DD10 is a...funky child with no diagnosis, but some ASD/ADHD traits. (She's odd in that nothing fits her all that well, but we try to focus on the issues we see and address them as needed.) As she ages, we are noticing more conversational deficits, particularly with adults. (She is socially very popular with peers. This is part why nothing fits.) In particular, she has poor eye contact and does not give the impression that she is an interested listener, even when she is.
DS7 is the same way except that the poor eye contact mainly shows up when HE is the one talking. He'll be rambling on about something while he's looking around the room. I watched him once during a speech eval and his eye contact became much more normal as the session went on and he felt more comfortable with the speech therapist. So even though he does not appear shy or anxious, I do think there is something like that going on, leading to reduced eye contact until he gets to feel comfortable with someone. But even with me, eye contact is not always great. He might look at me periodically to see if I'm listing but otherwise look around the room while he's talking. I'm not sure what it means either, or how to get the eye contact to improve, but just wanted to say he is the same and has DCD, some characteristics of ASD and ADHD. We do have a social skills group in his IEP and they are working on things like this, as well as in speech therapy in school even though he scores average to above average on speech assessments they are keeping him in speech because of the conversational back and forth--he tends to ramble whether people are interested or not, and he doesn't ask pertinent questions to show interest in other people, for instance he might ask someone "What did you do over the weekend?" and if they answer, he doesn't keep the conversation going, he'll move onto talking about minecraft or something else that interests him. Probably some of it is age-typical for a 7 year old though.
