My son is becoming a “low talker”

Seinfeld: "low talker"

If you’ve ever seen the episode of Seinfeld, where he dates a low talker.. you know immediately what I’m talking about.

For those that haven’t, let me give you a run down of the situation.

Cameron LOVES his video games. Some would say obsessed… but he has proven to be able to live without them. He can spend time at the cottage without video games and even here at home, he only gets to play during the week-ends.

Still though… he loves them so very much that generally, it’s all he ever wants to talk about. On the drive in to school, he tells me all about the levels he has to beat and how to beat them. He describes the actions that characters can and will most likely take. He recounts entire levels that he’s played previously… even though I was there playing with him.

He’ll tell me, his mom, his cousin… anyone. He talks and talks and talks.

Now, if you know autism, you know that many children with autism never do learn how to talk. They may or may not find other ways to communicate but talking just isn’t one of them for some people.

I know this and I’d never want to discourage my boy when I know not take this sort of thing for granted. Still though… how many can you listen about Mario or Sonic? A day? A week? Months? Years?

So anyway, even if we don’t ask him to stop, he realizes that we’re not nearly as interested. He knows that we’ve moved on to other things or are simply too busy doing other things to really pay full attention to what he’s telling us.

As a result, he’s slowly becoming a “low talker”. What I mean by that is… he continues on talking about video games, but he does so quietly, not really to himself, but such that only he can hear it. So he’s still telling us, or anyone, but no one will ask him to stop… people can go about doing what they’re doing while he’s talking… he doesn’t interfere with them.

There have been times where he’d talk about a video game for a solid hour, as if talking to himself, only… he’s actually talking to someone. He just doesn’t care if they’re listening or not.

Everyone in the house is aware he’s been talking away for an hour. Everyone knows what he’s talking about. But no one can hear the words he’s saying. Not even the person he’s talking to.

On one hand, I’m impressed because he’s found a way to continue on without bothering anyone. On the other hand, will this behavior be looked at positively by others later in life?

As I said, I don’t want to discourage him from talking about the things he loves either.

For now, he’s found a solution that works for him. So I’m more than happy to let him keep going with it.