Replies to 'Raising a Special Needs Child'

Another piece of information that might be useful is that 99.9% of children suffering from Asperger's have social skills problems, or what language/speech therapists call "pragmatics". If you believe your son may suffer from Asperger's, have him tested by a speech/language therapist in PRAGMATICS. This test is more in depth than the average language/speech test given to children and, unfortunately, many AS children can pass the lesser speech tests so they slip through the cracks. It is usually the pragmatics where the AS is "proven" or tossed as a possible diagnosis. Social skills deficits are the most common symptom of all AS children from the research studies I have seen. The DSM-IV R(I think) has a list of criterion that children must meet to be "Aspie's". Be careful of shrinks who are specialists in one area of the learning disabilities (such as ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenic, etc.) because that is what your child will have. If you can locate a university close to your son that has a psychology department that does developmental disabilities' studies, that might be a good place to start. 

One thing to remember is that not all AS children suffer the same symptoms/behaviors and severity is also a question. My daughter does not have the severity of other children with AS. I will tell you about a few of my daughter's but your son may or may not have other symptoms that are AS that my daughter does not have.  

Other symptoms you might inquire about are motor tics. For instance, my daughter will put the thumb and middle finger of her left hand together and move her left hand back and forth spasmodically and become visually fixated on that hand while jerking her body spasmodically. Another motor tic is when she rises on her tip-toes, paces back and forth in a straight line, rocking her body spasmodically and, again, becomes visually fixated on it. 

My daughter is very concrete in her thinking. She often does not understand idioms. A funnier one is the day I was speaking to another adult about doing something she feared and I said "Sometimes you have to kick the dog that bit you." (This is a fairly common idiom in Arkansas, maybe the south.) My daughter was absolutely horrified and asked me why I would kick a dog. I then had to explain to her what I meant. Sarcasm is often lost on her when it is used by other people. Oddly enough, she gets most of my sarcasm because I tend to be a very sarcastic person. 

She has "meltdowns" or "tantrums" if she encounters a situation that overstimulates one or more of her senses. She is hypersensitive with smell. She cannot play video games or play for extended periods of time physically because she becomes overstimulated and loses control of herself. She has accidentally hurt other children before (and me) when this happens. But to tell her to sit down for a while WILL bring on a meltdown. When she is in the middle of a meltdown, I have learned to not try to reason with her because it only makes it worse. She has already been sensorily overstimulated and more stimulation makes it worse. I just get her and leave wherever we are, no matter what. She cannot calm down until I remove her from the situation. 

My daughter talks constantly. And I mean literally. She is very detail-oriented, often giving me details that are completely irrelevant to the main point of the story, but if I interrupt her, she often has to start over. She frequently speaks in a monotone voice and still cannot grasp what a whisper is. I am a big picture person and details such as what color clothing a person was wearing or hairstyle often escapes me and I begin tuning out the chatter. But, most of the time amidst all of that detail, my daughter is actually getting around to telling me something I need to know. So, I have had to retrain myself to NOT tune her out when she launches into one of the "detail" stories. For instance, one day she began a commentary on her day at school by telling me about a little boy who got in trouble on the playground, what he had done, what he was wearing, where the duty teacher made him sit, etc. and then finally got around to the fact that two teens from the high school had been taking my daughter's entire class of the playground at lunch and NONE of the duty teachers knew until that day...four weeks AFTER they first began leaving the playground with the teens. 

She has no clue about personal space and stands too close to people when she talks to them. Well, actually she talks AT them. My daughter cannot read non-verbal clues and will talk about her latest fascination to anyone who will listen without allowing the other person to get a word in edgewise (this is called perseverative). 

I have talked to mothers of sons with AS and sometimes children with AS will react violently, they will climb about, shout, have angry outbursts in school and other situations and any attempt to calm them results in the same reaction as my daughter...it only escalates the situation. 

Hope this helps some. Don't forget the OASIS website for Asperger's. Angie can probably get you the names and phone numbers of people to call for help. 

SD 

You are wonderful!!!  :)  Thank you so much!  I found out that he HAS been diagnosed with Aspergers, along with all the other stuff.   

I will definately check out the OASIS site and see what I can get from there.   

I'm sure I will have more questions and when I do I will be sure to post them! 

Kara