My son with autism is verbal, but sometimes I find myself wondering:
Are we stuck? Are we self-soothing? Are we trying to process what we are currently seeing, hearing or thinking about? What’s going on in that unique brain of yours, Brady?
Why the endless loop of the same rhetorical question?
My son Brady regularly repeats his own questions during a conversation. I know this repetitive looping must be an ‘autism thing’ for him. This is one of Brady’s autistic behavioral traits, although not every autistic person engages in such verbal looping as Brady does. He’s nearly 10 now.
When he was around 4 or 5 years of age, his repetitive questions filled his day and I wasn’t sure how I could maintain my patience when I was asked the same questions for a few hours without much reprieve. I would answer his question in as few words as possible – straight and direct. Still, he would repeat the same question again moments later. I remember thinking: “okay, he doesn’t understand my answers, so I need to try to respond in a different way as SUCCINCTLY as possible.” It was always challenging because I believed my answers were already clear and concise; however, I’d pause, take a deep breath, and try again. I would sometimes get down on my knees near him so he would be more likely to look towards me. Eye contact could be difficult, and I knew it wasn’t a necessary component for hearing me. I kept hoping my answers would penetrate.
The pattern continued. Sometimes, I would respond identically and other times I’d try to respond differently but always without changing the overall meaning. I’d fight to keep my voice calm as I answered the same question over and over. This was hard work, for I was fighting to keep my own anger from seeping into my responses. I knew that being angry with Brady was unfair and not justifiable: my son has autism, a neurological condition that impacts how a person perceives their environment and how he/she interacts with others. This disability affects a child’s communication and social skills, which may also include repetitive patterns of behavior.
This is no cake walk diagnosis. It entails much uncertainty and great behavioral challenges, which is why learning how to parent a child on the autism spectrum is not a skill that comes naturally. It takes time, lots of deep breaths, and a village of experts as well as tremendous support (friends, family, teachers).
I grew to look at our situation in a completely revised way and recognize that yes, he had autism, but I was one of the lucky ones. My son was trying to verbally engage with me. Although it was a tedious loop and at times, quite maddening, I needed to be his unyielding, faithful responder. I needed to allow him the opportunity to try to make sense of the sensory-stimulating world even if it meant answering untold monotonous inquiries. This would take enormous amounts of time and an incredible amount of patience. Truly, I’m talking about a level of patience and perseverance that I didn’t know existed within me before becoming Brady’s mother.
I remember one morning when he was in kindergarten that I almost lost it. My eyes swelled up with sad and angry tears because I let my brain go to thoughts of: “He’s not understanding me. He will always ask these rhetorical questions over and over and I will never be able to appease him with a response that allows his brain to detangle from the ugly looping that holds us captive.” It was a beautifully white morning as Brady was standing at the glass doors in our kitchen staring at the large unique snowflakes gliding down onto the deck. I was cleaning up breakfast dishes, just a few feet away from my wide-eyed, captivated boy.
“Mom, is it snowing?”
Yes, it is snowing.
[10 seconds later]
“Mom, is it snowing?”
(Deciding to shorten my answer, I reply with a single word: Yes)
[20 seconds later]
“Mom, is it snowing?”
I go over to him and get down on my knees, so we are about the same height.
“Brady, what do you see?”
“Mom, is it snowing?”
“Brady, is it snowing?”
I try again, and gently cup my hands around his face.
“Brady, is it snowing?”
“Yes,” he responds.
“Do you like the snowflakes?” I ask.
(Silence)
“Brady, those are snowflakes. That’s how you know it is snowing.”
(30 seconds later)
“Mom, is it snowing?”
“Do you see snowflakes, Brady?”
(pause)
“Yes,” he responds.
“Is it snowing, Brady?”
“Yes,” he replies in a whisper-voice, keeping his eyes glued on the falling flakes.
I wish I could say that our conversation ended there, but that would be a lie. He asked me again if it was snowing and I went back and forth between replying, “It is” or asking him the same question in return. That’s when I suddenly felt tears spring to my eyes and my brain was bombarded with the saddest thoughts centered around: “Will we always be like this? Will he always ask me such simple, repetitive questions?”
Even if I asked him a question about his current favorite fixation, he would pull me back to his first question. I’d ask such things as: “Brady, do you like playing in the snow? Is snow hot or cold?”
