My son will be going for a full psycheducational eval. this summer. He will be 7 this month. We are having major problems with immature behavior. He talks like a baby, makes up silly stories and frequently has the “sillies”. This was okay until this year. Now that he is getting older, the kids do not accept this behavior. We have tried everything to help him stop. I have pointed out to him when he is engaged in these behaviors and the fact that kids do not want to play with him anymore. He is an only child and had many friends up until this year. He is only going into second grade but is already being labeled as the kid to stay away from. He does not play like this all the time. He has times that he acts appropriately for his age. He is a very sweet,kind and caring child. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Re: Immature behavior
Poor social skills is sometimes a secondary to an underlying problem. As the other person responded, people will get silly and do unappropriate things when they are uncomfortable. His problem could be anything from general shyness, to a learning disability to something as simple as developmental lag.
I have not yet seen a way to conquer shyness but if it is a learning disability there are many ways available to work with children. Developmental lag will usually take care of itself in time.
Either way working with him on his social behavior will not hurt.
I do have several suggestion to try:
(1) Roll play situations and rehearse several times. Try in a real setting. Role play some more.
(2) Read or tell stories that involves a social judgement and have his anticipate the ending.
(3) While watching T.V. pick out social situation where a bad judgement is made and ask him what could have been done differently.
(4) When he makes an inappropriate social choice ask him why he made that choice. His perception of what is going on around him may not be the same as the perception of others around him.
As your taking your son for an evalutation, you’ll likely get good input into any underlying causes of his sometimes behavior and you’ll be able to go from there.
See what that tells you first. If it suggests his baby talk is a speech issue, you could get him some speech therapy.
Last year I had a student who got the sillies all the time. He was otherwise a great student and a wonderful boy. Sometimes it’s a personality thing. During his sillies, his friends would roll their eyes and so would I but we all put up with it because his other self was like your son - sweet, kind and caring.
Sometimes the sillies happen when we get uncomfortable and we’re blocking things out with our sillies. You could also try to keep note of what circumstances might be sending your son into the sillies and see if there’s any pattern to it.