Asperger’s Syndrome Meets the Holidays

What a great time to help work out some of the intracacies of your asperger child’s social eccentricity; or, if you’re like me, what a great time to see them at their worst as to set a barometer for my son.

This Thanksgiving, my family and I have traveled to visit my mom’s half of our family in rural Georgia - such a twilight zone foreign land from the hustle and bustle of Denver where we live. Just this morning I stood on the deck of my mom’s house and watched a 12-point buck root through a pile of corn feed that they put out for them. Anyway, that’s off the subject.

Your asperger child needs routine, and by that token they inherently fear change. Imagine (or recall) the horrors for your AS child when they are in a completely new place, meeting people whom they don’t know and, worse yet, having to play with other kids whose personalities and playstyles they haven’t had a chance to analyze yet. This is us this season, and we are managing just fine. Here’s a little bit of how we prepared.

What most AS parents will learn is that pictures are truly your best friend. We have pictures of all our family members, so we prepped our son for a visit with them by showing him their pictures and talking to him about them; we make sure to tell him their name and how old they are (these are his little quirks) and we try to tell him something about the person in the picture that he can recall when he sees them in person, just so that he won’t be terrified when they reach out to hug him or something. People in rural Georgia hug a lot; it’s just what they do, more than they shake hands.

Another thing that we do is that we try to bring one or two things from home so that he can stay in his element when times are really bad. The key to this technique is that you can’t tell the kid you’re bringing object A, else they’ll of course be asking for it and their ability to reach out is limited because they’re pigeonholing their energy into object A, which they know very well. Only when it’s absolutely the only way to provide consolation or to right the ship is when the child needs to be given access to object A. It may be hard to hide from them if it’s large, so keep it small. This works for us in a pinch and really helps him to calm down and/or get himself in check to continue participating in the family activities.

What we really want to avoid is scolding or excessive discipline - remember that the child doesn’t believe that s/he is doing anything wrong when their behavior starts to do downhill or when their eccentricities begin to show. If you’re going to give them some discipline, your child appreciates it being in a very calm, firm tone of voice and also don’t do it at the top of your lungs. I’ve learned that there’s an inverse proportion between your voice volume and the actual effectiveness it has on the child.

What’s better than having your child experience their extended family and soak up all those interactions with people who care about him?

Aspie children are inflexible; parents must be hyperflexible

One thing which many Asperger parents usually learn the hard way is that AS children are particularly inflexible and are deeply rooted in routine. Brenda Boyd describes this in her book Parenting a Child with Asperger Syndrome as a consideration of trains versus cars; whereby an aspie’s mind is much like a train on its rails compared to the average mind that is much more like a car driving on a road.

This is really a great analogy, I’ll provide a little bit of context. The average (we’ll say “synaptically normal”) child has a mind much like a car going from point A to B. There are many possible routes, and various speeds which can be traveled along the way; often a car’s driver needn’t know where their precise destination is, because they can usually navigate to that point using several previously known points of reference and then using some discovery to get to point B.

AS children are much more like little mental trains. They require a specific route, a specific timetable, and often a specific set of rules for the journey from A to B. Unpredictability is not something that many aspies appreciate - it is widely suggested that the firm, repeatable structure and routine which AS children form in their mind is what makes them secure/comfortable. Interjecting the hand of change for the sake of change is often, as parents have found, a catastrophic event (queue the black hole sounds).

AS children often appear pig-headed, stubborn, down-right rude when they are faced with change. Let’s be honest; they don’t want to step outside their sandbox. Parents in this situation not only need to understand that their aspie child is routine-based, but they need to proactively predict when their child will require a routine.

What I’ve found of my own accord that works well with my 4-year old is to pigeonhole his entire day into a set of routines (I’m an IT engineer, so for me this is pretty easy). Not only do we take specific tasks and break them into checkpoints for him, but we take his entire day and break it into small pieces. When we want to introduce something new to him, usually it requires an obscene amount of enthusiasm on our part to get him started and an equally obscene amount of praise required to keep him focused and to allow him to believe he’s doing something correct.

