Yes I really enjoyed the site. Thank you for commenting here. Sequencing, charting, yes predictability are important. Adam does better with the step by step approach when it comes to sequencing steps. In the morning when he must dress, I lay out his clothes like a book, meaning, I lay them out on his bed in the order that they are to go on — left to right. If you don’t have charts or pictures in the moment, creating some kind of order with constant repetition is helpful.

And I’m not a big cook. I’m in the middle of going through a divorce, sadly, but I am looking forward to new adventures in cooking!!!! Adam, at least, has inspired me once again!!!!

It is disappointing that your doctor said that. But we can only expect that response from doctors as they are trained to be medical practioners and do not understand the social model of autism and disability. Of course, they are trained to help and to treat, but not to educate and accommodate. This is what my blog’s focus is.

The term “high functioning” is extremely misleading as it feeds into ideas of normalcy. What is the normal baseline anyway? If autistic people fall off that baseline, I guess the further away from it, they are deemed lower functioning.

There is no question that all disabled people (and all people for that matter) belong to some sort of spectrum. In autism, this is based on how you can communicate and be independent, although most people also equate functioning levels with intelligence. The latter is deceiving, for we know that just because a person cannot articulate verbally, or APPEAR to not understand, does not mean it’s so.

My son cannot talk well. He is seven years old. Yet he can understand, he goes to a “regular” school with support, and he is learning to type his thoughts more each day. Yet, he communicates VERY well nonverbally — but communication is a marriage of many things that are in the moment and transient — gesture, circumstance, tone, song, eyes, movement AND words. It can all happen together in nanoseconds and we get it.

I can advise with a certain level of confidence, to find a school, not necessarily an autism school, that accepts your child and to obtain support if you can for your child in the school. If you feel like reading my archives on some more of our early experiences, feel free to do so (go to right hand margin and seek Joy of Autism blog archives 2005-2008).

As far as The Autism Acceptance Project goes, I began it to launch some important lectures and exhibitions here in Toronto. Unfortunately, with the onset of a marital breakdown, I have had to delay some projects but have not stopped my work on an important Inclusion Initiative here in Toronto. TAAProject in the meantime morally supports my work in this area and TAAP will continue to send out information regarding the endeavour in order to make others aware of some of the events and programs coming up around that.

I am interested in your project as well. When the doctor was telling us about the formal assessment and the different options we have to help our son, I did ask him that there is a school of thought that autistic people should be accepted the way they are and what did he think about that. He responded that only parents of high functioning autistic kids support that phenomenon.
Is that true?

I can only speak of myself and how I interpret Adam. I cannot speak for Adam. He is still interested in all of those things, except that he has expanded his interests in large part on his own. Every child has their own time-line. All we could do is encourage Adam to extend his interests by constantly introducing him to new things.

I remember those early days of resistance and anxiety. We still went ahead, even if our activities were short lived. A lot of our success rested in our ability to follow Adam’s lead too. If Adam would be interested in bubbles, what might we do that had to do with bubbles? If he did something or made a noise that didn’t seem like anything “productive” according to our society that seems to have an idea of what is “normal development and play,” we would join in on Adam’s game. A lot of this stuff is also used in the method called Floortime, although we never subscribed to one particular method. We have used many strategies and picked the ones that seemed to suit Adam the best. It is worth your time to become aware of Floortime and read some books, but also to read a lot of books written by autistic people. This coupling between what you understand and what your child understands may help you to build a bridge to understanding each other’s value.

I also highly recommend Occupational Therapy. Adam was a boy on the move, yet he still has many motor challenges that he is overcoming. Lots of movement and a sensory “diet” in between learning may help your child too (depending on his sensory needs).

As for obsessions, you have to get rid of the word and remember that your son is learning. It is his way of learning and an unfortunate word our society uses to deem this interest less legitimate and valuable. Let me give you an example of Dawn Prince Hughes (an autistic woman living in Seattle who has her Ph.D. now in Primate Anthropology. If you haven’t read her book Songs of A Gorilla Nation, I highly recommend it). She describes herself in her parent’s home (I think it’s her parent’s home), running around to each room and sounding out the names of each room. In her adult years she describes it as if she didn’t do that, the rooms might miss her.

Every action is purposeful. We may, as parents, have to consider all the purposes, even if we do not understand at first and get wrapped up in the way the behaviour looks to the outside world.

One thing I have noticed in Adam is when he is getting stuck. He will certainly let me know the difference between pleasure and anguish. If he is stuck, he can’t stop what he’s doing but he is crying or whining while he is doing it. This is when I know I need to step in and lead him to something else. This doesn’t happen very often, but as we all learn to read our own children, we usually get what they are trying to tell us, even if there are no words involved.

I hope this helps a little bit.