Pragmatic Speech The desire to be social is critical to our kids' development because the will need to accept being with people in order to succeed on the job. Plus, they will need to understand the social norms that are learned during childhood social interaction. Sometime the desire to be social has a lot to do with exposure.  Try to see if Adam would be willing to have a friend or two over to your house on a fairly regular basis.  If so, have "playdates" frequently.  At first, they may do a version of paralell play.  But the more your son is exposed to social interaction, they better the prognosis for an eventual job will be.Tzoya, I wish he would accept having a "friend" over.  However, he does not talk to anyone in his school except his teacher and his special ed teacher.  I don't even know any of the kids in his grade.  If I even mention having someone come over to the house he has an instant anxiety attack.  And bad.  Hyperventilating, hand flapping, head swinging, and he won't stop for an hour.  Then is will take several more hours for him to actually come back to his normal behavior.  There is a 5th grader with similar problems as him, and they are going to try structured recess once per week with the speech pathologist.  We will see how that goes.  They haven't told him yet though.  And depending how you look at it fortunately, or unfortunately, Adam and this boy are the only two children with ASD in 4-6 grade.  There is only one other dx'd ASD student in school and she is in 1st grade this year.     Reach out and make friends with the other parents.  Or ONE other parent. Then arrange to go out together somewhere.  Someplace Adam enjoys without friends.  It'll be an excursion for you with the boys along for the ride.  Over time, if you arrange for meetings outside (going to the movies, going to Chuck E. Cheese or the bookstore or the library) Adam may come to accept the presence of peers and even enjoy these excursion.  At his age, you must start to acclimate him to being with peers and interacting with them or he will never be able to function on the job.  He's 11 now.  In another 11 years he'll certainly be out of school.  That's what you have to start thinking about now.  The years race by.Several people have mentioned the TOTAL Speech test for kids. And references to pragmatic speech.  Has anyone had the older child tested for pragmatic speech problems?  I was concerned because as Adam gets older he seems to have much more difficulty talking to kids his own age.  Mostly he has no desire to, but if someone comes up to him to talk he has NO idea how to answer.  So as part of his yearly IEP I had is pragmatic speech tested.  They used a different test, but basically the same.  Sooo, results are in.  Adam's pragmatic speech is at a 5 year old level!!!!! What a  shock.  I always new he was behind, but not that far behind.  I would be interested in how other kids are.        Up until about a year ago, Connor was generally about 1-2 years behind in his pragmatic speech skills.  In the past year, he has shown no pragmatic deficits  We now use speech therapy solely as a social skills tool.  In fact, the ST at his school tried to convince me to discontinue services, but the Special Ed teacher advised me against it, because if I should change my mind down the line, there is no way he would qualify for services again.  So we rewrote his speech goals to work entirely on appropriate conversational skills.My son also had pragmatic speech problems and speech was recommended, this was before the Aspergers DX and I declined, because I didn't know enough about it at the time, he should of had speech too. He still needs work in this area, now he's 11. In NYS, the spec. ed. regulations GUARANTEE that any child classified under "Autism" get DAILY speech therapy if the parents request it.  This includes Asperger's kids who pass all speech tests with flying colors.  That is WHY this regulation was included.  Speech pragmatics is something that is often ignored but it is CRITICAL. It means socials speech -- how a child USES speech in the world. Some of the kids who appear very advanced in speech actually use speech to their detriment, socially.  Our state has recognized this so it doesn't require that an ASD child fail a speech test to get language help.  It ASSUMES there is a communication deficit since that is part of the DEFINITION of autism. As far as I know, NY is the only state that does this, but it does this for the very reason you mentioned, Loki. Too often people are satisfied that the child can speak at all but don't realize that out in the world the child's speech is either not effective or is a real turn-off, socially.  The REAL problem for these kids is not not getting speech.  It's getting speech from a therapist who is not schooled in encouraging good pragmatics.  Still , it's worth trying to get the therapy.Tzoya,  I did get Adam the therapy.  I was just amazed, and I guess I shouldn't have been.  That they didn't test him until I requested it in writing.  I also found out that even though the Customer Service Employee at my insurance said that Autism is excluded, they do provide 20 visits of speech therapy per year for autism.  So, I am taking him to private therapy also.  I hope he comes around and decides he wants to be more social with kids his own age if he can understand how to. Up until now he has not had the desire.   Dawn, this is exactly what I did with Connor.  He got group therapy at school twice a week, and a sent him to private individual therapy once a week for at least two years, until he basically burned out on too much therapy, and then we cut out the private.  It was hugely beneficial to the development of his pragmatics skills.  When he was 9, I didn't think it would be possible to eliminate his pragmatics deficits in less than three years, and yet here we are!  But as Joan stated, even though he speaks the same as his NT peers, he continues to need support in how to properly use his language skills in a socially appropriate way.  For Connor that means not being rude and insensitive
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