So, parents, never forget that your aspie doesn’t believe that he/she is doing something wrong by presenting as stubborn towards change. They are merely trying to protect themselves — and that is not to say that AS children don’t find protection in their parents (quite the opposite is true), but merely that they want you to help them feel secure by allowing them to do things in their sturdy, structured way.

The Joys of Sign Language

I hope that the title is clear; I’ve found something positive to teach my aspie son.  Sign Language is a big victory for my aspie - while he is completely capable of well-structured speech (not all Aspies are) in multiple languages, I’m finding that teaching him ASL has been a great way for him to not only improve his overall communication skills, but also to help him grow his vocabulary and to allow him to convey ideas when he either doesn’t know what to say or when he goes into a non-verbal tantrum over something infinitely minor.

Is anyone else with an aspie child doing this?  I have been using the Signing Time video series by Rachel de Azevedo Coleman checked out from the local library in series.  It’s been amazing to watch him learn so quickly.  Like many aspies, he is particularly intelligent yet quite out of focus with his surroundings most of the time; however, he is able to tune in for these videos non-stop and he really gets a lot of enjoyment out of this series in particular.

Parents don’t neglect to watch the videos with your aspie long enough to learn the signs yourself.  You’ll be surprised at how easy ASL is to learn, and how effective it can be for helping you reach your sometimes unreachable child(ren).

Battling with Preschool

My Aspie son is 4, and is in his second year of preschool.  We enrolled him in a preschool that is actually part of the elementary school in our district so that he could get used to going to an actual school instead of some other place that, once he gets to be kindergarten age, he wouldn’t go anymore.  We were thinking at that time (which was before we learned about his condition) that it’d be a good thing to do, and so far that has been the case.  Now that we’ve learned that our older son is an Aspie, we are glad that he is in the exact same preschool classroom as last year with a lot of the same kids as last year, and that next school year he will be going to the same school but in a (gasp!) different room.

Last year, he was seemingly shy and a little bit detached from the rest of the class.  Everyone thought that was just him exhibiting some shyness and some discomfort with being away from home and from his mother because it was truly his first time outside the care of a parent.  This year, after spending a summer of growth in Japan, he is incessantly talkative and is actually communicating with the other students, albeit he often tries to talk to them in Japanese and they have no idea what he’s saying.

The way Asperger’s manifests itself in our son is that he is generally unaware of situational context.  Now, a lot of 4-year olds are the same way to a degree, but with him it is a constant struggle for him to do such simple things as lower his voice, stop talking, stop playing when it’s time to be serious, or even listen when he’s being told what to do.  It’s one of those things that is starting to wear thin at the preschool, where he is starting to develop a less-than-ideal pattern of behavior in class.  So, we’ve gone from this bashful, quiet yet slightly inattentive 3-year old child to this rambunctious, randomly loud, excitable 4-year old with a penchant for blowing raspberries at the other kids when he either doesn’t know what to say (in English) or doesn’t like what they’re doing.  And if someone tells him to stop what he’s doing too many times or in a too-strong voice, you might as well have just fried the side of his head on a griddle.

Here in the Denver area, there’s outreach available.  We’re fortunate to have a school district (Littleton Public Schools) that provides developmental screenings for *free* and then they provide guidance, coaching and referrals to appropriate counseling and developmental psychology folks as well as classes for the parents to learn how to cope/handle/deal/manage/remain sane with an especially young Aspie.

So, Aspie parents, have you had the school battles?  And what are you finding is effective to curb behavior which you want to reserve for at home or completely eliminate?  You’re welcome to submit via the contact form below and I will post your submission once I moderate it.

 

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Are YOU an Asperger Parent?

In my first post for this blog, I am out to capture experiences from parents of children with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) from all over the world. If you are one such parent, be proud and say so in a comment for this post. Feel free to share an experience, advice or anything else you wish to share about being an Asperger parent, but please do so in a positive way.