aspergers (life related)
badder_than_evil
951 Posts
anybody here know anyone who has this or someone who`s child has this??
badder_than_evil
951 Posts
Comments
Read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime for a great story told from an Aspergers POV
he`s very clever with words and reading(he`s barely 6),but struggles with maths as he sees everything in black and white and doesn`t understand anything that can have multiple possibilities.
i`ve just learnt this today and of course i`m worried(he has an obsessive nature).
he doesn`t understand spontanaeity,and loathes when something is not what he expected or out of routine.
it`s scary.
I hope everything works out for your family. You just have to know that things will be okay.
My heart goes out to you.
I second this. Everyone with Asperger's or High-functioning Autism is different though so keep that in mind. The perspective of the main character is well written.
I'm a Speech-Language Pathologist who has worked with lots and lots of kids and older individuals with Asperger's and Autism. Hearing someone lay a diagnosis on a loved one can knock you on your feet. But remember, you know your child. Learn as much as you can about the label, but don't let it define him. Hit me on the PM's if you have any questions.
My six-year-old nephew has Aspergers. He also needs a strict routine and tends to see things in black and white terms. For example, the other day I tried to teach him to play dominoes. It was different from the way he played with his dad, so he yelled at me for doing it wrong. When I explained that everyone I knew played the way I did he screamed, "Everyone you know does it wrong! I will never play it that way! I will never play it with you!"
He was a very early reader (recognizing letters at two, reading simple words upside down and backwards at three). He's fairly advanced at math too. He is very adept at analyzing mechanical objects and loves to experiment with them. He doesn't have any discernable empathy yet, but he occasionally shows affection.
His biggest obstacle is impulse control. He reacts to anything that frustrates him with violence. This has gotten him kicked out of four daycares/schools in the last year alone. Luckily, he is now in a school with teachers trained to deal with students like him. They see beyond his problems to recognize that he's a very sweet, bright, optimistic boy.
You might get a kick out of this:
My nephew has always interpreted language literally, so when he was about three he assumed that "you" referred to himself and "I" referred to whomever was speaking to him. It made for a lot of funny dialogue, like, "You don't want I to be here! You want I to go away!" Or, "You want I to go get you your blanket!"
Yeah, lots of kids with Asperger's have difficulty with pronouns (understanding what/who they stand for b/c of the difficulty with taking someone else's perspective). Many times they simply substitute the pronoun's with the actual names because it can be confusing for them. I've never had a student/child actually have the You's and I's completely reversed and then use them appropriately, well almost. That is interesting.
it`s actually reassuring to know that other people actually know what aspergers is and have stories to tell(i had no idea until i had it dropped on me today).
i`ve ordered the book on the advice given..thanks again.
My heart goes out to you and I know it's scary, but a diagnosis is the first step in getting the services you need for your son. Holler at me whenever you want and I'll be there. I'm teaching Special Ed Mild/Moderate disabilities right now and have studied the Autism Spectrum disorder at length, I would love to hear about your son. peace!
oops, I meant one of my professor's SONS has Aspergers
thank you.
i have questions i`d probably like answered,i`ll definitely take you up on the kind offer.
When my nephew was first diagnosed, he could tell you all you want to know about sharks, down to the species and genus of even the most obscure shark (ever heard of the cookie cutter shark? - it exists). And sometimes, if you asked him a question that he didn't know the answer to, the answer would be "sharks."
He also had his pronouns inverted when he was first learning to talk. "You want me to do it" would mean "I want you to do it." It was very endearing, but it took some teaching to undo.
My sister went all the way in terms of immersing herself in the latest learnings about Asperger's, and tried to get him involved with the best kinds of therapies she could. He was in occupational therapy for a few years from 4 to 8 (he's 10 now). She also changed his diet - eliminated gluten and dairy entirely. No doctor will tell her (or you, I'm sure) that eating wheat has anything to do with neurological development - the science doesn't support it, they say. In my nephew's case, it is one of many factors that may have helped him. She has since reintroduced dairy without a lot of complications, but he still eats no gluten.
Asperger's is a neurological dysfunction, but it really manifests as a social disorder for kids. The "little professors" relate very well to adults, who find their erudition utterly charming, but other kids just think it's weird. My nephew struggles more with his peers than he does with adults.
But he's come a very long way, and is a hell of a bright kid. I love him to pieces.
Read up on the disorder. Join online parent support groups (besides soulstrut). Try things that others recommend trying. And most of all, love the snot out of him. He'll be ok.
Stay strong,
JRoot
Props to the strutters here who had something supportive to say, and best of luck to badder_than_evil in helping your kid overcome any obstacles he faces. It's good to see so many caring parents up here.
I LOVED THIS BOOOK!
the author's decision to tell the story from the boy's pov is really bold and incredible. keep in mind that it's fiction of course, but an interesting story. i think the author had experience working with autistic youth...something like that.
