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<blockquote data-quote="Marguerite" data-source="post: 398799" data-attributes="member: 1991"><p>I only seem to have answers because we've been there ahead of you, in triplicate! Experience is all.</p><p></p><p>Happy, you said, </p><p></p><p>He may not be lying to you. Not in the strict sense of the term. Although the younger they are, the more they are likely to try the more simple lies of "I didn't do it." But be careful - he may be tellnig the truth as he understands it to be.</p><p></p><p>I used to believe that Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids can't lie. Then I observed my boys lying. Or trying to. I realise ALL kids lie, but Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids, due to their poorer social skills, are far less skilled at lying. They tend to tell less complex lies and also are more likely to be found out. Over time this builds up a conditioned response that teaches them that lying is not a good idea.</p><p></p><p>Looking ay your list of Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) symptoms - first, few kids have all of the symptoms. Second, it's possible to NOT have Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) but still have some of the traits. That may still be your son. </p><p></p><p>Now to look at your list - Asperger's people don't have the language issues (eliminates the first one). And even in kids like difficult child 3, it's called language DELAY. difficult child 3 was non-verbal for the first few years but if assessed now, he scores in the superior category for language.</p><p></p><p></p><p>This will vary a lot, depending on the social situation the child is in. At home with people he feels safe with (even if you do have shouting matches, for him it is home and he understands it better than anywhere else) you will find much better eye contact than away from home in a changing situation. Back when difficult child 3 was being diagnosed, when we were going to a multidisciplinary diagnostic team when he was 4, we were asked to bring in his baby photos. They scrutinised those for signs of eye contact avoidance, and couldn't find it. Yet in the room with him they noted (according to their report) a reduction in eye contact. From my view at that time, difficult child 3 was showing intense interest in the toys they had there, and was focussing his attention on those. Anyone trying to talk to him had to take a back seat. Also at that time, difficult child 3 was mostly non-verbal (his diagnosis is autism, not Asperger's). But difficult child 1 and easy child 2/difficult child 2 at that age were highly verbal. difficult child 1 did not make good eye contact with strangers. Interestingly, easy child 2/difficult child 2 tells us that she has always had to work really hard to make eye contact in situations where she knows she should, such as when she was at school being yelled at by a teacher. She currently works as a "checkout chick" and has to force herself to make eye contact with customers. However, she has realised (and done the online test) that she has some degree of face blindness. Check this possibility out with your child too - it's a subtle thing and normal (non-Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD)) people can have it too, although form what I am seeing, I believe it is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) trait wherever it is found, even in someone who doesn't officially have Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). We have a celebrity scientist in Australia called Dr Karl, who is part of a duo with Adam Spencer called the Sleek Geeks. Dr Karl has quite severe face blindness. Adam Spencer filmed him at a book signing, Adam sent the same bloke up to Dr Karl (who writes a lot of popular science books) and the autograph hunter would change his shirt or his cap each time. They got up to about 6 times before Dr Karl began to say, "Have I met you before?" </p><p>Face blindness is also called prosopagnosia. difficult child 1 does not have this despite having a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) diagnosis. However, easy child 2/difficult child 2 is quite bad, almost as bad as Dr Karl. This was a huge problem for us at school when difficult child 3 was being bullied - he could never be sure who it was who attacked him, and so the bullies learned they could get away with it easily by saying, "I wasn't there."</p><p>easy child 2/difficult child 2's doctor (who isn't too fast on the uptake sometimes) insists she is not Aspie because she makes good eye contact with him. But as easy child 2/difficult child 2 has said to me, "I know him. I've been seeing him since I was 10 years old. Plus these days I know how to make myself look at someone in the eye."</p><p>Pointing - have you ever tried to point something out to your dog? The dog looks at the end of your finger. A dog can be trained to recognise the abstraction of the signal, however. And so can a child, even a child with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). This particular bullet point is talking about social skills and social sense - young children tend to lack social skills to a certain extent anyway, so this in a high functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) child can be still very subtle at 7.</p><p>On the lack of facial responses - that is an interesting one. difficult child 3 as a baby/toddler did not play the usual games a baby does. You know how you can say, "Where is baby's nose?" and teach the baby to touch his nose? difficult child 3 couldn't ever get that game. He just looked blank. But easy child easily taught him to mimic facial expressions! We would say, "Show me 'happy'," and smile, and difficult child 3 would put a smile on his face. We extended his expressions 'vocabulary' to include angry, sad, confused, surprised - you get the picture. Of course these expressions were fake because this was a game. Interestingly, when he started school (age 5) he was still using these fake expressions to demonstrate his real inner feelings. His teacher laughed at his put-on angry face, but it took her time to realise that when he put on that face, he really was angry!