Autism and Not Looking At Things

[OldMcDonald]

DS(5) can maintain reasonable eye contact at times, especially with people he knows well, but at other times will be gazing all over the place. What's making me curious is that he seems to have a similar pattern of eye gaze when he's trying to manipulate an object. Often he will be looking around the room rather than at whatever he's trying to do. It is usually when I'm trying to get him to put on gloves/do up a zip/put his shoes on/do some other task that he'd rather someone did for him. He struggles enough with fine motor skills without sabotaging himself further by not looking at what he's doing so I'd like to know what's going on. I'm wondering if it's a form of protest over doing an activity he doesn't particularly want to do.

Can anyone shed any light on why he might be doing this? Do any of your DC do something similar?

He had an eye test a year ago and is going to another next week. He had perfect sight last year.

DD would open her schoolbag, later handbag and just feel for something in it and if she'd not felt it would say it wasn't there. She would never look inside the bag to see the item she was searching for.

Yes, that rings bells too!

My son uses his peripheral vision a lot. He always looks like he’s about to bump into people but never quite does. There’s various theories why they use peripheral vision more eg coordination difficulties or sensory - that direct vision is too intense and ‘hurts’. It’s obvious Ds doesn’t look at people’s faces as if someone has similar colour and length of hair to someone else he knows he will often confuse them and it’s only if I prompt him to really look he will notice who it is.

That's really useful Donkey, thanks. I hadn't thought about him using peripheral vision, but I guess if he does it for faces why wouldn't he do it for everything else! I feel the need to experiment now somehow to see if he is actually looking after all!

I was having a conversation with him yesterday about how he tells who's who in his class (as he still can't name half the children in it) and he seemed to be using the colour of their skin or the colour of the clothes they normal wear to work out who they were, even for his best friend. It must be really hard on non-uniform days!

Ds2 (ASD, 17) doesn't like looking at people or things directly either (apart from his phone screen, school work) I was told that it was a mistake to ask a child with autism to look at you when you are speaking directly to them(ie to instruct or reprove) Ds does look at me but only when I am not "boxing him in". Teachers who insist that a child looks at them when they are talking miss the point, the child can hear better when they are not looking even though they appear not be attentive. It is to avoid overload that the child looks away, he can still take in what you are saying.

It is a bit like asking a dog to do a task, apparently dogs feel quite threatened if you make eye contact, whereas sideways on, they are happy to concentrate on the task (only just learnt this with my puppy, interested in the body language parallel)

Similar. Ds (7) doesn't mind eye contact, but finds it tricky to do at the same time as talking. The hardest thing for him is to look at whatever you are explaining, e.g. a maths problem on paper, how to kick a ball, it's as though there is some invisible force that he as to act against to make himself look. Don't really understand it.