Follow-Ups to Answer from Expert Michelle Fattig

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Cc wrote at 2010-12-05 04:37:54
Hi.  Curious to see how this is going.  My son is the same way.  We have been recently seeing an lcsw who has given us so many ideas to help with this.  For my son, she says it's a coping strategy when he is unable to process a new situation, or idea.  He gies to something comforting that he is good at.  When I asked what if he does this for a long time she said, put limits on it.  Okay bob, you can talk about sticks for 5 more minutes and then we need to put them away and make spa e I our head to think about xyz (dinner, game,etc...). She also suggested drawing a picture of a head and dividing it into parts, saying, my brain has this much space to think about sticks each day, then it need time to think about other interests ...ask your son for ideas and draw them in.  She also said that sometimes kids get stuck if they're really interested in a topic , but b/c they don't have access to encyclopedias, Internet, etc they will talk about the same thing.  So, in the extra 5 min you give your son to think about his stuck topic, maybe expand his knowledge by doing a new activity with it.  I've found with my son, if he gets stuck, I plan to have tons of activities to distract him.   A art projects, tactile bins, educational videos that I rent from  a plus educ video rental...we talk about the video, draw pix for science journal, act it out, experiments, etc...  Then in future when we do the head drawing and he's getting stuck,  I tell him to go to his journal to find a new topic to play with.

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