Building friendships through support groups - Part 10
To create a support group of your own, visit Support. In the meantime, here's the latest installement from Sarah and Joan's group. To read the series, go to Friendship.
My child struggles with personal boundaries.
“There’s another problem that Neil and other kids like him have,” says Joan. “They don’t recognize other people’s physical boundaries because they lack a sense of their own. They need to touch and feel things – to push up against something solid – in order to find boundaries in their physical world.
“In his pre-school and early elementary years, Neil was oblivious of the disgust and negative remarks from other kids when he talked to them incessantly … nose to nose! You know, like the people who stand so close to you when they talk that you can see their nostril hairs. Neil was like that, and he had a terrible time standing in line. His hands were always touching the child in front of him, or running into other people with some part of his body in order to establish the boundary that his brain could not.”
“There is another type of boundary issue with difficult kids, or at least there is with mine,” Valerie reminds us. “It’s the attitude that ‘what’s yours is mine.’” Valerie describes how her daughter has no qualms about making other people’s property her own. “Caroline has a poor sense of boundaries; she has little sense of self or others. She borrows, steals, lies, interrupts, and refuses to deal with anything that isn’t about her. I wonder if that is typical for her age. Her friends act this way to some extent, but Caroline’s behavior seems extreme.”
