Life with Aspergers

With Lockdown still in effect in lots of places, I wanted to share some of the experiences I had with my son and his inability to self-manage when it came to working on school projects by himself.  My youngest has a lot of potential but also tends to be lazy or easily distracted by video games. Lockdown seems to have "changed the game" and he feels like he can get away without putting the effort in.  There's no easy answer but this is our journey. Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay The Problems Before we get into solutions, I wanted to look at some of the problems we were experiencing.  First of all, my son had been a reasonable student before lockdown. Not brilliant but middling. He was putting in a reasonable amount of effort and was getting work done more or less on time. The only thing that was a bit of a problem for him was assignments that he had to do out of class.  That should have been a warning sign for us. When lockdown started, the kids were off school be...

It's becoming an increasingly common story, a capable 20+ year old with Asperger's syndrome, living at home with their parents, unwilling to leave the comfort of the house - or their gaming console. There's a lot to discuss in this scenario but I want to break it down into three posts. Reasons for the Behaviour Preventing the Behaviour  Changing the Behaviour In this post, I want to touch on whether or not there are valid excuses for this behaviour. Excuse or No Excuse? For the most part, there aren't too many good excuses for this kind of behaviour in a young adult with reasonable communication skills.  Asperger's syndrome itself is not an excuse. That said, there are actually, some good excuses for this kind of behaviour; Lower Functioning Individuals;  I specifically mentioned “capable” earlier as a means of “filtering out” individuals who have difficulties which are significant enough to make them a danger to themselves or others, or who...

** Parents please note - there are some concepts in this post which may offend or may be unsuitable for children ** Censorship Long time readers of this blog will know that I'm firmly opposed to a lot of today's censorship even when it applies to children. In some cases however it's in the child's best interests.  If a child has special needs or issues which impact their understanding of concepts, then media censorship takes on additional meaning. The bad effects of media on children can range from social gaffes all the way up to life-threatening behaviour. Of course, like everything, media has a flip-side too and it can have many beneficial effects particularly for children with different learning styles. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash How do you figure out what to block and what to allow through? How do you draw the line between providing a safe versus a sheltered environment? Can the media really be of benefit to your child's education or is it just a baby...