Life with Aspergers

Living with Autism Undiagnosed by Ruth Horowitz is quite an unusual book in that it's not exactly an "autism book".  By that, I mean that the vast majority of the events in the book occur well before Ruth received a diagnosis and that thus far, I don't get the impression that Ruth as done a complete review of her life in the frame of autism. This is something that many of us on the spectrum do but it also takes many years and a lot of insight. This is quite a good thing though because the book is very much a biographical retelling of the events of Ruth's life without a lot of explanations. We are left to interpret those events and actions and there are many clues to how these relate to autism spread throughout. This makes the reader think and pulls them into the story.  Ruth's story is a very interesting one for several reasons. It's rare to hear the voices and stories of older autistic women and usually these stories are either triumphs against adversity ...

In my last post I talked about the dangers of social media. Today I want to talk briefly about a recent event and how it needed to be dealt with. Names are changed to protect people.  The aim of this post is to educate parents and fellow autistics about how this problem started, why it became such a big deal and how to deal with it if and when it does happen to you. Even if you don't read this whole post, at least skip to the end where I give some recommendations for ensuring that this doesn't happen to you. How the Problem Started I received a call about an autistic boy who had an issue on social media. Essentially the crux of the problem was other family members who followed his channel on YouTube were being confronted with videos containing bad language and nudity. This included younger children, so clearly it was a issue.  For the sake of clarity, I'm going to call this autistic young adult "Robbie". Robbie is in his early twenties, he is fairly self-sufficie...

Following some recent issues with an  adult-aged autistic , I wanted to talk a little about social media and autism. Social media can be a great thing for autistic adults. It will enable them to contact others with, in most cases, fewer risks than real-life interactions. It can give them a chance to connect with others on the spectrum and/or with similar interests, and a chance to be heard. Unfortunately, social media has a dark side too.  Social Media can help people follow their special interests Social Media is Pervasive I've heard from a lot of parents that they don't allow their kids onto social media. This works very well when they are children and when you have total control over their devices. It didn't work for my kids because they were far too tech savvy and could find a way to connect with any kind of device and could get through any firewall security we put in place. Unfortunately, children grow into adults - and social media is everywhere. If your child has a n...