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Bad manners and good manners in sickness and in health

peteandliz

Our 13 year old son was recently diagnosed with aspergers. He has all the classic problems with socialising and social communications, but is academically sound. We have not told him about his condition yet. Most of the time he does not use good manners, despite our constant reminders - he very rarely says please and thankyou and generally shows little empathy or respect. BUT whenever he is ill, even with just a cold, he becomes a different child. He is impeccably polite, well mannered and thoughtful. When he gets better he reverts to his normal self. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I be encouraged that deep down he does know how to behave properly, or discouraged because his 'normal' self rejects this?

thank you

Parents

  • My reason for asking was my own experience of growing up without a diagnosis or any other "explanation" for all the difficulty, which was seen as something I was doing wrong.

    The pressure mounted through the day, but I would break down often for no obvious reason at all. I thought of it as "last straw syndrome" because I usually coped with most of the bad things but finally blew just because of the build up of mishaps. This would add to the guilt of the whole thing because I'd have a huge over-reaction to something obviously trivial so that added to the perception it was all my fault.

    My problem was I was entertaining. I got bullied because I was easily agitated by noise and movement, especially sudden noise and movement and especially on the periphery of my field of view. So I performed for the crowd by getting distressed.  These things would happen out of sight of authority, and could be managed so I appeared to over-react to nothing at all when authority "turned up".

    It makes sense now because I've observed it in others. You can see that the over-reaction doesn't seem to have an immediately obvious cause, but must be down to the build up of stress.

    For that reason I tend to like Digby Tantam's "bandwidth" theory that the ability of AS to process information operates over a narrower bandwidth causing a bottleleck, or else the information coming in is much more than for most people and finds a bottleneck (Tantam "Can the World Afford Autistic Spectrum Disorder - Nonverbal communication asperger syndrome and the interbrain" Jessica Kingsley 2009).

    Not enough seems to be understood about the contribution of short term "past" events as distinct from the apparent immediate relationship to behaviour.

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  • My reason for asking was my own experience of growing up without a diagnosis or any other "explanation" for all the difficulty, which was seen as something I was doing wrong.

    The pressure mounted through the day, but I would break down often for no obvious reason at all. I thought of it as "last straw syndrome" because I usually coped with most of the bad things but finally blew just because of the build up of mishaps. This would add to the guilt of the whole thing because I'd have a huge over-reaction to something obviously trivial so that added to the perception it was all my fault.

    My problem was I was entertaining. I got bullied because I was easily agitated by noise and movement, especially sudden noise and movement and especially on the periphery of my field of view. So I performed for the crowd by getting distressed.  These things would happen out of sight of authority, and could be managed so I appeared to over-react to nothing at all when authority "turned up".

    It makes sense now because I've observed it in others. You can see that the over-reaction doesn't seem to have an immediately obvious cause, but must be down to the build up of stress.

    For that reason I tend to like Digby Tantam's "bandwidth" theory that the ability of AS to process information operates over a narrower bandwidth causing a bottleleck, or else the information coming in is much more than for most people and finds a bottleneck (Tantam "Can the World Afford Autistic Spectrum Disorder - Nonverbal communication asperger syndrome and the interbrain" Jessica Kingsley 2009).

    Not enough seems to be understood about the contribution of short term "past" events as distinct from the apparent immediate relationship to behaviour.

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