</p><p>What I'm saying here - this can be more complex than you realise. But it's OK - because the brighter the kid, the more likely they are to modify and adapt what they can do, to mask what they have difficulty with. So you get a kid who can slide past a more obvious diagnosis. However, as we have found with easy child 2/difficult child 2, later on there will be baffling problems until you look at the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) possibilities and realise - "bingo!"</p><p></p><p></p><p>This is not always rigid. Some kids will ONLY line up their Matchbox cars. Others will only spin the wheels of the cars and never go "vroom, vroom!" But other kids, difficult child 3 and his best friend among them, will happily play with Lego appropriately. or be able to play a board game well. Over New Year difficult child 3 was playing Connect 4x4 with me and other people. And thrashing us. The thing about this bullet point - if you ever observe a tendency to focus on part of a toy and not the main purpose of the toy, and if the child tends to return to this activity, you need to consider this criterion met. But it's not mandatory. it can often appear in a 'normal' activity perhaps played to excess, such as stacking cups, Babushka dolls or similar. My kids focussed on toys which let them post shapes through specially shaped holes. difficult child 3 liked toys which were beads on wires which you could slide along. A friend gave him an abacus - in the movie "The Black Balloon" where difficult child 3 is playing Noah, he is holding an abacus.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Your son has this. This is the difficulty in coping with change in activity or task. He has this strongly. However, he is capable of learning to manage, as these kids (especially the bright ones) are capable of learning to adapt in ANY way.</p><p></p><p></p><p>difficult child 3 never flapped his hands or did anything like that. No rocking, no foot tapping. Instead, he watched the trees. What we DID have, however, was certain noises. Often, especially as they learn to adapt, these noises will be the normal noises a person might make, but in these kids the noises will be made with greater frequency and with no need for the noise to be made. For example, throat clearing, sniffing, saying, "mm," or similar. You can get gestures that work similarly, such as the gesture to push glasses up the bridge of the nose, even if the glasses are not sliding down. These are still 'tics' and are actually a coping strategy. They soothe the agitation and anxiety that is going on inside, as the person is trying to adapt. it's subconscious and if you try to control it or punish it, you will risk increasing it because it is anxiety-driven.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Again, this is a very simplistic statement and also does not apply to all or even most Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids. difficult child 1 would cling like a koala bear; you couldn't prise him off. difficult child 3 was always a loving child, but you could't force him to give you a hug or cuddle if he was busy doing something else. But if you held your arms out in a gesture asking for a hug, he would almost always come and give you a hug. From toddlerhood. And he has a diagnosis of autism!</p><p>easy child 2/difficult child 2 is an interesting case - she was always wanting to be in physical contact, but not with the apparent insecurity of difficult child 1. Instead, I would be walking past and easy child 2/difficult child 2 would grab me for a hug. She still is a very 'huggy' person, her friends all love her for it and give her lots of hugs.</p><p>The angle here is - these people LOVE being touched and love hugs, BUT ON THEIR TERMS. Temple Grandin, one of the world's most famous autistic people, knows just how much a hug can help. But she also can't cope with other people being in control of the hug. She actually invented her own hugging machine, to help her. She can give herself the gentle pressure she feels she needs, and is in full control of it. It calms her down, it helps her cope. She is also more severely autistic than difficult child 3.</p><p>Interestingly, easy child (my allegedly 'normal' child) from infancy was not wanting physical contact much. I would breastfeed her, and as soon as she decided she was done, she would push away from me and lean towards the floor, wanting to be put down to play. Even before she was old enough to do more than roll over, she would 'ask' to be put down immediately after a feed. She did not cuddle. When difficult child 1 was born (and, oh joy! I had a baby who loved to be held!) easy child realised that maybe she had been missing something, and for a while she tried to cuddle more. She never really took to it.</p><p></p><p>It is difficult when Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) information is so specific - "Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) is always like this" - because every child can be so different. When difficult child 3 was going into 1st grade I arranged to talk to his teacher ahead of time. We only talked on the phone, but it was very helpful. The teacher said to me, "Don't worry, I do understand autism. I have twin boys, and one of them has Asperger's."</p><p>I said to her, "You will find difficult child 3 is very different. He likes people, does not avoid them at all."</p><p>"We will be fine, I do understand," she repeated.</p><p>But at the end of her first day with difficult child 3 she met me at the classroom door. "You're right, he IS different, isn't he?"