Fantasizing vs lieing in a 6 yo world ?????

[joburg]

DD 6 yo (actually soon 7 but pretty behind for her age) lives in her own fantasy world most of the times. But when it comes to her peers she has difficulties understanding that they can too roam around, imagining things. As a result she calls them lairs, they answer back. Then its fighting and quarreling, DD comes home grumpy and frankly speaking i start to loose my patience with explaining to her (must have been a thousand times so far in a thousand different ways) that kids do talk silly stuff and one should not call them lairs for that, but take it as fantasy, enjoy their stories, etc etc.

She runs into conflicts with other kids because of what they said, they are not telling the truth, etc etc.... Her social skills are very poor anyway, and now this lying thing on top of everything else.

Her vocabulary is very much behind so using words as imagining or fantasizing didn't help at all. How can i explain these things to DD?

I think it's pretty normal for children to believe their fantasies, to some extent, at her age and beyond. It is also very hard for her to know other people have fantasies too because that requires quite a high-level insight into the minds of others. Given you describe your dd as having some language delay I imagine both the language and the under-lying concepts you're trying to convey are too difficult for her at the moment.
At this stage to only thing you may be able to address is her reaction to their perceived lies, e.g. to work on getting her to walk away from children when they're annoying her or get her to tell a teacher so they can intervene before she gets upset.

It's possible that a picture system, like Social Stories, would help her to see things from the perspective of the other children without such reliance on language. It doesn't sound like it'll be easy though.

Thank you Eclipse, I tried over and over again to work on her reactions but i am at a point when hearing one more time about how she is the victim of those those lairs, only makes me want to go deaf for ever .... i can't hear it any more (maybe i should have asked instead about how can I cope with this ) Never heard about the Social stories you mention ...??? Are they story books?

Any ideas about how to teach her to react to the 'lairs'? I tried the 'laugh together at such a funny story', 'go away if they upset you', 'pretend to believe them, even if you think it's not true' .... what else??? She just gets angry at them and it's day after day after day .... soon nobody will want to play with her anymore .... I must admit I wouldn't if I were 6

nobody having advice about how to deal with it?

this might be useful. Social stories take the child step by step through a social situation and give them rules to deal with it. They're good because you can write them down and then dd could carry it with her (can she read? even if not she might still want to have it), and they mean you don't have to think up 1001 new ways of explaining the same thing. Carol Gray (who invented them) has several books of template stories too.

I'll try to buy it. Thank you niminypiminy. I could still have any other advice that you mums might have to give before the book arrives.