Age Appropriate Communication

Post Reply New Topic

I have been wondering about this. I have read both that people with Aspergers and autism, may either have delayed speech, or sometimes very well developed adult type speech "little professors" where they talk to other children in ways that are not age-appropriate.

I am not quite sure what age-appropriate communication really is and I was wondering what your experiences of this have been.

Whether you are or consider yourself on the spectrum in some way / not neurotypical or consider yourself completely neurotypical / not on the spectrum at all, I'd like to hear from you. How would you answer the following.

1) As a child did you have any problems communicating with other children? If you did, do you think this might have been because your communication was in some way not age appropriate?

2) Did you get better at communicating with your peers appropriately as you got older?

3) Do you think there is actually such as a thing as age / experience appropriate communication, and does it matter?


My answers are briefly

1) Yes, I was developmentally well ahead in speech and I talked to children like they were adults and they didn't understand me and were confused and I was confused by them (especially ages 3 to 7).

2) Yes and no, I sort of got better at communicating with peers, massive misunderstandings got less frequent as I got older, especially age 10 onwards. However, I still have some problems communicating with many people of my own age, talking to people either older or younger than me often seems easier.

3) I'm not sure.
I think we sometimes dumb down too much for children, and they understand a lot more than we sometimes give them credit for. But on the other hand I'm aware I need to use simpler lay language when trying to communicate complex academic ideas to people - if I use the jargon words I'll completely lose people. For communication some optimum level of mutual understanding is important, too simplistic and you'll make people think you think they're stupid, too complex and you'll confuse people.

What do you think?

I am not exactly answering your questions, so my apologies about that upfront.

I was socially awkward when I was younger and at some point I realized I was "too smart" and so I learned to tone it down a bit in the way that I spoke. I still find myself doing this today. With some people, my speech is much less proper and my vocabulary is not as high. With others, I probably sound more...umm...learned? I use bigger words and I think even the cadence changes. I think the second way of communicating is more my "natural" way, but I have learned to be more relaxed. I have a tendency toward more "proper" speech and a more "rigid" posture and sometimes that makes people think I am snobby, so I often find myself trying to adjust, especially around people I don't know.

My daughter used to be behind verbally. In pre-k and part of kindergarten, the other kids kind of treated her like she was a baby, and I think in part it was due to her immature speech patterns. However, in kindergarten she really started to take off and now as she is about to enter 2nd grade, her verbal skills are above many of her peers. I think they notice that just as much as they noticed the immature speaking. At least now they see her as smart instead of as babylike, but I think in the next couple of grades, it may make her stand out in a negative way again.

I do think that there is such a thing as age appropriate communication, but since I have never been able to quite figure out what it is, it's hard for me to comment too much on it, even though I know it is important. If you don't do it there are negative social consequences.

1) As a child did you have any problems communicating with other children? If you did, do you think this might have been because your communication was in some way not age appropriate?

I did not communicate to other children unless I was very familiar with them = like my brother, but still my communication was very little or repeating what he was saying. I did not took any efforts for friendships at all as a child.

2) Did you get better at communicating with your peers appropriately as you got older?

I realized around age maybe 27 that I did not really talk to people which I were not very familiar with. I felt that other people could communicate, but I remained silent, because I could not understand how they do it, but I was very withdrawn into my interests and my own world, so I realized it sometimes but often just forgot about it, so it was not present in my mind, that I have to communicate unless I was in a situation in which it was needed and then I failed often due to not knowing how to understand or mutism.

3) Do you think there is actually such as a thing as age / experience appropriate communication, and does it matter?

I guess so... I watch people communicating and bounding, so there must be an age / experience appropriate communication and I guess it does matter if I understand your question well.

Please, I'm happy for anyone to answer none of the questions if they want and just make a comment. I put the questions there as this is what I was most interested in, I hope the detail did not put people off...



That's really interesting to me because that almost spot on describes what I experience, and I would say that my more - 'learned' - 'intellectual' speaking mode, I'm not to sure what to call it either, is also my more 'natural' way of speech. I certainly feel more relaxed and less guarded when I can speak like this.



