“His emotions run away with him,” I concur. “But we can help put him in the driver’s seat”

Mother: I just can’t take it anymore!

Sister: Shloimy is such a baby. He drives me crazy.

Shloimy: I don’t care what anyone else thinks!

Miriam Morgenstern and her son Shloimy, seven-years-old and the youngest, settle in across my desk.

“Shloimy,” Miriam says sweetly. “Run across the hall and play with the toys for a few minutes, okay?”

Shloimy frowns.

“There are some really cool cars there!” Miriam tries.

That gets him moving. Miriam practically sags with relief.

“So tell me what brings you here,” I say.

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if you can help me. But I definitely need help.” She falls silent.

“Just start anywhere. Any specific incident that made you schedule this consult?”

“I took Shloimy with me to the grocery store last week,” remembers Miriam. “He asked for a treat — a race car that squirts some kind of sour liquid. I didn’t want to get it for him, so I offered him another option, but he was totally stuck.

“I warned him that if he didn’t pick something else he’d get nothing, but he wouldn’t back down. He had a tantrum and lay on the floor, kicking and screaming. It was mortifying” [Shloimy has difficulty processing his emotions. He couldn’t overcome his disappointment or express himself in an age-appropriate way]. She’s getting more and more worked up as she speaks. “He’s my seventh kid, and I’ve lived through public tantrums before. But Shloimy’s much too old for that.”

“That was probably so frustrating and embarrassing.”

Miriam’s face changes. ”Whatever,” she says guardedly [Miriam is by nature more emotionally reserved. She doesn’t model emotional expression]. “It’s probably because he’s the youngest. The point is that incidents like this keep happening. Is this the kind of thing you can help with?”

Shloimy returns holding a toy convertible. I show him a picture of an ice cream parlor. A mother, a child, and an employee are staring down at the floor, where the child has just dropped his ice cream sundae.

“What do you see here?” I ask Shloimy.

He points to the kid. “He dropped it.”

“Excellent!” I point to the mother. “What is she thinking?”

Shloimy says, “She’s thinking, ‘I want to run out of the store’ ” [A child might think this way, but not an adult].

I give Shloimy a stack of cards showing faces with exaggerated expressions. “Can you sort these? Good feelings go in one pile, bad feelings go in the other.” Shloimy sorts them randomly, mixing Angry with Happy, and Surprised with Scared and Excited [Shloimy cannot read and interpret emotions].

Lastly, I give him another set of six cards. These show the same face in progressively more animated expressions, from a blank look all the way to happy and excited. “Can you put these in order, from least happy to most happy?”

Shloimy hands back the cards in random sequence [Shloimy cannot read and interpret emotions].

Miriam whispers to me, “He overreacts to facial expressions. If I act surprised, he thinks I’m angry and falls apart, even if I try explaining that I was just a little startled.”

I watch Shloimy zoom the convertible back to the toys. “His emotions run away with him,” I concur. “But we can help put him in the driver’s seat.”

Originally featured in Family First, Issue 665. D. Himy is a speech-language pathologist in private practice and creator of the Link-It and STARPower curriculums. The fictional characters in this column represent typical client profiles.