Life with Aspergers

Some of the biggest issues that children with aspergers and other forms of autism tend to face are social ones and in the early years these tend to be most obvious during play. Children with aspergers often have no idea how to join in games or how to play co-operatively. While other children will play with toy boats in water, children on the spectrum may simply sprinkle water on their hands and enjoy the feeling. Parent concerns are often pushed aside with the phrase, "it's a sensory issue". Then there's parallel play, where the child will sit with a group of other children and play similar games but not make eye contact and not engage in discussions or interplay. Again, parents are often told to expect the worst. Their child won't socialise, won't interact and isn't friendly. Finally, there's lone-play, where a child will go into a corner and will line up cars, organise toy kitchen utensils or simply cuddle up to some soft toys. In this case, parents...

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...

Continuing the discussion about how Asperger's traits can directly cause depression, I'll be working through the list from the end of my last post. Very good long Term Memory How can a having a good long-term memory be responsible for depression? The key to understanding this is to approach it from the point of view of an NT. Most of the time, it seems to me that detailed memories just aren't available for NTs without external assistance. By external assistance, I mean the use of video cameras or photo albums. In the movie One Hour Photo , Robin William's character says, while looking at birthday snaps, " Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget ". I think that this is particularly relevant to the issue because it means that NT's tend only to remember the good things in any detail. The Aspie however, with their long term memory often has perfect recall of past events and conversations. They will spend hours analyzing a conversation that ...

Patterns are the Asperger's child's dream come true. We see patterns everywhere, even when others don't notice them. Aspie behaviour is, to some extent, governed by patterns. Parents of aspies often think that their children don't show Asperger's tendencies towards patterns. Sometimes, you just need to know where to look... Example 1. My 7 year-old son seems to wander all over the place when we're walking in the shops. My non-aspie (NT) wife just thought he was mucking around but when I went with him, I immediately became aware that he was walking in patterns on the tiles. Since the coloured pattern zig-zagged across the shopping center and he was following it, he seemed to be all over the place. It should be noted that this is very similar to the notion that Asperger's children cannot "step on a crack". Of course, that reasoning is quite flawed and asperger's people can quite comfortably step on cracks depending upon the pattern that the...