This is very interesting to me too. I have never experienced mutism, but reading posts here it on WP it appears many do experience it.

For me interestingly, unless I'm talking to people I know very well and am very comfortable with, I often feel like I'm giving a performance. The only way I can talk with people easily is to somehow step outside myself and give a performance of me talking. This has become almost second nature, I've got very good with practice, but can be very tiring indeed if I have to keep it up for a long time.

I rarely attend social gatherings but when I do I find I can be sociable for a bit, then I tend to find a corner to go and be quiet in, or help with clearing things away or something, so I can have a break from active socialising.

So for me faced with people I don't know well, I will 'perform' or 'act out' rather than go quiet, but I wonder if the things that trigger me into 'performance mode' might be similar to things that make some other people become very quiet or mute.

Any thoughts from anyone else?

I grew up surrounded by adults, so I treated other kids as if they were adults too. That was one of the sources of my social difficulties. All my life, I've believed that this was due to the fact that I grew up amongst so many adults. Only recently have I begun to consider the possibility that this might not have been caused by the environment, but by something within me. So I guess this was the case with me too...

When I became a teenager and started making friends, I learned how to dumb down my speech and I still do this to this day. In fact, I learned to listen to the way the others talk and then mimic their style when I interact with them. I'm a writer, so I have a way with words; that makes it easier, I suppose.

I have a friend who suspects she might be an Aspie. When I'm with her, I don't need to dumb down my speech...

I had problems big time. I don't think it was a case of not being age appropriate though. It was developmental, apparently I couldn't speak coherently till I was 7.



I seriously doubt it, given that all my life I have hardly ever if at all had friends my own age, or who could be considered peers. They've always been some other age, older or younger.



Definitely, because people tend to usually socialise in terms of age, interest etc.

1) As a child did you have any problems communicating with other children? If you did, do you think this might have been because your communication was in some way not age appropriate?
Hmm, I think I was OK with speech. I think it was something in my personality that made other children not want to be as friendly to me as what they were to eachother, probably also due to shyness.

2) Did you get better at communicating with your peers appropriately as you got older?
Not really, it was just the same. I just found it more hard when I was a teenager because the social rules altered a bit and I think I was a little bit behind on keeping up with teenage trends.

3) Do you think there is actually such as a thing as age / experience appropriate communication, and does it matter?
I don't think it matters. I knew a few kids who had speech delays (not Aspies, just kids with learning difficulties) but still made friends normally.

For me, it was both being around older people and being on the Spectrum.
I hate the term "age appropriate" because it makes me think as if the person is talking about "adult-oriented" things, if you catch my drift. How is it inappropriate to be talking about particle physics in 5th grade? It's better than the filthy things other kids talk about in school.

I hardly communicated with other children except for a few occasions. I started on a sort of autistic version of parallel play around age 6 and issued very occasional orders (a limited set of "faster" and "stop" to tell the other kid how to operate a giant toy car I sat on) soon after (age 7-8?) when I was forced to be in range of other children that played with my toys or drew pictures besides me.

As far as I know, parallel play usually starts way earlier and isn't considered age-appropriate if it is the predominating form of play/social interaction (with few exceptions) throughout elementary school.

I only began to ask for colours, follow my classmates when I was lost and didn't know where to find the unfamiliar classroom around age 9-10. I've been working in 1st and 2nd grades (mostly ages 6-8) and from it learnt that non-autistic children and a few autistic children are a lot more interactive and actively seek out other children with a ridiculously high frequency during just a single day of school.

(Though, in the case of those elementary school-aged autistic children, cuddling up to and falling asleep on the lap of a stranger during a perfectly normal day is quite age-inappropriate as well. As is poking every other kid who happens to come along or running up to an adult every time another kid so much as rolls their eyes, touches their toys, shows up in school with banned toys or says they don't want to play with the autistic kid.)

I know in my early school days, I wasn't bullied but I was left alone generally. I now realize that my vocabulary was W-A-Y too advanced for my age. On the playground, while other kids were talking about toys and army figures I would talk about topics like how I couldn't grasp how a Black Hole could absorb light because we wouldn't know they existed if nothing escaped from them or how I couldn't understand why Pluto was called a planet. Yeah, that really helped to make friends at age 7!

