My 5yr old son and socializing

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It's true: the earlier the intervention, the better the results in the vast majority of cases.

To me, from what the OP has described, it would seem as if he just needs a bit of encouragement, and perhaps "social skills" training.

I wonder if the kid's really "just shy." That could happen as well. He seems like a "passive" sort.

I guess it wouldn't hurt if the kid got formally assessed.

Thanks everyone, great information - pretty much what I expected to hear I guess.

I didn't speak with him last night any further, he was in the "don't talk about me" mode. He's obsessed beyond words with power rangers right now and it's about as linear in focus as you can get. He cannot for the life of him stop talking about it or wanting to play. He has studied every little detail about the show, constantly re-enacting scenes. I hear sword swinging sound fx followed by "That's a super mega win" probably 20 times in the 2 hours I see him in the evenings. It wouldn't surprise me if he busts out these moves at the playground.

He's had early intervention and we're so thankful for it. In the past year alone he's come a long way. He's now on an OT wait list at school and ABA wait list (not through school) which should start up around February. He doesn't qualify for IBI as he went through those assessments.

We did early intervention around 2.5 years old, originally looking for speech therapy (as he didn't speak any words at this time, not until sometime after 3). Ultimately we he had a resource teacher that came to our house once a week to work with him (and us) for a full year prior to starting school, this was fine motor skills, speech, small games, and sensory stuff.

During that time he had been in many social groups (Mostly for ASD kids), he was in a home daycare for 2 years from age 2-4 for socializing (She's the one that recommended early intervention initially and got us the information). He did OT but didn't really gain much from it. That resource teacher program from our region (Ontario Canada), ends once a child starts school, then it becomes the school board's responsibility. He's had psychology tests and ADOS test (which is what inevitably lead to the ASD diagnoses from his pediatrician last December).

The reason I bring up pragmatics specifically is that it's an assessment that should be obvious to autism specialists, but sometimes gets missed or glossed over. The usual instrument for testing pragmatics is the TOPL, but there are others - one is an instrument for parents, called the CCC-2, which from what I read is more likely to identify pragmatics issues than the TOPL.

If you can be there to watch the testing, do. Having an instrument that shows the deficits exactly is extremely helpful - we did a lot of work with DS on our own using books and TV (BTW, check out the "prosocial media" thread, some of that was helpful for us)

Here are other diagnostic instruments for pragmatics:
Test of Problem Solving-3 Elementary (TOPS-3)
Test of Pragmatic Language-2 (TOPL-2) Available for children 6-18 years of age*
Social Emotional Evaluation (SEE)**
Social Language Development Test -Elementary (SLDT-E)

When DS did the test, we found that he got nearly 100% of the answers right in some areas, and 0% in others - he wound up with a score of 52%. (Our school, in reviewing this instrument, explained that a score above 50% meant his pragmatics were "average." This was not an accurate reading of the test results.) DS was able to interpret social situations fairly accurately, knew what people were probably thinking and feeling, but completely and absolutely unable to figure out how to respond.

So my son (call him "J") talked about it a bit more tonight and he continued to hint that he feels different than others.

My son really looks up to the popular boy in his class (call him "L"). He's the boy that came over as a playdate in the summer that went.. ok. My son said "we do a lot of the same stuff but just different". I asked him for an example and he said "After school L says, Goodbye J". I asked him and what do you say back? He said "nothing, I just look at him." He told me he doesn't look at any of the other kids but he looks at L when he says bye to him... so its the same but different. He then told me he just wants to be the same as them.

It's hard to figure this all out but I've sort of concluded that to my son, looking at others is his way of acknowledging them when they say bye when he's not comfortable to talk back in a normal social conversation. However in the moment he wishes he knew what to say back and wants to say "Goodbye L!" but just can't do it. It's hard to grasp this concept for me really since he holds conversations with me but anytime it's appropriate to say bye to someone I've always had to prompt him to "Say bye'" to get him to say it. He never does it himself without being prompted and I'm sort of understanding why.

His assistant has started to notice the lack of social skills as well after I spoke to her about it which is great because she works with him every day. She's been making notes about it for us in our communication book. At this point I think we're going to need more help to move this along for him since he seems ready for it.

I hear what you are saying, Sweetleaf.

Sometimes it is helpful to think about therapy as another form of teaching/learning. My son hates school, too, but while there he successfully learned to read, write and do math in the same way that he's learned social skills from therapy (I can say that he's been successful, because we are at a stage where his skills only need fine-tuning and therapy is mostly done.) I wish it hadn't happened the way it did, but we did the best we could with the tools we had at the time.

That said, if we had been able to do it when he was younger, I think it would have been less difficult for all of us. By the time we got him the help he needed in mid-4th-grade, we had several years of failed "counseling" (by people who had no clue about autism and assumed it was some kind of problem with family dynamics) and in addition to being isolated and bullied at school he was confused, angry, and very dangerously depressed. Even though we were trying as hard as we could, he justifiably stopped trusting us to find a solution, and did not trust the professionals we found to help him because he measured everything against all of the past failures.

Eventually, when he started having success, he began to realize that there were things he needed to learn how to do and that therapy was helping him - but he still hated therapy, because it was a reminder that he was different, and his experiences in school had taught him that different meant bad. We are struggling with that less, now, but it still comes up on a bad day.

When kids are small, different is different. It's a much easier place to work from.