I think you're onto something, Adrianne.
Go carefully, feel your way, but I would have tried to probe deeper (Basket B, though).
"What is REALLY the problem? Can you tell me what you're thinking about right now? Let's talk about it."
And when he said he was planning to run away, again I would probe - "Why do you feel you need to run away? WHat is it you want to run away from?" The rest of it - the practicality, etc - very well done indeed.
In asking these extra questions you are showing him that you do care, that you know it's not easy for him and also that you want to really understand him so you can help him find the answers he needs.
As he learns to answer your questions, he also learns to think more deeply about what is bothering him and to ask himself those questions later on.
About sending kids to their room - we discovered early on, that when we used it as time out, the kids soon saw it as a refuge and would put themselves in their room without being told, if they were unhappy, upset or having an argument with someone. "Go to your room" evolves into "I will go to my room because I need to be alone for a while."
This is especially likely to happen if being sent to the room is not always used as punishment only, but also encouraged as a refuge. For example, "I'm sorry you bumped your head while playing Batman from the garden shed roof. How about you go to your room and lie down quietly for a while and see if your head feels better?"
Adrianne, your son sounds like he not only lacks social skills but is aware of this lack in himself and is working to rectify it. He also sounds like he is a basically honest and good kid. His inability to understand (or accept) that people lie all the time, but HE is not permitted to - a classic Aspie reaction. Oh boy, so very classic! To be more accurate, a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) reaction.
Think about it from his point of view. Life really isn't fair. He's taught that a balance of exercise and good nutrition means you will grow up to be strong, healthy and the correct weight. They really pound that into kids early in, at school. At least, they do here. I suspect they do in the US as well.
Then you have a visitor, a lady from church who, to be polite, is overweight and not healthy. You invite her in for a cup of coffee and morning tea. Politeness and friendship has you opening a packet of biscuits and offering her one. Over the next half hour you and the lady talk and as she reaches for a third biscuit, difficult child comes in and says to her, "You shouldn't eat more than two biscuits, because that is being greedy."
difficult child is being honest; he is also reciting the social rules he has been taught. From HIS point of view, he has not only done nothing wrong, he has been very good as well as helpfully pointing out something that perhaps the lady from church just didn't know (clearly didn't know, since she is overweight and unfit. It must be because she doesn't know she should be exercising and eating a healthy diet).
You, of course, are mortified. You send difficult child to his room for insolence and at the same time you tell your friend, "Don't worry, help yourself. You're not overweight anyway. You look great."
On his way to his room difficult child hears you saying this to the lady and it really confuses him because he can see the evidence with his own eyes. You lied. This undermined the good things he was trying to do, to help the lady.
Some difficult children would come storming out of their rooms accusing you of deceit and double standards. If your difficult child is slightly more socially aware than this, maybe he decides to wait until the friend has gone before asking you why you lied.
We often are not aware of our lies. We drag ourselves out of bed, fighting off the latest cold, because we have a job to get to and kids to take to school. difficult child sees we're not feeling well but otherwise does not react. We're late out the door heading for school, got to drop the kid off fast and keep moving, too much to do today. The teacher calls out, "How are you?" and on the fly past, we respond with, "Fine, thanks!"
To difficult child, this is a lie.
The social side of all this, the reasons we do this, are often just too far beyond our kids' ability to understand. In time and with support they will get it, but in the meantime the apparent double standards can really upset them. It really isn't fair, and they get confused. When is it OK to lie? WHat sort of lie? When is is OK to tell the whole truth?
The first lesson for a difficult child is NOT how to lie, but how to know when to shut up. A Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kid does not automatically have empathy. They would like to, but it's not something they understand easily.
At difficult child 3's drama class (for kids with learning problems) the kids go in to class and we parents sit in the next room, drinking coffee and chatting. One classmate of difficult child 3's has a sister who is functionally autistic, but who doesn't go to drama because she is too unpredictable. She is about 15. We adults were going through a bag of cast-off clothes and I was trying on (over my jeans) various skirts. I am still losing weight and I'm beginning to look "almost normal". Some of the other women were telling me how much weight I've lost and I said, "I don't look like I still weigh over 80 Kg, do I?"
The other women responded (as you would in that situation) and clearly wanting to belong, this autistic girl piped up and said, "No, you don't look very fat at all."
I know the girl, I know she was trying to be polite in her own ham-fisted way and thanked her. Her mother corrected her and said, "You could have phrased that differently, darling. Maybe you could have said,..." and explained a bit more.
The girl turned to me and said, "I'm sorry I said you were fat."
Poor kid! The more she tried to fix it, the worse it sounded! I just laughed and said it was perfectly OK, I was the first one who had mentioned my obesity by naming my weight, so it was perfectly OK for her to have responded as she did. And she hadn't called me fat, anyway. We were all girls together, talking girl talk, and under these circumstances especially when trying on clothes, talking about weight is perfectly OK. I made it clear that she hadn't offended me at all.
Our kids will say the wrong thing but in general are not intending to be mean or cruel. It doesn't always sound that way, though. It often sounds like a kid being cheeky, or deliberately confrontational. With this girl, she is herself overweight (connected to her brain damage) and so would know more than most how much it hurts her feelings if someone calls her names and teases her about her weight. But she has also been taught that it's not polite for ANYONE to talk about someone else's weight in public. We had broken the rules and were talking about it, which confused her. By making it clear to her than we were all very good friends and this meant we could be a bit more informal than usual, I think I avoided a bit of the confusion. I don't know. It's not easy for the poor mother - one child very much Asperger's, then her younger, easy child daughter gets severely injured and in a coma for months, waking up brain injured and functionally autistic. Life just isn't fair sometimes. But as her mother says, they had been told she would never wake up. Then they were told she would never talk, never walk, never feed herself. So she says ANYTHING is a bonus, and is grateful for what she has.
If the girl had been more unsettled (she probably wouldn't have said anything then anyway) then I would have put my responses to her in Basket B. But because she seemed calm and receptive, I responded in more detail and her mother was happy for me to do this (I was watching her body language).
We've been talking a lot on other threads about being good parents/bad parents etc. And this makes me realise - not only do we have to be good parents, we have to go above and beyond the level of expertise tat lets parents of PCs just slide through. The mothers of difficult child 3's classmates - they are amazing. They come form all socioeconomic backgrounds. Some work full-time, some are single parents, some stay at home and invest everything in their kids. But I watch their interactions, the careful way they manage tier kids and even watch out for warning signs in each other's kids ("Hey, Freda, your Ben's beginning to pace the floor with his head down; I think you might need to get him out of here and somewhere quiet fairly soon, he's trying to hold it together and not coping."). Sometimes it's nothing more than a nudge and a head toss to indicate the concern discreetly. And they all know that when someone says in difficult child 3's hearing that it's time to go, he grabs the car keys from me and takes himself to the car, strapping himself into his seat, putting my keys on my seat and waiting.
We are not only good parents - we are THE BEST parents because our kids teach us to be.
Marg