Luckily one of my special interests became Nintendo games so I could relate to at least a few boys my own age.

Interesting how a number of posters posting so far, have said that their vocabulary was in advance of others. Though I note for those with delayed speech this does not seem to be the case so much but other communication issues have persisted.

I had always assumed my advance vocabulary and manner of speech was down to spending most of my time with adults too...now I'm beginning to wonder too.

I would have loved to talk about particle physics when young from at least age 6 upwards,you might have had to explain some basics to me, but then I'd of been fascinated (what age is 5th grade?). Also I agree 'age-appropriate' is not really the best term - I should maybe have put it in speech marks in the original subject title.

There does seem like there might be some level of communication mismatch between those on the autistic spectrum and peers but can anyone think of a better term / phrase than 'age-appropriate' which would cover what seems to happening here?

As if it wasn't unusual enough, my vocabulary was better than most of my classmates, except my best friend , because she read for hours. I finished my literature book months before school started and my teacher commended me by not checking it I would also frequently lecture people about why most government factions lie to you, conspiracies, etc.
1) I had problems communicating to other kids, but not when saying "Hi, how are you?". I think the problem was I wanted them to be less normal and more weird.

2) Not really. The people I would always befriend are the geeks (not nerds, there's a difference) who play on their computers for hours or the kids who seem more disconnected from the world than other NTs.

3) There is no such thing as "age-appropriateness." One my friends, she created a joke "stop acting your shoe size!" Yes, you read correctly. I think she did that more as a playfulness to say "There is no such thing as being age-appropriate." There are some things I did that clearly weren't appropriate, like pick-pocketing people or watch them like guinea pigs in a lab, but I think I'm more comfortable with my friends than family.

I had troubles, because I can't express my feelings and thoughts well. About speech, I had troubles because my speech has always been too above avarage and formal compared to the one of my peers, so they couldn't understand well what I said.


No. Peers still have troubles understand my speech because it's too formal.


I don't know; I'm not an expert.

Yes.


I don't think so. My verbal communication was just hard for other people -- of all ages -- to understand (a lot of this has to do with comprehension problems and how so much of what I said was echolalic) ...



Yes, a bit -- very slowly. Mostly I got better at scripting, which (in my case, the way I'm using the word "scripting") wasn't really the same as communicating...it was more like trying to fill in the blanks where my words were supposed to go in conversations that I couldn't understand. My communication/language skills only really started to improve in my late-adolescence/young-adulthood (in terms of speech, only in specific contexts.... in writing, more generally).


Yes and no....

I think developmentally-appropriate communication makes more sense than "age-appropriate" communication, and that "person-appropriate" communcation is what really matters....

"Age appropriate" communication is an offshoot of developmentally-appropriate communication that assumes all people develop skills/abilities/interests and acquire life-experience at the same rate and in the same way, based on statistical norms. (i.e. most elementary-schoolers don't have an interest-in nor understanding-of advanced neurology , so conversation about advanced neurology is not "age-appropriate"... but really, it's not about age so much as it's about whether or not somebody has the cognitive skills, interest, emotional maturity and/or knowledge/experience to talk about something --> "person-appropriate" communication.... it becomes about age because "At [insert age] most people can learn/talk about/understand [or have experience/knowledge/interest of/about/in] x, y, or z").

I guess that age appropriate communication is just how nt children communicate at various ages. Some autistic children are delayed, and some are advanced with adult-like speech.

1) As a child did you have any problems communicating with other children? If you did, do you think this might have been because your communication was in some way not age appropriate?

I didn't communicate with kids my age. I didn't know how. I only played with younger kids. At school I kept to myself and didn't talk to other kids.


2) Did you get better at communicating with your peers appropriately as you got older?

No. I kept to myself In high school also. I didn't understand how to communicate or socialize with other kids. As a young adult I was thought of as being weird but I got along by learning how to be polite.

3) Do you think there is actually such as a thing as age / experience appropriate communication, and does it matter?

No. Not in my world. I accept myself the way I am. I don't think it should matter.