Personal Space and other NT Mysteries
Personal space is something we understand on a very intuitive level. Everyone has a different comfort level. It's nearly impossible to teach. (Though I spend rather a lot of time trying.) We chant the mantras "worry about yourself," "it's not your business" and "stay in your own space" -- they're almost meaningless, and it's really hard to do.
Personal space is something I can have trouble with myself, especially verbally. I am easily led by whover is around me, and have difficulty getting back into my own belief space. It's why I hate debate. To quote my grandfather, "The way you tell it, I think you're right."
More importantly there is a flipside. I'm a peoplewatcher. It's a skill I honed with pride in middle school. (To the alarm of many of my peers. More than one of them thought I was a stalker; at the time I had no clue why.) My shoddy social skills mean that I don't pick up on social cues the normal way. It's only by carefully listening and paying attention to *everything* that I ever have a clue what was going on. If I don't do that, I'm immediatly back to being totally clueless. I simply cannot afford to only "mind my own business" and "stay in my own space."
And so I begin to wonder about how we teach the skill to students who have similar (or worse) social skill deficits. If I'm using those personal space incursions as a coping mechanism, isn't it reasonable to guess that they might be too? If so, should we be approaching this "behavior" in a different light; restructuring it instead of trying to elminate it. (I'll fully admit the stalker-type stuff I did in middle school was freaky and unhealthy.)
There is a such a subtle line between teaching appropriate behavior and allowing for neurodiversity. I'm not always sure I can find it in myself. How can I presume to teach it to my children? Both of us need absolutes, because generalization is so hard. Yet that is the problem; there are no absolutes when it comes to social language/social interation. That is what makes it such a fascinating mystery to me. I can watch forever, and I'll never figure out all the rules. How do I teach *that* to my kids?
Personal space is something I can have trouble with myself, especially verbally. I am easily led by whover is around me, and have difficulty getting back into my own belief space. It's why I hate debate. To quote my grandfather, "The way you tell it, I think you're right."
More importantly there is a flipside. I'm a peoplewatcher. It's a skill I honed with pride in middle school. (To the alarm of many of my peers. More than one of them thought I was a stalker; at the time I had no clue why.) My shoddy social skills mean that I don't pick up on social cues the normal way. It's only by carefully listening and paying attention to *everything* that I ever have a clue what was going on. If I don't do that, I'm immediatly back to being totally clueless. I simply cannot afford to only "mind my own business" and "stay in my own space."
And so I begin to wonder about how we teach the skill to students who have similar (or worse) social skill deficits. If I'm using those personal space incursions as a coping mechanism, isn't it reasonable to guess that they might be too? If so, should we be approaching this "behavior" in a different light; restructuring it instead of trying to elminate it. (I'll fully admit the stalker-type stuff I did in middle school was freaky and unhealthy.)
There is a such a subtle line between teaching appropriate behavior and allowing for neurodiversity. I'm not always sure I can find it in myself. How can I presume to teach it to my children? Both of us need absolutes, because generalization is so hard. Yet that is the problem; there are no absolutes when it comes to social language/social interation. That is what makes it such a fascinating mystery to me. I can watch forever, and I'll never figure out all the rules. How do I teach *that* to my kids?