Life with Aspergers

Lately, my eldest son (8) has been showing signs of depression. It's nothing major yet but the problem seems to be that he now realises that he's behind the rest of the class in maths and english. In fact, he's starting to realise that the entire special education group is a bit behind. There's no doubt about it, he is behind. He has ADHD (and possibly undiagnosed Learning Issues too). It's a lot for him to cope with but we're working on it with a weekend tutor for schoolwork and cub scouts for social. A Cubs Flashback A little over a week ago at scouts we were playing a game where a designated cub is "leader" and the other cubs have to follow their actions. A cub who was outside the room during selection gets three chances to identify the leader. We had run the game several times before my son was given a chance to be the "secret leader". Up until this point, the game had been quite dull with all of the leaders doing the same actions; clappi...

I just thought I'd draw your attention to this article which appeared on the aspie teacher blog a couple of days ago. How to Prevent the Aspie Ramble http://www.aspieteacher.com/2009/08/how-to-prevent-the-aspie-ramble/ I can really relate to this. It's awful how great conversations turn sour quickly because you discover (in hindsight), that you've been hogging the conversation. The article is really interesting and has some great tips. The only thing I have against it is ... well, why should we prevent the aspie ramble? Why do we have to shut up and go away? Nobody ever wants to play Trivial Pursuit with me - not since I was a teenager, because although I suck at the sports questions, I know enough about everything else to win every time. Even worse, I've got a set of Star Wars questions for Trivial Pursuit which have never been used. Why... because people don't like to talk/play with an expert. So my question is this. If someone comes up out of the blue and o...

Introduction My son has been a little upset of late because he's realised that he's behind the rest of the class in some areas. I'll cover how I "dealt" with his feelings in another post but for now, I thought it was time for a look at the myth of Aspie Genius. It's a sad fact of life that not all aspies are geniuses and that the "little professor" tag doesn't apply to everyone. In fact, it's a distinguishing feature of the aspergers diagnostic criteria that the IQ of an aspie is no different to that of a neurotypical. This doesn't mean that aspies do as well in IQ tests as NTs because often the phraseology in the questions leads to interpretive difficulties (and time delays). It simply means that the aspie ability to "solve" is similar in scope, range and variance to NTs. What can Adversely Impact Aspie Performance? If we assume that the IQ is "normal", then it follows that some aspies will be more intelligent than ...

I've been thinking long and hard about my own change resistance. After all, I've never really considered myself to be change resistant. I'm usually happy to test out new versions of software I'll ocasionally find new music that I like I'll generally take to a new car quite happily What could I be change resistant about? The funny thing is, that the more I try to find things that I'm not resistant to, the more I discover that I am actually very resistant. It turns out that change resistance isn't some giant misstep at all but rather a series of smaller resistances which build up over time. The Big Examples It's easy to find big examples of change resistance in my life because they're the things I feel strongly about. What is interesting though is that they're not all "sensible" things. In fact, often my change resistance overrules the sensible alternatives. House Change Recently we "moved house", actually since we did a knoc...

As usual, this follows on from Part One , Two and Three . If you haven't read these, you really should go back and read them before moving forward - otherwise it might not make sense. At the end of the last marriage encounters session, we'd listened to a couple who talked about their recent past experiences bringing up small children. We were then given a bunch of questions to choose from which got us to talk to our partners about our feeling with negative emotions. It was time for the next couple to take the stage. Middle Age The next couple was a bit older, though not by much. They talked about how whenever the conditions around them change, their marriage must change too in order to survive. Their discussions picked up when, after years of supporting their children, the kids were beginning to need them less often. For years, they had lived almost separate weekends organised around their children's sporting events. Now finally, those sports were beginning to finish...