Since joining school 18 months ago my 5yo seems to go through phases of compulsively talking, he seems to feel the need to narrate his whole life.
I can be making a drink he’ll shout me like it’s urgent into the next room and he’ll just tell me that he dropped his spoon on his foot or something similar. He will come out of school and one of the first things he’ll say in a big rush is ‘I’ve been scratching my eczema, picking my nose and biting my nails’ all three of which are things me and his dad have casually told him to try not to do. Throughout the day he’ll say things like ‘oh I dropped my Lego but now I’ve picked it up and now my foot is itchy and I was going to get a snack but now I’m going to get a drink and my leg just touched the couch’.
This evening he’s said to me a few times ‘urgh I’m fed up of telling you and dad everything I do’, I said calmly he doesn’t need to tell us everything, but I didn’t want to bring to much attention to it.
These phases have so far usually happened towards the end of a school term, not every time, but I think we’ve had maybe 4 ‘phases’ of this since he started school and they’ve all been towards the end of term and into the school holidays. He has no issues at all at school or at home and on the whole seems like a really happy little kid, but these phases really seem to exhaust him in a way and they also exhaust me and his dad. He gets loads of attention so I can’t think it’s that, and he also doesn’t seem anxious about anything he talks about, it more just he feels like he HAS to say it, we try to just acknowledge these ‘word vomit’ episodes and just change the subject, but it’s hard and I do worry as I’m not sure what they mean in terms of what is going on in his head. I did speak to the SENCO lead at his school a few times who didn’t seem overly concerned.