Life with Aspergers

How an Individual Education Plan (IEP) is Structured An IEP is designed to be a "flow-on" document where the issues are identified up-front and the remainder of the document covers methods of dealing with them. The IEP will start with a bit of information about the child, the diagnosis, who is present at the meeting, etc. I'm not going to cover this bit as it's simply box-ticking on the form. The first part of the IEP will attempt to ask and answer two questions; 1. What are the child's strengths and interests? 2. What are the perceived weaknesses of the child? It is important to get these questions properly answered as the entire remainder of the IEP will reference them. This post will attempt to provide some background on the sorts of things that should be in these areas with particular emphasis on their relevance to the aspergers condition. Keep in mind though that aspergers manifests itself differently from one individual to another and that all c...

The IEP is a critical document resulting from the Individualized Education Program in use at schools worldwide. In short, it results from an IEP meeting and is a unique "plan of attack" for your child's education utilizing your child's strengths and targeting their weaknesses. Over the last few weeks, we've been struggling with my child's second IEP. The process is long and I've learnt a lot. This topic is going to take several posts. To start with, I'm simply going to try and establish the importance of the IEP and the reasons why schools struggle against it. In later posts, I'll cover good and bad things to have in an IEP and how it could be tailored for Aspergers children. A warning: Parents, do not approach the IEP meeting as if it were simply a normal school meeting. It's a critical and legal part of your child's education. You need to get it right. So, How important is this IEP thing Anyway? Schools tend to underplay the impo...

I've already discussed perfection in a previous post . This post is intended to provide a bit more background. We already know that aspies can be obsessed with patterns. In many cases, particularly school work, patterns only make sense when something is perfect and/or complete. It therefore follows that aspies often have major hang-ups about perfection and completeness at school and at work. This obsession with impossible levels of perfection and completion can cause a lot of stress, particularly in young aspies at school and particularly where other factors, such as learning difficulties, writing problems or other forms of work-impairment are present. For example; An aspie with poor writing skills may find that he is constantly crossing out and redoing entire paragraphs of work because it doesn't meet his or her standards. Often they will tear out a page in their exercise books rather than leave imperfect work on the page. This isn't limited to writing and can happen d...

I had my attention drawn to this video recently. It's actually a year old (possibly older) but I think it's still quite relevant and interesting.

I just found this news article on ComputerWorld and thought I'd bring it to your attention. It's dated 2 April 2008, so it's a little over a month old. Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret?

A lot of the more common behaviours and feelings associated with Aspergers seem to lend themselves to a definition of Introversion and it's tempting to see aspies as simply "introverts" but this clearly isn't the case. It is true however, to suggest that there are more introverted aspies than extroverted ones. Most aspies feel very much like "a fish out of water" at social gatherings. Often, we don't care for a lot of social contact and we need a lot of "alone-time" particularly following intense social gatherings like school, work and parties. It's fairly accurate to describe aspies as "nerds" but that shouldn't imply that we are all scientifically minded and boring dressers. Can Aspies be Extroverts? Many aspies will do extroverted things to their appearance, like get a tattoo, dye their hair or wear "loud" or colourful clothing. Unlike NTs though, they'll do this because they personally like a particular loo...

First of all, I'm not intending to cover this from a "medical" perspective. If you want to know this look it up in a medical journal or on wikipedia . Ritalin is a medication which has had 50 years of field testing in children, it's therefore generally considered to be safe and to have minimal side-effects. Of course, being a parent and giving my child a daily drug which is deemed safe isn't quite enough for me. I need to know what's really going on. Since my child doesn't communicate in any detail about the effects of the drug, I decided that I should give it a go myself. Since my genes are closest to his, I expect it's the next best thing to testing it on him (and getting decent reporting). He's currently 7 years of age and is on 1.5 tablets in the morning and 1 at midday of Ritalin 10. I did two tests, which gave me a good indication of the short term effects. I don't intend to do any further testing - not because of any side-effects b...