5 year old conversation - age issues or really need to worry about?

[joburg]

Our daughter is 5 and a half now (I should also mention she was adopted and came home with us 9 months ago - reason why i am not sure if i should worry or this is just a normal step in her, maybe a bit delayed, development).

Anyway, now that her english starts to be ok, and we can understand what she is saying, we realize her stories make absolutely no sense. She contradicts herself in the same phrase, for instance she talks about a friend who "doesn't speak english then he speaks english to me because he is blue and small ..." and so on.

She can't seem to follow one topic. She talks about an airplane which she seems very interested in, we come into the discussion adding something about it, and her next reply would be about snow white like she has never talked about airplanes.

She re-tells a story she had just seen on tv. There is no event order what so ever in her speech.

All in all it is impossible to have a 3 line conversation with her. Her answers would most of the time have nothing to do with our topic.

She has learnt whole expressions from us or in school that she is using with an almost 'grown-up' intonation but it seems to me she doesn't understand what they mean, and she is not interested in understanding them either if we try to explain.

Our conversations are surrealistic .... nothing makes sense, there is no continuity, all these 'because' things of hers never make sense (see the boy who speaks english because he is blue) and she is not at all interested in hearing us helping her find the correct explanation of that thing...

Please help! I know we should talk a lot together but it's just so hard and annoying when there is basically nothing to talk ABOUT with her, she's just not interested in hearing us ....aaaa, and she never asks any questions about anything either!

Reading into this I'm guessing, English isn't her first language and you've adopted from another country? (just from what you've said) In which case, it seems like very very early days to me. She must be going through an almighty adjustment to her new family, language and life and is either probably confused or finding escapism in the 'world' she's creating.

Can you engage with her in her first language at all? Can you clarify if that's the case or you'll get lots of well meaning but pointless advice.

I think encouragement and allowing her to find her feet in her time might be what she needs right now.

Thanks gingerninja, i should have clarified this of course. She comes from an African country where english is commonly used, although in a sort of a mixture with some local dialects. While spending time at the orphanage last year, i could very well communicate with the kids there in english. Also, they had schooling in english too (she spent 2 and a half years there). Still, our daughter seemed to have difficulties expressing herself in english for a while after coming to us, but progressing very fast in terms of vocabulary afterwards.

... But never asking any questions about anything???? Not being interested in hearing what others have to say? Jumping so randomly from one subject to another?

could you try picture stories. By this i mean you get a series of pictures and get her to tell you what is going on in each picture. You start off with them in the correct order and then once she can tell you them correctly yuo can sttart to jumble them up and allow her to place them back into the correct sequence.

Myabe draw your own picute sequences, you could use getting dressed in the morning, "what do we put on first" etc etc

It might be that she is not used to putting things into a logical order, or actually holding a conversation of any length...these things all need practice, good luck

im going along stoppinatwo lines... maybe she is not used to conversations. maybe she was never encouraged, or even more, discouraged from asking questions. its probably the first time in her life that she has an interested listener, and she could be over excited about it. my guess is that is more to do with what she has observed in terms of what people expected and allowed her to do, than her development per se.

you seem to be dealing well with the situation though, you can spot what is not working and you are looking for ways to help her. well done!

and what could you do about it... being persistent on explaining and encouraging her is a good way. any chance to get some tips from a psychologist perhaps?

I tried the illustrated pictures as you recommended, stoppinattwo, and in very simple stories she managed to organize them after a lot of talking and explaining. But when it comes to talking without images and without explanations she seems to looses interest or concentration or both. She talks endlessly but she doesn?t make much sense.
She had been attending nursery already since she came with us (9 months).

According to her age and of course, considering her situation as adopted (but please remember, although it?s an African country she comes from, it was an American run orphanage who offered them schooling, and other kids seemed to be pretty able to have a conversation with me) would you recommend I should start to consider looking for help in her case?

i think you can only gain from an expert advice. some people are reluctant to seek for professional help because of what it could look like on them such as "oh, i have a problem". in my view, if there are people out there that knows more than me, why not take advantage of it?

i was thinking of your story and i was trying to imagine the setting of an orphanage. even with the best of the intentions, i doubt she had much one to one long conversations. probably it was more a series of short interactions, which would be consistent with her way of talking right now. you said other kids were able to hold conversations with you, but we are all different and perceive and react differently to things. we cant measure her for what the others were like.

thats excellent that a book with images helps her to organize her thoughts. she seems to be a more visual person than audition (not sure what the noun for it is). just like me

Yes I would seek help. If a child is struggling to talk then the techniques are common sense but this is trickier isn't it?

Try the charity ICAN in the first instance, especially if your access to speech therapists is limited.

joburg your story really reminds me of a gorgeous little girl who is the daughter of a good friend of mine. she was/is (to a lesser extent now she is 7) very similar. very engaging and incredibly chatty (talks non-stope in fact) but her answers to questions were almost entirely random, leading to very surreal conversations as you describe. she didn't seem to fully grasp what she was being talked to about/asked. she also had other issues and was eventually diagnosed as dyspraxic, but she also has a language/comprehension disability it was eventually concluded and she got help with that. hopefully with your little one it's mostly to do with background/circs as others have suggested but knowing this other little girl, i would really back those who have suggested seeking help - the child development centre (via a referral from your gp if you are in the uk) was the team who saw my friend's daughter. good luck!

joburg your story really reminds me of a gorgeous little girl who is the daughter of a good friend of mine. she was/is (to a lesser extent now she is 7) very similar. very engaging and incredibly chatty (talks non-stope in fact) but her answers to questions were almost entirely random, leading to very surreal conversations as you describe. she didn't seem to fully grasp what she was being talked to about/asked. she also had other issues and was eventually diagnosed as dyspraxic, but she also has a language/comprehension disability it was eventually concluded and she got help with that. hopefully with your little one it's mostly to do with background/circs as others have suggested but knowing this other little girl, i would really back those who have suggested seeking help - the child development centre (via a referral from your gp if you are in the uk) was the team who saw my friend's daughter. good luck!

