Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional School called me about eye contact

Hi all,

One of my twins ( with DYS qualifying score) has not had a great time socially (or academically) at school. I always thought this was because few are interested in what he has to say.. For example- they were asked to write a non fiction story to read to a Kindergarten class and he wrote 3 pages on JAVA programming.

To help with interactions at school he has been pulled out into a socials skills group once a week with my consent.

The social worker who runs the group called me just to touch base but mentioned that when the kids ask him a question he looks at her to answer. I felt like she kept emphasizing poor eye contact which worries me. At home I don't notice it at all.

The EdPsych who tested said No to Aspergers but now I feel the school is sort of hinting that way???

Thank You Portia,

Im not sure. Which ones would be the visual subtests? His lowest were PS with scaled scores of 11.

If he is looking toward the social worker I don't think it's autism, it's insecurity. He is smart enough to know he needs help and if he's not sure what the answer is and is shy about it, he's going to look away or at the SW.

If you do not see poor eye contact at home or with other people he feels comfortable with it sounds like it is situational.

Also someone told me once that people who specialize in something can have a tendency to see that something more often than not (it can become their "go to" if that makes sense)… so if the SW in question is used to seeing kids on the spectrum, they may just jump to that instead of digging deeper.


However that said, the EdPsych that tested my son (also with social skills and okay academics- he is at grade level but not really working above) said he had anxiety and perfectionism but that was about it based on slow processing speed. When nothing worked to fix anxiety I took him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a tic disorder (which included tics, inattentiveness- which explained social skills delays and daydreaming - ocd and anxiety. If you had told me all that was going on when I took him to the EdPsych I would have been shocked, but now I can see it all going back to 1st grade. So if your gut is telling you something is wrong, trust it and dig further. If not, asynchrony -fun, right?

I would agree that the school staff member is probably suggesting an autistic spectrum disorder.

I would also agree that this behavior sounds a little bit like social referencing, which is generally typical of younger children, but isn't out of the range for a latency-age kid who has already been identified as in need of a little additional coaching in social skills. In particular, he is probably quite aware that his read on other children's interests and expectations is not always accurate, so of course he's going to check in with the designated adult authority on social interactions. Adults are also more likely to scaffold social interactions, which means that looking at her increases the likelihood of him experiencing a positive outcome, which reinforces the behavior. Especially in a group of kids enriched for others who need social skills support.

Anecdotally, I find that this happens to me quite often in social situations. If I am present in a group of multiple people, the speaker generally makes eye contact with me more than with anyone else in the group. As I've been observing this phenomenon for decades, I've concluded that it's a response to the high degree of scaffolding and positive feedback that I provide as a listener. Individuals with less social confidence tend to hone in on me more than those with more confidence do. You probably haven't observed the eye contact behavior at home because he is comfortable with that social communication environment. His home setting may also have more integrated environmental scaffolding for social skills, so that any little quirks aren't really felt.

As a listener, when I encounter speakers who restrict their eye contact to me, I do things like pointing my eye contact toward other members of the group, to drag the speaker's eye contact in that direction, deliberately including other members of the group with focused nonverbals or verbal responses that invite their participation, or even discreetly repositioning myself in the group so that the speaker's eyes will track across other members of the group.

Eye contact is an area for development in many individuals with social skills vulnerabilities, including the majority of such, who are not on the autistic spectrum.

The school can be hinting that way but the social worker is probably not a train psychologist. Your child probably does behave differently at school than at home. This social worker is probably looking for things that they think could categorizes your child. And my experience is the like to try and categorize children who don't meet the norm as having either ADHD or ASP. They may have very little experience with an extremely gifted child.

I have had this issue with my DS16. When DS was struggling with anxiety and preteen angst he wouldn't look at people in the eye. Mostly he wouldn't look at older adults than ones he really really trusted. I kept getting the hints from school about ASD but every psychologist who's worked with him has said no. He even tried to do his 6th grade science project to show that you can hear just as well if you aren't looking at someone. (This turned out very hard to test.)

Several psychologists have told me DS isn't ASD although he does share some traits. Now that he's older this isn't a big problem anymore. It wasn't a problem as a preschooler either.

You've gotten great advice already, I'll just add one other possibility - my ds has an expressive language disorder, and one of the signs that wasn't at all obvious to me when he was around your ds' age was that he would look to someone like the sw in this situation if he was stumped and didn't know what to say. It didn't look like a communication issue - it looked like a young child who didn't want to talk to the other person or who was shy or who was an observer etc, but really he had no clue what he was "supposed" to say (actually he had a slightly deeper issue of generating thoughts/words but I'll spare you the details lol!).

