Earlier this week I found an article online that provided “Signs that Your Child Might be Spoiled.” One of the signs mentioned was that he or she would fail to respond upon being greeted. When I read this, I shifted uneasily in my chair. Although he handles please and thank you beautifully, my seven year old son Connor will not even talk to his classmates when he is having a bad day. I know this hurts the other children, who go out of their way to make him feel comfortable in his general education classroom.
Later that day, when I picked Connor up from school, I was chatting with another mom. My son walked up to us, and she said, “Hi Connor!” My son promptly turned his back on her. This was the last straw.
Autism is no excuse for rudeness, and I knew we would have to do something to change Connor’s behavior, and pronto. It was also humbling to realize that my husband and I had been overcompensating for Connor’s autism, and we had been unintentionally spoiling him by letting him get away with bad manners. (Ack! These facing-the-music moments in parenting are not pleasant, and I was determined to redeem myself).
At first, I tried talking with him, “Honey, you need to say hello to Mrs. Worth.” He looked hard at me for a moment and then declared, “I don’t say hello to strangers.” I tried a different path. “But, sweetheart, she is my friend, it is okay to say hello.” More firmly now, he responded, “I don’t say hello to your friends.” It was clearly time to change context.
I then asked, “You say hello to your classmates, right?”
“I only say hi to my friends in my classroom.”
For those of you who know how literal a child on the spectrum can be, Connor meant EXACTLY what he was saying. He prefers to talk in the classroom, but not in hallways, and only sometimes on the playground. Oh, this was worse than I thought!
When I got home, I pulled out a training video that had been recently returned to me by our son’s resource teacher. I had given it to her to review, and she had been playing it for all of her students over the past four months. The video series, Model Me Kids, features real children in real settings to teach social skills. I had purchased two of the videos, Time for a Playdate and Time for School as a starter set because Connor LOVED the video clips that Model Me Kids had provided online as a try-before-you-buy strategy. It was a wonderful courtesy, and prevented me from wasting more money on yet another educational tool that Connor would have no interest in watching.
I located the section in the Back to School video about Saying Hello. And then I remembered that when I played the video the first time, that Connor had connected to the characters in the video, but had turned his head away from the saying hello part. Clearly this was something that was difficult for him. Perhaps he was shy; perhaps he saw a greeting as an intrusion into his personal space. Who knows? But it was time to address the problem, and although the videos were able to teach him a number of training skills, this particular task was going to need a bit more oomph.
So I went back to the Model Me Kids website, and found that a teacher and a student training manual were also available as accompaniments to the videos. (Sections of these luckily were also posted online, so I could try them before I decided to order the set, which I did). The training manual included discussion questions, such as “how do you feel when someone says hello to you”? Connor responded “I feel happy!” Then we talked about how he felt when he said hi to someone and they didn’t say hi back. He read the proper response off the manual, “Hurt feelings.” We also went over the student manual, which talked about the rules of saying hello, such as turning to face the person who had issued the greeting, making eye contact and saying hello.
But Connor still looked a little dubious, so we decided to role play. I asked him to pretend he was my friend. I would pretend to Connor. And so we began. He said, “hi!” very brightly and friendly. I, as pretend Connor, walked right past him. He was flummoxed. “Hi!” he said again, and I walked by again without responding. “Hi!”” Hi!” he repeated. And I continued to ignore him. He was looking a little worried by now. After his fourth hi, I turned to him, smiled and said hello with a big smile. Connor got the message.
We watched the Back to school video again, and when it came to the Say Hello part, Connor repeated each instruction.
The next day, Connor began to say hello back.
