Life with Aspergers

Catchy title aside, I'm not about to suggest that you need to kick all your autistic kids out of home. I want to cover one specific recent instance for us and I want to look at the reasons why we believed that it would work while others thought it might fail. Why we did it anyway and why we feel it is succeeding. Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay Kids who Stall We have a lot of friends and relatives who have kids on and off the spectrum who have "stalled". By stalling, I mean that they've become; Permanently at home Often Unemployed Caught in unproductive routines (TV, Gaming, Extra Sleeping, Overuse of Routine) Often stalling is linked to other obsessions, such as computer gaming but it also appears in non-gamers and active kids. People can get into a stall pattern simply by filling their entire lives up with chores and leaving no room for themselves to forge ahead.  There are a lot of reasons why stalling has become common in the last couple of generations in...

Parenting kids on the spectrum comes with a unique set of challenges and being a single parent puts its own spin on this. In my previous two posts, I looked at parenting young and school-aged children. In this post, I want to look at the some of the problems that are common when single parenting young autistic adults.  As usual, a quick disclaimer that I'm not a single parent, so my knowledge of this area is not first hand. It is based upon co-parenting my own autistic children and on countless observations and discussions with parents in this situation.  Disappearing without Notice Teens and young adults generally have a lot more freedom than younger children. They have pocket money, and in some cases earnings. They can be reasonably street or bush savvy and they usually have a better understanding of public transport. Many autistic adults can drive too. All of this means that they are far more likely to disappear for hours, sometimes days, without telling anyone where they...

It’s not uncommon for fathers to feel like they don’t get any respect from their teens. This is the case in many families regardless of whether the kids are on the spectrum or not. Boys will rebel against both parents but when they rebel against their fathers it's usually because he’s the authority figure with the same gender. Sometimes it’s a test of strength, sometimes it’s just because dad is easier to push around. Girls on the other hand, tend to rebel no matter what. It’s an age thing for them.  Rebellion is normal and the reasons for it are wide-ranging. In this post, I want to look at the ways in which teens on the spectrum rebel and in particular, I want to look at the father-son relationships.  What’s different about Spectrum Rebellion? Teen spectrum rebellion differs from normal teen rebellion in that quite often the teens don’t realise that they are rebelling. They’re not fighting to go out or fighting to do adult things. Teen spectrum rebellion incidents a...

In part 1 of this series, I covered how to make the most of your final school years in order to gear yourself up towards work.  In part 2 , I looked at developing your CV, and marketing yourself towards jobs. In part 3, I want to look at the interview process, whether or not you should disclose your autism diagnosis and what other options exist to help kids on the spectrum find employment. The Interview Process If you keep applying for jobs, eventually you'll get an interview. If you're applying and not getting any nibbles at all, you need to talk to some new people (people outside of your immediate family). If possible, talk to people in similar jobs to those for which you're applying. They'll help you tweak your resume to get noticed. A little preparation can take a lot of the discomfort out of an interview. Preparation If you're applying for an office job, you'll need to do a lot more preparation than you would for a trade position. Here's a ...

My eldest son now has a job and of course, I'm over the moon. No only does he have a job but it's also in his area of interest and there's a traineeship component. He's going to thrive there.  His employment is the culmination of years of planning and it all went so smoothly that I wanted to talk about it because I feel it's a model that others can follow. In part one of this two part post, I want to look at how you can use the last few years of school to get your teen prepared for a job. The Statistics Before I get into the "how to", I just wanted to take a look at the statistics for people with autism being unemployed, under-employed (in lower paying jobs than they should be) and not completing higher education. The Australian Bureau of statistics published some statistics from 2015 here and here   The results are grim and the story is similar worldwide. In fact, I'd venture to say that statistics and support in Australia are a little bett...

In my last post , I looked at some of the more "female" behaviours in memes and how they describe people on the autism spectrum in relationships.  This time I want to look at primarily male behaviours. Of course, these aren't really gender restricted behaviours and depending upon the type of relationship you're in, they could be either male or female. This is a long post, so I'm jumping in without further preamble. If you want more background, refer to the  previous post . White Male Privilege I could be mistaken but it feels like feminism is stronger online today than it ever was in the past. This is not a bad thing as women's rights still have a long way to go. Unfortunately not all men are the enemy but feminism can make men feel as if comments are directed specifically at them. This is especially true if you're a white male. It triggers a lot of bad feelings but the worst thing you can possibly do is to try to put your two cents in and d...

The internet is full of amusing sites like Ebaum's World  and Cheezeburger where memes rule and people surface almost any content on the internet in the most disturbing ways.  Just as the culture of the internet flows through the comments on more serious sites like Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, it flows through the meme sites too -- only with far less censorship. Don't get me wrong, many of these posts are terribly funny but most are not politically correct and some seem to showcase the darker side of human nature.  One thing that I have noticed is that there are a lot of "cringeworthy" posts which show some very disturbing trends towards dating -- on both the male and female sides. Why is this an autism problem? While the behaviours I want to discuss are not in any way restricted to autism, some of the memes and comments seem to echo sentiments I've heard all too frequently in the autism and Asperger's communities. People with autism o...