I, you, he,she

Pronouns are something the Small Boy has always had problems with. He does the classic autistic echolalia thing of repeating what you said straight back to you. As in:

"Do you want some toast?"

"You want some toast."

That means "yes".

Actually, a more usual answer would be "want some toast", with the "you" left out completely. Clearly he feels that pronouns are tricky and unreliable, and should be avoided wherever possible. Or at least, he did feel that.

On the subject of echolalia, a quick digression. I divide his echolalia into two categories - meaningful echolalia and non-meaningful. The non-meaningful is straight out quoting from TV or other places, context-free. He does a bit of that (though usually when he's quoting he acts it out as well, so I tend to class that as rudimentary pretend play) but more often it's meaningful, as in:

"Do want your book?"

"Not want your book!"

The meaning is fairly clear, but the form of the words is echolalic. He's using my words as a kind of structure to hang his own sentence off - probably because it's infinitely easier for him to recognise a word and its meaning when presented to him than it is to call up the word itself from memory.

This week, however, he's suddenly jumped to "Not want MY book". And "Mummy, you draw a airplane". And "Not in my jamas and bed". Over the course of about two or three days. He's still definitely avoiding pronouns, but now on the rare occasions that he uses them, they're generally being correct.

This is huge, and I have to think that it has implications for developing self-other knowledge and theory of mind. Understanding that when I speak I say I and when you speak you say I is half way to realising that you are a person, and I am a person, and we both have equal and separate points of view, which put us at the centres of our own worlds. And when you understand that, you're ready to be a part of society.