I asked these questions in hopes of breaking the looping and expanding his level of thinking. I desperately wanted to have a real conversation with him instead of sliding back to the original question of whether it was snowing.
I got lots of advice from therapists, including special educators at his school, on how to handle these daily repetitive interactions I had with my young autistic child. Answer him concisely. Make sure you have his attention when you answer his question. Ask him the exact same question so he tries to answer it first. Don’t answer the same question more than once.
Don’t answer my son? This was a hard one to swallow, and after I tried it a few times, I quickly saw that he was upset by my total lack of reply and I decided that I would not ignore him again. Not ever. I answered the mundane questions for years and over time, as he aged, I started to recognize that he was asking more and more interesting questions.
For example, at age 9, instead of asking about whether it was snowing (he was witnessing the snowflakes falling again), he asked me: “How many snowflakes are on our deck now?” YES, I went from very easy inquiries to impossible questions for me to answer, in a matter of a few years (by the time he was a third grader). The problem became: Brady wanted an exact answer. He was not satisfied with my answer of “Countless” or “Probably millions.”
Should I just placate him and say: “There are 30,486,339 snowflakes as of 10:24am (and thirty-one seconds).”? That would be a very tricky and impossible charade to maintain because moments later, he would surely ask me the same question:
“Mom, how many snowflakes are there on the deck now?”
Repetitive questioning is still present, but the level of thinking was getting more impressive and allowed me to more fully understand where his brain was traveling. He was thinking about numbers and how fast they can multiply with all the tumbling snowflakes. Once I began to put the thought pieces together, I could then ask follow-up questions and widen our interactions:
“Brady, the snowflakes are like pieces of sand on the beach. It is too hard to count them all. There are so many.”
“Snowflakes are bigger than sand,” he responds.
“Yes, you are right. I just mean it is hard to count each one.”
“How many are on the deck now?” he asks again.
“How many do you think, Brady? Thousands, Millions, Billions?”
“Does only God know how many are on the deck, Mom?”
“I think so.”
“What does it mean when someone says: ‘they think so’?”
“It means they believe it is something that might be true.”
(confused look on his face… I try again.)
“It means I think you are probably right.”
As Brady matures, I can see that he struggles to understand the greyer areas of life; those places where exact, precise answers are not possible or even known. This doesn’t stop him from being a very inquisitive person. He wants answers and I feel strongly that, as his mother, he deserves an intelligent response every time (Google has become my friend).
As I look back just a few years ago when he was asking the most seemingly obvious questions, I can only surmise that he was processing my answers and that the repetition of my responses helped him understand his world, calm his brain, and laid the foundational roads for broader questions to spring up in the future. Little did I know that his questions would challenge my brain!
Autistic kids may seem stuck, but do not lose hope. Their brains process information differently and they see the world with such contagious amazement. I am asked the most left-field questions from Brady now. But not all the time – there are still the obvious questions, but often we can move on from those and have the type of conversations that make my heart fill with happiness and allow us both to feel so connected.
Question on our way to school earlier this year: “Mom, do boa constrictors have friends?”
“No, they aren’t friendly creatures. They will kill their owners and they also like to sneak attack their prey. They have no friends, Brady.”
“Do they wish they had friends?”
Hmmm…so hard to answer. Google doesn’t know either.
OMG the boa question!!! I love it. Maybe the answer is that they’re friends with other boa constrictors? And Tucker still asks me the same question over and over, although they’ve gone from hard-to-answer “how many” ones but now are more self-esteem ones. Although, he’s asked me maybe a billion times whether Nugget is cute. Um, why??
Yes – every creature wishes it had a friend. Or was a friend.
That’s what the food chain/web is about.
This is why I partner the animals; birds and reptiles.
And so did God in Noah’s Ark.
And sometimes boa constrictors have been known to befriend their prey – like mice and rats.
About questions – I liked the way you asked about things Brady could see; touch; smell; hear; taste himself.
Would he have wanted to touch or taste a snowflake? Some children do.
Even though the question and the reason has not changed per se; he is using it to ground and orient himself in the new information and knowledge and as you said to keep up the interaction with you.
To know you’re still you even if he no longer feels like him.
So questions can be anchors.
How would you respond to someone with dementia whose questions fill up their days?
Obvious questions aren’t always obvious to the asker or the respondent or even a third listener.