Why won't he stop talking about maps?

Q: My 7yr old AS/HFA (not sure which yet, but who cares) son of course has his perseveratory topic: Maps/Geography. He really wants to make friends so I have plainly explained over and over to him that constantly talking about his topic to his peers is hampering him in his quest but it doesn't seem to sink in.

Even when he is home alone with Mom and Dad and is not nervous about "how to act/what to say" he will keep talking about it even after I tell him point blank I don't want to hear any more and change the subject.

I know it is difficult for him to pick up on nonverbal cues, etc. but why isn't telling him plainly unsuccessful? Is it due to short term auditory memory difficulty? He has other outlets for expressing his "passion",he draws maps, makes up streets, etc.

A: I think the best analogy here is to remember the first time someone asked you out on a date, or when you opened the first acceptance letter to college, or some similar time when you were incredibly excited about a piece of information and were just bursting to tell somebody about it. Now imagine that that piece of information was the etymology of the word "doubt", or a series of baseball statistics, or the capitals of South American countries. It's not that you don't understand intellectually that the other person doesn't want to hear about it, you're just really excited and need to tell somebody about it. And it seems so incredibly interesting to you that you can't imagine that anyone else would not want to hear it. Sure, they said they didn't want to hear any more about the Great Vowel Shift, but that's because they didn't know this particular fact about dipthongs.

Like with most Aspie problems, this does get better as kids get older and learn more self-control. But even now, as a 20 year old, I once and a while come across a fact that is so cool that I have to call my mom up and tell her. Or if it's too late to call her, go tell one of my roommates. Having other outlets does help, but one important thing to remember is that there's a difference between an outlet for wanting to think about a given subject and an outlet for wanting to inform people about a given subject. Depending on how you feel about your son using the internet, I would recommend finding him some Geography related message boards online where he can go and talk about geography with other people. If I've just learned about a particularly amusing branch of neopaganism, I can read about it all day, but that's only going to increase my desire to tell someone about it. Luckily for me, one nice thing about having Aspie friends is that even when emerging religions aren't their personal perseveration, they do appreciate interesting random facts and will usually sit still for a brief lecture on Wolf-Age Asatru until I can get it out of my system. And that's the key: find some outlet for his desire to talk about his perseverations, even if it's just online or even into a tape recorder, and he won't feel that need to keep telling you all about it.

Wiley