Do You Know Me?

Last week Anna and I overheard Melina playing a game with Daniel. She called it "Do You Know Me?" She was asking him questions like "What is my middle name?" and "What is my favorite superhero?" And he was answering.

Anna and I both realized at about the same time that what Melina was doing was absolutely brilliant. She had Daniel engaged through the use of a game format, and the same was a social game. By asking Daniel these kinds of questions, she was letting him know that there were aspects of people that he could know that was similar in nature to his other interests.

She also expanded the questions beyond herself to include the rest of the family. For example, she asked him, "What is daddy's middle name?"

It probably won't surprise anyone that Daniel did quite poorly in correctly answering these questions. (Even I would have guessed "Super Girl", as he did for the superhero question, and would have never guessed in a million years that it was "Black Widow.") But these are the kinds of questions people on the spectrum ought to be asked so they can learn the answers about the people around them. Knowing a bunch of trivia about a person might even make an autistic person want to get to know you even better.