to you is to go learn something about Nascar and racing cars.

I worked with kids on the spectrum, for one of my pupils I went to National Geographic website twice a week looking for news articles that he might be interested in and hoped he hadn't read them yet, I always wrote three questions to the text, the answers were yes, no, this was a stupid question, the last option was there, because when anything was off, he'd just crumble it up and throw it or tear it into pieces. At the end of the term my entire class refused to speak Swedish during their science classes, and had their science teacher teach them in English. I rewrote a whole text book from a cat's perspective and filled it with Hello Kitty pictures for one of my non-verbal pupils who refused to do work during lessons, it worked. You will need to go way out of your way if you want to really reach them. You need to understand that those kids have had enough teachers that make halfhearted efforts to get them, they're not interested in putting any effort into you unless they see you do the same.

This is going to sound very harsh, but if the answer to your question is I don't know, then you're asking the wrong questions.

I am perfectly willing to elaborate on anything you want me to, but make it more concrete. What do you actually know about the kid, his background etc. What is it you're hoping to achieve?

 

[May Black]

I'm sorry if I sound rough, it's quite a sensitive topic to me, quite a few from our most broken children came from special schools that didn't put enough effort into trying to understand them. One of our most brilliant pupils was forced to work with middle school math tasks, because he couldn't show the teacher how he came to the result, he couldn't, because he just knew them. I cannot express in words how much it hurts to see perfectly good kids pushed so hard they end up demolishing class rooms out of frustration.

I made myself cry and now I can't stop. :/

 

[Kari Suttle]

You said you work at a middle school, right? Meaning he's not little, he's around preteen, early teen years. I'm not a guy, but by that age i'd long since learned that no one cared to listen about whatever my favorite topic or interest was. Until i felt comfortable with someone i stayed closed off. And like May said, if he's diagnosed and in special small groups like that then chances are you aren't the first agenda/goal oriented person to try to get to know him. Even now i can't read when people are being genuine or not so i just assume they aren't. I don't mean to be overly morbid about it or anything, that's just my jaded view on other people in general. It may or may not relate to the kid you're working with or not, idk. I don't mean to sound rude i'm just talking. That and today's been a ****** day but that's not the point.

 

[Granta_Omega]

I mainly was just saying that I'm rather stuck on what to do that he would find beneficial.

I wanted to find out if he made any attempts to make friends or would enjoy it to see if I would be meeting his needs to try and help him with that. Typically ones I've met complained about not having friends or people making fun of them, but needed help with the behaviors that were turning others away. I haven't even been able to get the slightest information out of him to find out if that even applies to him. So I didn't want to elaborate on how to make connections with others if that is not something he wanted to even do.

So basically, I'm trying to make it a bit different than the typical agenda/goal oriented person by finding out what he actually wants or if he even wants to meet with me during lunch sometimes.

 

[Granta_Omega]

So I guess I'll look up a bit of information on Nascar for conversational purposes.

I noticed he also seemed to like to give his opinion on current events in the news one of the other teacher pulled up on her computer. Especially the recent story about the drunk bus driver with a bus full of kids that got pulled over.

 

[May Black]

Good, there you have a few things. Can you give me any information on what your task is? Helping him with school or more the every day bit of it? I realize you might not be allowed to talk about it, but basically the more you can give me the more I can do with it.

 

[Kari Suttle]

Oh okay. Yeah i figure with you coming on here at all, you probably want to help this kid. I was just trying to illustrate a point. I think looking up stuff like that is a good idea. =) You just gotta figure out how to connect with him and that's a good start.

 

[Granta_Omega]

Good, there you have a few things. Can you give me any information on what your task is? Helping him with school or more the every day bit of it? I realize you might not be allowed to talk about it, but basically the more you can give me the more I can do with it.

The task is mostly to give advice in the perspective of someone who has the same diagnosis.

As I said, I told him a similar story to his about how he got in serious trouble for physically shoving his teacher who was agitating him. I think I helped him in that regard. I'm not sure he generally gets into a lot of trouble anymore though. One of his problems he says are he gets angry when he doesn't get all of his notes copied down that the teacher puts up on the board.

I met with him only two times, so I was hoping he would give me something to go off of. I guess I don't need to dedicate every meeting to trying to get him to tell me about his problems, but I just met him so I wanted to find out any significant issues I needed to know about at first. I was trying to talk about some of his interests, but he didn't give me anything other than Nascar, and everything he does at home and researches on the internet is related to cars somehow, and I wanted to see if there was something else he was interested in too such as music, games, or sports.

 

[Kari Suttle]

One of his problems he says are he gets angry when he doesn't get all of his notes copied down that the teacher puts up on the board.

He gets mad when he can't finish taking notes? That makes sense. I assume working with aspies you know this, but aspies in general have issues going from one task to another quickly/switching focus and can have a bit of a need to finish or do perfectly whatever it is they are doing. I know i'm like that.

 

[May Black]

The task is mostly to give advice in the perspective of someone who has the same diagnosis.

I'm a bit confused here, you're diagnosed?

How often are you going to meet him and for how long?

We had a simple exercise for our kids when they got to tell us every Monday how their weekend was. It's a good simple question that cannot be answered by "I don't know."
If he does that, you can easily counter it by saying something like "Oh really?! You don't remember what you did? Common now!" Put yourself on a friendly level.

It's fine to not know much about racing cars as long as you're capable of asking decent questions that he can explain.

Does he go in normal classes? How is he coping with the curriculum?

 

[Granta_Omega]

He gets mad when he can't finish taking notes? That makes sense. I assume working with aspies you know this, but aspies in general have issues going from one task to another quickly/switching focus and can have a bit of a need to finish or do perfectly whatever it is they are doing. I know i'm like that.

I told him to not necessarily worry about getting every word the teacher writes copied in class, and that teachers cannot possibly go a speed that suits every student.

I suggested maybe talking to another classmate to see if he can use their notes to catch up the next day in class, and also seeing the teacher after class and tell them that they didn't get all the notes copied and to go over what they missed.