Life with Aspergers

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...

School is a very difficult proposition for kids on the spectrum and your first choice of school isn't always going to be the right one. Sometimes you'll need to change schools as personnel change, as bullies come and go or as the general "fit" between the school and your child ceases to work. In this post, I want to look at different school scenarios and try to give guidance on three issues; Private versus State-Funded Special versus Mainstream Homeschooling versus Institutionalised  Private versus State-Funded Schools Understanding Public and Private Schools While these two major types of schools appear all around the world,  they're called different things in different countries. In the UK, the word "public school" actually means "independent" (essentially what a "private school" in Australia and the United States means). They use the words "state-funded" to describe what we call public. As an aid to under...

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...

Book Review; Joel Suzuki Volume 4: Fable of the Fatewave by Brian Tashima Over the past six years I've reviewed the first three volumes in the Joel Suzuki series; Secret of the Songshell , Mystery of the Moonfire and Legend of the Loudstone . Fable of the Fatewave is the fourth book and it feels a little different.  It's not just that the main characters of Joel and Felicity seem to have grown up over the course of the books, it's also that their story and the world of Spectraland seems to have become larger. Fable of the Fatewave expands Joel's abilities to include time travel and when things start to go wrong in the present, it's only natural that the main characters might look to the past as a solution but things just aren't as easy as they might seem. It's another great story and as usual, Brian's tales aren't predictable. Things just don't unfold the way that you think they might. Fable of the Fatewave doesn't retread old...

One of the things that people on the spectrum do really poorly is manage their own time. This is because people with autism often suffer from poor executive functioning.  They have difficulty planning out their day or estimating how long a task will take. They're also very easily distracted.  Time management is a critical skill, particularly after your child had left school and is expected to take charge of their own day. In this post, I want to look at some of the reasons why time management fails and some of the changes we can make to train ourselves to be better at it. Who Manages Your Time? In your formative years, you do very little time management and it's usually your parents who set alarms and cajole you out of bed, harass you into getting dressed, slog through the breakfast routine, push you into the car and drop you off at school. Once at school, you're at the mercy of the timetable but apart from getting the right books to the right classes on time,...

Believe it or not, I'm not actually a shy person.  Put me in front of a group of people for a planned session such as training and I have no problem talking (I spent a few years as a TAFE teacher after all).  Drop me in an ad-hoc, unstructured conversation however and sometimes I get so nervous that I lose my words. I often blame this on my poor hearing and it's certainly a large part of the problem. It's not that I can't hear though, it's anxiety. I get anxious for a variety of reasons but recently I've managed to overcome at least some of it. While I'd love to be able to say it was my hard work, it really wasn't.  It was a clever choice on the part of one of my work colleagues. Anxiety I've read very widely on the subjects of Asperger's syndrome and high functioning autism - and of course,  I've interacted with a great many people on the spectrum over the years. Everyone is different and no amount of rules and exceptions can take...