He's a good boy!

We've all seen it too many times.  A life is cut short always too soon.  The evening news reports that someone's child has been shot and killed by law enforcement in the commission of a crime.  We will never find out why he was seen climbing out of the window of a business late at night.  We'll never hear his side of the story and he'll never hear the tongue lashing from his disappointed mother.  What we do hear is his grief stricken mother blaming the authorities and her declaration that he is a "good boy".  While I am not one to automatically defend the police, it always amazes me that his mother claims he is a good boy.  A good boy would not be breaking into someone else's property.  A good boy would not do this to his mom.  Maybe she is remembering the boy he used to be.  Maybe he fell in with a bad crowd and was influenced by others.  But we will never know because he was caught doing something wrong and killed in the process.

This seems to happen every time.  You never hear the mother say anything like, He was always getting into trouble or, I've never been able to control him, or he never listens to me anymore since he started hanging around with those bad kids, or started taking drugs or dropped out of school.  Always she says, he was a good boy.

So why does this concern me?  I think it is because, that after hearing this opinion so many times, the the general consensus becomes that a  mothers opinion of her child can't be taken seriously.  The unspoken word is that since she's his mother, her view is tainted.

This becomes a problem for us when trying to get school officials to understand the child with Aspergers.  Aspies who don't realize something they say is rude, gets punished instead of learning why their comment is inappropriate so they can alter the behavior.  When my children lash out, it is because they are over stimulated or overwhelmed.  If this happens in the classroom, there is always a reason for it.  If that reason is figured out, the whole class usually benefits.

Kids with Aspergers usually have an above average intelligence.  Past teachers have told me, that they use my kids as a sort of barometer for the rest of the class.  If the smartest kid in the class can't keep up, then chances are no one else can either.  This was brought to our attention recently when one of the kids had a substitute teacher.  When it became clear that this sub would be teaching for an extended period and have to keep the class on the same pace as the regular teacher, things got rough.  He had to get the class up to speed in a short period of time.  When Katie couldn't keep up and lashed out disrespectfully, she was called down to the office, talked to and threatened with in School suspension if the behavior was repeated.

Now I get to say it.  Katie is a good girl.  Do you believe me?  Well she is.  I rarely if ever have to discipline her.  She never deliberately misbehaves.  One time she sorta kinda misbehaved and it drove her crazy.  She came to me in some distress, worried that she had done the worst thing.  I was either taking a nap or gone and she had helped herself to a soda without asking.  She always asks and unless it is the last one and I want it, I always say yes.  It's not a big thing.  But she was convinced that since she didn't ask first, she would be in big trouble.  It bothered her so much, that she had to snitch on herself.  I never would have known.  That is the worst thing she has ever done unless she was in some Asperger induced distress, and then she can't help herself anymore than some one in a wheel chair can get up and walk.

Luckily she is attending a school, with a great principle and wonderful teachers.  After several emails back and forth, her school understands that if Katie was disrespectful. She didn't mean to be and something was wrong.  Her regular teacher is back and all is right with the world.  But it wasn't always like this.

In the past, we sometimes had trouble getting  people to realize that even though she couldn't always control her behavior, I didn't think that she should be able to behave anyway she wanted to.  But there are more effective ways to alter the behavior of some Aspies than to threaten punishment.  In Katie's case, if you can explain to her why others act the way they do and why her behavior is wrong, she can usually find a better way to make her distress known and communicate what her needs are.

Aspergers is a neurologically based  developmental delay.  Because of this and also possibly due to our style of parenting, Katie doesn't understand why her classmates act the way they do.  Sometimes it is normal teenage behavior, sometimes it is due to a cultural difference.  Sometimes I have to dig way back to my classes in sociology to explain typical teenage behavior.  She listens very carefully to my explanation and sometimes you can see the lightbulb go off.  "Oh I get it", she'll say.  "That's dumb" and usually "ok" and she'll be fine.  The problem is that i won't know what she doesn't know until the situation comes up.  If it is timed right, we can avoid a meltdown.  Luckily as I said, her school is pretty good about these things.  Yesterday she had a problem with a particularly loud and boisterous assembly.  A teacher noticed her difficulties and moved her to a quieter room.  I learned today that her principle heard the noise and her first thought was how Katie was handling it.  She told me she looked all over for her before finding out she had already been cared for.  It is good to know that they are all looking out for her.  She is a good girl

Theory of Mind

I have read about and heard about The theory of mind or mind blindness that people on the autism spectrum do not possess. I think I understand it, but have never been able to explain it in a way that makes sense to me, much less the person I am explaining it to. I found the following passages in an article at Wired.com.


Sally has a marble. She puts her marble into the box, and then she goes outside. Anne comes in, takes the marble out of the box, and puts it in her basket. When Sally comes back, where will she look for the marble?

By the age of 4 or so, most children who watch this scenario played out by puppets - including children with Down's syndrome and other developmental problems - know the answer. But some do not. They do not understand that what they know and what Sally knows are different, that Sally has a mind of her own. The children who expect Sally to look in the basket, because they know that's where the marble is and can't believe that she doesn't, are the ones likely to be diagnosed with autism or its relative, Asperger's syndrome.


