Our 13-year-old daughter has recently been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disorder, and we’re now thinking of following up with some testing of her social perceptions as this has long seemed to be an issue for her (she seems a little “off” socially, seems to stand out to other children when she’s in group situations, and has never had a friend). What sort of test would we need for info on social pragmatics, and what sort of expert would administer it?
We are currently home schooling her and I need to get some objective information on where I need to start. We went to the Christmas Eve service last night and she was in a bad mood and so cried all through it; she does this whenever she is stressed and seems unable to distinguish between public and private situations. She’s a sweet girl but she has trouble making those connections somehow, and when she’s in group situations her behavior turns off the other kids (she talks too loudly, or says something just a little “off” [not mean, just odd — such as she’ll say “no problem” when someone says she looks nice today]). It’s hard to get her exposed to social situations because she has gross and fine motor problems (not good at sports) and her processing, especially non-verbal, is extremely slow (she can’t think on her feet so when the other kids run off to do something, she hesitates and is lost). I just don’t know what to do.
Sandy
Re: Social pragmatics -- evaluation?
Just a caution — I had some very miserable experiences with a person who picked apart *every* social occasion afterwards and let me know every single thing I did wrong, and it seems that in this person’s opinion every single thing I did and said was wrong. Since I already know that I don’t deal too well with groups and I am nervous among strangers, already have crises of confidence, this put the lid on my attempts to have a social life. If an occasion wasn’t a disaster before or during, it got turned into a disaster after; can’t even have pleasant memories. This is a good recipe for driving someone into a breakdown and destroying relationships. If you do analyze social interactions, be extremely careful to stress the positive and not to make the person even more nervous. Constant anxiety and embarrassment is not a way to improve life.
Re: Social pragmatics -- evaluation?
Thanks for the responses! I like the idea of explaining that it there’s a whole language of social language that we’re going to go about learning — we’ve just started French so that should play right into our discussions about that.
…And thanks for the warning — it’d be just like me to go too far and pick apart every single social experience. :)
Sandy
Re: Social pragmatics -- evaluation?
Try socialthinking.com. Michelle Garcia Winner is very insightful.
Last I knew, there weren’t any good tests for pragmatics. In language testing there can be a discrepancy between TOPS scores and others but that doesn’t tell you much about what your where your child needs to start working on social skills.
Often the best angle with these folks is the verbal one — instruction and practice in social behavior, and learnign what people expect as replies to what kinds of statements. (Then there is also learning when what they say is *not* all of what they mean — that sometimes “that’s no problem” means “as long as you never do that again, I will not have a problem, but I”m probably not going to forget it, either” and that sort of thing.)
There’s a good video about social skills at the “LD STore” on this site; I believe it’s one of Rick LaVOie’s. He talks about “social autopsies” where you take apart both good and bad social expeirences after the fact adn try to learn from them. (I think it might be the “last one picked, first one picked on” video.)
It might help just to tell her that some folks out there speak a whole social language that others don’t…. we have to learn it like a second language. There are, however, a lot of “second language” folks out there and when we’re with each other, we don’t have to be quite as careful about tuning into the stuff between the words… and we can get along rather well in the world if we work at it :-)