=
it's really amazing to see how many ppl here are not only well-informed about asperger's, but are working in the special ed field. we need more of you. my boyfriend works with autistic youth and the last boy he had was a non-verbal 17 year old, it was unbelievable for me to see how challenging not only his work was, but the boy's parents work too. i would join them sometimes when they would do outings to help with his socialization skills and even something like going out to dinner, something that i can do and not even think about, was a major, major task. the amount of love and patience i saw in his parents and my bf was really eye-opening for me and gave me another opportunity to appreciate the people that devote their work to this.
Good advice. This could have been written about my 11 year old nephew, right down to the gluten and sharks, although he is although pretty keen on superhero comic characters too. Thing is Aspergers has always been around, they're just getting better at diagnosing it. Knowing the behavioural patterns, I can now think back to a couple of kids I went to school with who were Aspergers for sure but never got the benefit of a diagnosis at the time.
What has been proven though is that Autism is on the rise, a hundred fold and cases seem to concentrate in parts of country like Silicon Valley (there is a theory that many of the computer programmers and engineers have mild undiagnosed forms of autism, makes sense if you think of who gets into that field, and they are getting together and having children with autism)
For those that do not know, Aspergers is the mildest form of autism and it often appears in bright kids who exhibit social and behavior deficits.
There is a saying in Special Ed that goes, "If you've met one kid with autism, you've met one kid with autism" and it's so true. It is a spectrum disorder and each case is so unique.
iirc terrified parents inadvertantly caused a whooping cough outbreak in upstate new year last year because they wouldn't get their kids immunized.
my new-york-times-science-section-reading nerd self has seen more substance to the gluten/dairy argument...
Touching post people. Especially nice to see this type of support given to someone w/ under 200 posts.
Just wanted to jump in and propose something to you, phono. I don't know a lot about Asperger's specifically, but the way it's being described in this thread makes it sound like the problem these kids are having with pronouns doesn't have to do with an inability to take another person's perspective (though I'm sure they have difficulty w/ that too) but to understand a fundamental quality of language, namely its arbitrariness. I say this b/c mastering the the 'You' and 'I' distinction doesn't require a switch in perspective (this would in fact be cognitively inefficient), but it does require mastering the idea that linguistic symbols (words) are not inherently linked to their referents. Children make use of this ability to divorce words from their meaning in deciphering pronouns, which have definitions that change with the speaker. I would not be surprised if a child w/ Asperger's who's demonstrated an inability to see the world as anything other than black and white would find the concept of pronouns completely unintuitive. In any case, just something to think about.
I think you're correct here. In fact many children with significant language impairments (not Dx with Autism/Aspergers) often have difficulty employing pronouns effectively because they are not concrete labels. Most likely, in children with Autism, it's a combination of this abstractness and difficulty with perspective-taking that make it such a prominent impairment. Here's an abstract from a prounoun/perspective study in children (CA = Chronological Age, MA = Mental Age):
I, you, me, and autism: an experimental study.
Lee A, Hobson RP, Chiat S.
Developmental Psychopathology Unit, Tavistock Clinic, London, England.
The nature of autistic individuals' abnormalities in the use of personal pronouns has been a topic of considerable speculation but little systematic investigation. We tested groups of CA- and verbal MA-matched autistic and nonautistic mentally retarded children and young adults on a series of tasks that involved the comprehension and use of the personal pronouns "I," "you," and "me." All subjects were able to comprehend these pronouns within the test situations, and there were few instances of pronoun reversal. However, autistic subjects were significantly less likely to employ the pronoun "me" in a visual perspective-taking task (when instead they tended to say: 'I can see the . . .'), and lower ability subjects were more likely to use their own proper names rather than personal pronouns in certain photograph-naming tasks. There were also circumstances in which autistic subjects were less likely than controls to employ the pronoun "you" to refer to the experimenter. A high proportion of these autistic subjects were reported to have current difficulties with personal pronouns in their everyday life, and we discuss some alternative interpretations of the results.
PMID: 8040159 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Sometime it's ok to not be RR.
My advice to you is to invest time and research the subject[/b]. go to your library...look up papers in scientific journals (use pubmed.org and search for asperger's) and of course, interact with your kid as much as possible. A lot of current theories regarding autism see it as developmental atrophy of the emotional centers of the brain (if you're really interested pm me and i'll send you some more concrete info) and environmental enrichment and emotional stimulation can only help.
the problem with autism spectrum and asperger's is that we really don't know what causes it, or even what's going on neurobiologically...it's a very emotional/cognitive disorder and there's no adequate animal model (...or even any genes specifically linked to the disorder, so even creating a transgenic mouse with said genes is not possible).
Good luck.
I just wanted to thank everyone who replied or sent me a pm to offer support over this..i am completely overwhelmed by the response here from a board i frequent but probably haven`t offered much in the past(i`m a vinyl fiend who has a family and can`t afford to dig like i used to).
To the 3 people who pm`ed me (d*y,n*t*sfr*mth*p**t and m**p) thank you too..take a bow - you are 'real headz'.
This really helped what was a shocking day for me yesterday and made me feel a lot better about tomorrow.
i`m gonna stop before this turns into some gwyneth paltrow type speech...BIG UP SOULSTRUT.