The theory of Mind as the author writes is "an innate ability to understand other people as having feelings, intentions, and pictures of the world that are not the same as our own. A theory of mind is a basic requirement for empathy or, for that matter, deceit..... a theory of mind is what people disabled by autism and its related conditions lack.

I find this happens to me a lot. Just yesterday, I had to copy three files to a folder and put them on my husband's computer desktop. He had been complaining for some time that he couldn't get to them because they were on a shared drive and not where they were before. In other words, when he opened our recipe database, it no longer brought up the Schleicher family cookbook.

Now he knew the files were on an external hard drive, but that I had had to move all those files to my Mac. Long story. Now I am not sure if he didn't have permission to navigate to that file through our network or what, but he wanted access to those recipes and couldn't get there. So since I couldn't yet reconnect the external drive system, I got on our network and did a drag and drop of the files from the mac to his machine.

To me that was a rather first grade act. I said to him later. "you know you could have just gone to the Mac and transferred that file to a disk yourself instead of having to wait for me to do it. He looked at me as if I had asked him to hack into the government's nuclear launch codes. "Everybody can't do the things you find so easy." he said. I just don't understand that he doesn't know all the things I know. Heck I talk about it enough.

I guess that's why some people with Aspergers find it so hard to lie. If you think everyone knows what you know, of course they can see right through what ever lie you just told, or shall I say, tried to tell. Katie has such a hard time lying that when I ask her if she's finished her homework for example, she just doesn't answer. She can't say no (she didn't do it) because she doesn't want to get in trouble. However she can't say yes (a lie) because I must know she hasn't. I have to go through all sorts of maneuvers with things like this, explaining to her to just give me a yes or no, that she's not in trouble, I just need to know in order to decide what I need to do next. etc. Do I need to remind her to put her book bag away, Is she hungry, does she need help, did she get distracted etc. I think you get the point.

It also explains why Andy gets so frustrated with his classmates. Why don't they just be quiet? Don't they get how interesting ancient Egypt is? Certainly they can hear how loud their music is. They surely know he can't concentrate with anything but classical music on. Andy has supersonic hearing.

Well we may not know what you all are thinking, and according to this theory, it's not the same as what we are thinking; but at least at home with my kids, we understand each other. Of course as Katie would say, her poor dad is the "Clueless Dude" lol

It really is Real

When People think of Autism, they thing of kids staring off into space, maybe with a football helmet on to protect them as they spin around on the floor or bang their heads on the wall. Or they thing of “Rainman”, a movie with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. Raymond (Rainman) was the older brother who was sent to an institution when it was feared he might hurt his baby brother. Raymond was exceptionally good at math, but had poor social skills, had rigid routines, swayed back and forth and had a flat tone of voice. Raymond was somewhere along the Autism spectrum which ranges from severely affected, to very high functioning. A high functioning autistic who might have Aspergers, may look just like anyone else, or might have a peculiar gate, but even though his disability isn’t as visible, trust me it is just as challenging and oh so evident in the lives of many of us, just as diabetes or asthma is to others.

I was once told, that autistics live in their own world but those with Aspergers live in the world, just in our own way.

I was also told once by a social worker at my kids’ last school, that Aspergers was rare. There was no arguing with this person, who reminded me every other sentence that she was the mental health professional. (My doctor thought this was extremely funny). This “mental health professional” needs to go back to school. One in every 166 kids is autistic. There are 4 in my family. That doesn’t sound very rare to me.

There have been many theories about the cause of Autism and Aspergers and suggested reasons for the rapid increase that we are seeing now. NBC even did a story about the Autism epidemic, which I tried to tell the “mental health professional” but she wasn’t listening. Some have blamed the preservative in childhood vaccinations. Some say it is genetic. Others say that, since the increase in technology jobs, people who are not good with dealing with other people socially can thrive at a job on a computer. Also it is now very possible that an Aspergers male may meet a like minded Aspergers girl in the next cubical, marry and have more possible Aspergers kids.

So is the world now doomed to having a bunch of us Aspies running around? It could be worse. The people that are diagnosed by the public as having an awful lot of Aspergers like traits would amaze you. The one I always like to mention is Bill Gates. Now while I like to Hate Billy boy, especially when my computer is acting up, think of where we would be if he didn’t think out of the box the way he did. Watch the pirates of Silicon Valley sometime. You might hate him more but you will come to see the method behind the guy.

My biggest problem with Aspergers isn’t the condition itself but getting the world to realize that it exists and that it is real. I was once accused by that same “mental health professional” of making up the kids’ diagnosis. Her words were .”Do they have a formal diagnosis?” Emphasis on the word formal. This was in response to some special things I had asked for to help them adjust to a new environment. I so badly wanted to say. No lady, I just read Readers Digest and this is the disease of the month. Geez.

Personally, I wouldn’t want my kids any other way. They are cute and adorable and really hate it when they do something wrong. If I can get the rest of the world to just lighten up and just listen to them, they would enjoy them as much as I do