Thank you, everybody! After a couple of months of having her home i felt that something might not be exactly right. But everybody kept telling me she's just a kid, she's young, she's adjusting ... which was of course true, but there were other things that had not much to do with her situation i would say. She can't pronounce many sounds, her moves seem somehow clumsy for her age, she keeps playing the same game over and over again for weeks and would refuse to try anything else, or watch the same movie evening after evening until i couldn't bear to hear the same noises myself ... and even after all those many evenings she would not remeber the character's name. She wouldn't sit still for a minute and even while watching cartoons at the end of the day (after a full day of running, jumping, swimming), she would jump in the couch, move around, scream at the tv .... etc.

I am not at all embarrassed to seek counceling from a professional if that can help her, so i guess this is what we just have to do.

Does anybody have any tips regarding some memory games? any other games i could play with her myself to help her organize her thoughts, help her with sequencing (the picture story thing is one, thank you again stoppinattwo) ...?

Hi Joburg,

I also agree that it would be a good idea to seek professional help for your DD, you need to see a developmental pead, you will need to make this clear when seeing your GP as most will refer you to a community pead as a first port of call.

From what you have wrote about your DD it sounds to me like there is a possibility that she may be on the autistic spectrum, my eldest daughter (6) has ASD and i can relate to a lot of what you have wrote.

However it sounds like she has been through alot in her short life and to be honest i would imagine that most children that have had these experiances in such a short space of time would suffer some sort of developmental delay, are there any local groups/organisations that support parents with adopted DCs ?? or charitys that supports parents of DCs adopted from other countries?

Twocutedarlings, when you say ASD does that mean autistic spectrum ... or is it smth else? Does anybody here have knowledge of SPD (semantic pragmatic disorder)? I started reading about these things and much of what they say there seems to describe my little daughter.

Anybody have any ideas of what kind of games we could play together to help her with memory issues? Or exercises that we could do? Before adopting, one learns that routines are very important for the child to feel safe in her new home. We try to stick to it but she seems to have difficulties remebering her everyday things even today. If she brushes teeth she forgets to comb hair and so on (she forgets, not that she doesn't want to ... that would be easier to deal with ). She forgets where she put her things, she looses things etc etc ... she even has troubles sometimes remebering her friend's name, a friend she is playing with since she came home with us.

I probably start to drift away from the intial topic, but all these things come to mind while reading your posts ...

Hi Joburg,

Yes ASD is autistic spectrum disorder

Now SPD is again a very similar condition (in terms of communication). I think would be a good idea for you to post a thread over on the special needs board, the ladies over there are minds of information .

As regards to helping your DD organise herself better, we use a visual timetable for various activaties (this includes a morning one) how is work is basicly like a list but with pictures and text, so the morning this first thing for DD to do is put her glasses on, then eat her breakfast, brush her teeth and hair and get a wash. We then have another one for dressing which starts with taking her PJs off ect ect and ending with getting her coat on .

forgive me, but from your typing am I right in thinking that English isn't your first language either?

I am asking because if other languages are also spoken in your home, then this might be very confusing for her.

Also, if she's grown up in an orphanage then this will have been a very isolated existance for her, one where she essentially never saw the outside world, and only knew the people who were in the orphanage with her, and the ones who might have passed through to adopt the other children.

Adjusting from living in what is essentially a bubble to living in the big outside world where there are lots and lots of new things to learn and remember must be very overwhelming, and I would imagine it would take months, if not years to adjust to that.

Thank you twocutedarlings, we used to have a reward chart (until she got angry at it and broke it in pieces in anger, then we put it up again and she silently hid it somewhere, and so on). We have pictures of what needs to be done, placed in the action locations ?. Like ?please clean me!? poster on the toilet door, or ?look what can happen if you don?t brush your teeth? on the mirror in front of her sink. But she tells me very innocently she ?forgets? to look at them ? for nine months now ?we? try to remember to at least once in a while ask for new toilet paper if ?we? run out of it (and sometimes she can stay without it for a full day, and end up smelling bad!!! if we forget to check it, even if in the orphanage they always had toilet paper) ? check ?our? clothes if they are dirty or not, she never does that ? I?m not absurd and I don?t expect her to be precise and every day do it. I only wish she would START to do this and that, now and then, regarding her own things, showing she starts to learn a bit here and there ?. ?couse I start to loose my own concentration and memory any day soon trying to built those routines everybody is talking about

As for the language, thank you wannabe to jump in with your question. Both me and my husband, we come from non-english backgrounds, but exactly because of that we only speak English ?couse none of us speaks the other one?s mother tongue. So. At least our poor DD is not going through a confusing phase of several languages being spoken in our home (even if our English might not exactly be fluent )

We have never actually tried a rewards chart with DD1 .

This is the type of thing we use we DD

Here

However after reading your last post i actually think that you might be expecting a little to much of her, after all she is still only 5 .

But i will admit that DD1 is my eldest child so ive not yet raised a 5 year old that didnt have special needs IYSWIM, so i may well have a clouded judgment LOL .