Why Does My Kid Have Obsessive Conversations? Practical Tips for Parents and Teachers
I pulled into the grocery store parking lot an hour after school let out, and my 6-year-old son Jax had already been talking about the same thing for 42 minutes straight: why the new slide on the first grade playground is slower than the old one it replaced. I’d nodded through his explanation of how the old one curved more, answered two questions about what friction means (that he’d asked me twice already), and snuck three quick text responses to my boss while he paused to breathe. By the time I turned off the car, I could feel my jaw tightening. When he started in on the time the old slide let him go fast enough to make his tummy flip, I cut him off: “Jax, we’ve talked about this enough. Can we be quiet for five minutes?” He shut down immediately, staring at his shoes, and I spent the whole grocery trip feeling like the worst mom alive.
A week earlier, my best friend Lila, who’s a third grade teacher, had texted me panicking about her own 8-year-old. He’d spent the entire family dinner talking about garbage truck route schedules, and had cornered a cashier at Target the night before to ask her what time her local trash got picked up. “Is this normal?” she’d asked. “Am I supposed to stop him? Is this OCD?”
I brought it up at Jax’s parent-teacher conference a few days later. Ms. Lopez, Jax’s first grade teacher, leaned back and laughed, not in a mean way, like she got this question every other week. She said she sees this at least once a year in her class, usually between ages 5 and 10. It’s not a sign of anything wrong most of the time. Kids’ brains are just really good at latching onto something that feels big or confusing or important to them, and they work through it by talking about it over and over. It’s not that they’re being rude or not listening when you’re tired of it, it’s that their brain hasn’t finished processing the thing yet.
She told me the trick she uses in her classroom for kids who get stuck on one topic, and I started using it at home the next day. It’s called “park and bookmark,” and it’s way simpler than it sounds. If Jax starts looping on the slide when I’m in the middle of a work call or making dinner, I don’t snap at him to stop, and I don’t half-listen while I do something else. I just say: “I hear how important this slide question is to you. I’m going to park this conversation right here, and we can talk about it for 10 full minutes after dinner, okay? I’ll even write it down so I don’t forget.” Then I actually write it on a sticky note and stick it to the fridge.
The first time I did it, I thought he’d put up a fight, but he just nodded and went back to coloring. After dinner, I sat down, gave him my full attention, and let him talk through every point he wanted to make. When 10 minutes were up, I said “Okay, our slide time is done for today, want to go play Uno?” He didn’t even argue. That was way better than the old routine of me getting more and more annoyed until I snapped, which just left both of us upset.
Ms. Lopez also suggested giving kids a separate place to put all those extra thoughts, so they don’t have to unload all of them on you. I got Jax a $1 spiral notebook from the dollar store, and we called it his Slide Notebook. He can draw the old slide, draw the new one, tell me what to write down for his questions about friction, even paste a blurry photo of the old slide I pulled from the school PTA’s Facebook page. Now when he starts looping, I can just say “why don’t you go add that to your notebook first” and half the time that’s enough to get it out of his system without talking my ear off. Lila tried this with her garbage truck-obsessed kid: she got him a big notebook to write down route times, and taped a map of their town to his wall where he can mark the routes. She said it cut the constant dinner conversations by 75%.
I used to get so embarrassed when Jax would corner some poor relative or stranger at a party to talk about the slide. I’d yank him away, apologize a million times, and he’d get upset that I cut him off. Now I do a simple routine that works for everyone: I walk over, smile, say “Jax has been so curious about playground slides lately, he’s been telling everyone all about the new one at school” then turn to Jax and say “let’s go get you a lemonade, and we can tell Aunt Mabel the rest after dinner, okay?” It’s polite to the other person, it doesn’t shame Jax for being excited about his thing, and it gets us out of the situation without a fight.
Of course I panicked and googled it early on, and the first result that popped up was OCD, which had me worried for a full afternoon. Ms. Lopez said it’s easy to mix this up. The big difference for most kids is that this kind of constant talking doesn’t get in the way of the other things they love. Jax still plays soccer, still draws dinosaurs, still rambles about his friends at school. The slide is just the big thing his brain is chewing on right now. If it started interfering with sleep, or stopped him from doing things he used to enjoy, that’s when you talk to a doctor. But most of the time, it’s just a phase.
It’s been two months since the new slide went in, and Jax still brings it up once a day, usually. Some days I’m patient, some days I forget the whole sticky note trick and snap. Last week he brought it up in the checkout line at Target, and the cashier actually got into it with him, talking about how she prefers slow slides for her own grandkid. Jax was so pleased he didn’t bring it up again for the rest of the day. I still don’t love the constant looping, and I’m already waiting for the next big thing his brain will latch onto. But the sticky notes and the notebook work more often than not, and I stopped feeling like I’m doing something wrong when my kid wants to talk about the same thing over and over. It’s just how he works through stuff, right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Does My Kid Have Obsessive Conversations