Now my son is older (8) with no dx, life is pretty easy. He celebrated his eighth birthday by overcoming his fear of all handdryers except the awful Dyson ones.
The problem is, he swings between periods where he has established friendships on the playground and longer periods where the friend has "broken up" with him, and depends a great deal still on his lovely big brother (10).
When we are in the "broken up" periods, I get down, fearful, anxious about him, terrified that his sibling will lose patience with him, and it hits me right in the solar plexus, just like it used to when he was three and people would speak to him and he didn't understand.
Is it his social skills that are the problem? Or is it my lack of acceptance that's the problem? And if the latter, is that because I was brought up to believe that knowing how to deal with lots of different kinds of people and be socially successful is the be all and end all in life? I was definitely brought up to be ashamed of my older brother because he was a loner at school.
I have also leafed through some of the recent books on introversion, which seem a bit simplistic because you can't divide a whole population into two groups. But sometimes I wonder whether these authors make good points about social skills being excessively valued. I also suspect that introversion is more to do with your sensory profile than these authors mention.
Anyway, please don't flame me, but do wander over if you want to chew the fat and ponder whether it's really so terrible to be alone in the playground or whether perhaps sometimes it's society telling us you should never be alone....
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do you think as a society we are too obsessed with social skills?
62 replies
goonIcantakeit · 10/09/2013 10:52
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