He was also a kid who had high WISC scores on everything but PS.

In your situation, I think I'd ask the sw for more info re what she's observing and what she's thinking. She may be way off, but her observations are probably going to tell you *something*. Following that, I'd follow your gut if you're concerned.

Best wishes,

polarbear

DS has what I would consider poor eye contact but I was told by multiple people that he is not on the spectrum. He has good eye contact when other people are speaking to him, but when he is speaking he is looking all over the place. I think part of his issue is that he is visualizing whatever he is talking about. So if he is telling me about the Crimean War he is probably visualizing the map in his head. He has told me that he recalls things by seeing images.

I am also very uncomfortable with eye contact myself. I have to force myself to look at people when I am talking.

Whenever I see statements like this, I think of this blog post.

For what it's worth, having adequate eye contact prevented my DD from being diagnosed with autism for years. We are all a lot happier now that she has the diagnosis.

DS's neuropsych would say that "quirky" is not the same as autism. It's only a disorder if it causes the person significant social issues and there is a pattern to the symptoms. If you added up all the people who have trouble with eye contact or display any other flag for ASD, probably the majority of us would have autism.

When I was a kid I probably should have been put into a social skills group since I was very shy. But I don't think having a social skills deficit equates to ASD.

Interesting statement that I'd like to hear more about. My DD has poor eye contact which I notice in these situations:

1) With us when emotions are running high (not an issue when things are positive or neutral)
2) With adults in authority or adults she does not know well. This can be VERY noticable.

I never see it with other children--ever. I have also seen the "referencing" behavior discussed, but only with parents.

DD is still what I would call socially immature, but functioning at a very high level in school and socially popular in a nerdy, gifted group.

PB My DS11 is quite a talker, but a lot of the time he seems to have trouble finding the words for what he wants to say… he will struggle to tell you something, then suddenly say never mind… I've been considering whether to have him screened for an expressive language disorder (he was a late talker and that was his primary problem- his receptive was advanced but his expressive was delayed). When you say PS you mean low Processing Speed right? My son as well…although he has other things that can be contributing to that- he has inattentiveness (ADD), so not sure if I should or not.

These both sound very consistent with my DS16.

Add not looking adults in authority the eye, and his refusing to say ANYTHING when pushed set off all sorts of red flags to these adults. But honestly once he got to know or trust an adult this didn't happen unless emotions were running real high. And he has gotten significantly better as he has matured.

Social skills, including eye contact, can be hyponormative in individuals with specific learning disabilities (dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, etc.), especially nonverbal learning disabilities, with language disorders (particularly expressive language), with ADHD/EF disorders, with mood or anxiety disorders, with schizotypal disorders, etc. It's a long list, obviously.

In other words, social skills are extremely complex, multifaceted skills, which can easily be affected by disruptions in any one of a multitude of functions. It's really more amazing that the majority of people function socially. (Or we could think of it the other way, that most of us (the norm) have social skills deficits, a few of us have even more deficits, and then we have a few extraordinary outliers, like HK's DD, where everything truly comes together.)

When there are additional strains on the system (e.g., emotionality/anxiety, social uncertainty, expressive language demands), some skills will naturally fall off the edge. Eye contact is one of those that tends to go. In people with EF deficits or other learning disabilities, it may also be that they have had less access to implicit instruction in social skills (from natural environmental feedback), because they've had to divert more development and processing energy to compensating for the area of learning difference.

Some individuals, with intense emotional sensitivity, also find maintaining eye contact to be too powerful of a connection with the conversational partner, and avert their eyes to keep the emotion of the interaction consistent with the level of the conversation, or to keep the net emotional level (eye contact + verbal + other nonverbal) within manageable range, so they won't be overwhelmed.

I didn't know eye contact issues were seen with mood disorders. DD has some depression/anxiety issues. We have been told by professionals that what we think looks ASDish is more anxiety behaviors.

VERY common. Anxiety drives quite a few symptoms that are popularly associated with other conditions, such as the rigidity and awkward social interactions connected with ASD, or even more outlier symptoms, like some auditory or visual hallucinations (mild ones--I except command hallucinations), which are usually associated with psychosis/schizotypal disorders.

This is why (referencing the OP), it is important to involve experienced clinicians who take a comprehensive view of the data in any diagnostic discussion. A single observation or comment from one school professional (excellent though she may be in her area of expertise) is not enough to change the whole narrative.