</p><p>She was a good teacher but he had her at times at screaming point. I later met her son (we all went on a school excursion a few years later) and yes, her son was more typical (a lot like difficult child 1 in the shyness and insecurity). It has often been difficult for lay people to meet difficult child 3 and accept that he has autism. Until they see him melt down over a need to transition!</p><p></p><p>Another of difficult child 3's best friends is a 12 year old girl who is genius-level but with no Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) at all. Her mother is difficult child 3's speech therapist. When difficult child 3 first met the girl, he said to her mother, "Is your daughter autistic?"</p><p>The mother was almost outraged - only her training as therapist had her pause before she exploded. "Why would you think that?" she asked him.</p><p>"Because she's so very, very smart," he explained. To difficult child 3, being autistic is being smart, being capable academically (in some areas especially) and being gifted at problem-solving and almost instantly understanding how something works. He saw this in his friend, and made an interesting (if incorrect) assumption.</p><p>Meanwhile young friend who was about 6 at the time, thought difficult child 3 was wonderful. And normal. Until she witnessed his first tantrum. "I didn't know anyone knew words like that," she told her mother.</p><p></p><p>Living with this has been quite an education for us, but it has also been an adventure. </p><p></p><p>Temple Grandin says that if she were given the chance to wake up tomorrow and not have autism, she would refuse. Yes, it has its problems, but it has enriched her life in ways that would not be possible without the autism.</p><p></p><p>When you look at what Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) really is, boiling it down to basics - it is a disorder of communication, of social skills and some repetitive behaviours at some stage. The repetitive behaviours can be masked or hidden especially as the child gets older and learns it is not appropriate; or they find other ways to get their 'fix' of repetition or stims. For example, the hand-flapping so commonly associated with autism is actually providing a flickering light effect to the child's eyes. difficult child 3 learned in infancy (he was a week old!) to look at the light flickering through the trees. We were amazed at this baby, on his first day home form hospital, fixing his eyes on the trees. From that day if I wanted to soothe him for sleep, I would take him outside under the trees and he would look at the light through the trees for a little while and fall asleep. So he never flapped his hands - he just looked at trees! And we never realised until years later, what was really going on.</p><p>difficult child 1 got a volunteer job at a zoo and loved to watch the birds. He took note of the emus and noted the sound the male emus make. difficult child 1 tried to imitate it. He practiced the sound until he felt he had it. But it had already become a habit and it became his new stimulant - the "emu boom" which is a sort of quiet gulping noise in the throat, like a flap valve closing in a long pipe (which is probably what the noise really is!). It took years for difficult child 1 to change to a more acceptable stimulant.</p><p></p><p>We've explained to our kids - this is how your brain was made, this is how it functions best. So find the way your brain works best and use your gifts wisely and to the full.</p><p></p><p>It's a disorder of social interaction - they don't learn to follow social rules the same way other people do. But they can learn. They just need to find a different way to learn, generally by mimicry, having it modelled for them. </p><p>Contrary to popular opinion, autistic people are NOT socially withdrawn by definition; they are socially inappropriate or mismatched. easy child 2/difficult child 2 grabbing me for a hug, even if my hands were full with a hot tray of biscuits from the oven - inappropriate timing. But it was HER choice to hug, she was in control of it. And she so desperately craves physical contact.</p><p>They don't always do obvious repetitive movements. difficult child 3 gets his jollies by blowing bubbles (when younger); throwing paper planes; firing darts from his Nerf armoury; building elaborate machines which lift balls high up to then run through a complex roller coaster system. He can watch those for hours. He also loves to make things work, especially if they're made up of lots of small things. Electronics. Chemistry. Anything that goes bang, that fizzes, that bubbles - he loves it. he wants to understand it so he studies it.</p><p></p><p>Studying animal behaviour, or human behaviour, is often something a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) person will choose to do, as a means of learning to understand people. Temple Grandin became an animal behaviour expert. She wrote a book called "An Anthropologist on Mars" because she said tat is what she feels like sometimes - like in observing people, she is studying s species alien to her own.</p><p></p><p>These are the kids that can watch an ants nest for hours, then come and explain the complex intricacies of ant behaviour to you, until you never want to hear about ants again.</p><p></p><p>difficult child 1 used to feed the white cockatoos outside (much to the annoyance of neighbours - these birds will eat timber houses if they get bored). They all look identical, but difficult child 1 sat and watched their behaviour, so he could understand them. And as he did, he noticed something - the bolder birds that approached first, had slightly darker eyes. He rang the museum and discussed this with their birds curator - yes, difficult child 1 had just independently discovered the difference between male and female cockatoos in appearance and behaviour.</p><p></p><p>Just after Christmas difficult child 1 & I dropped in on friends who have a new labrador puppy. We watched difficult child 1 play with the puppy - he became a dog too, and played like a dog would. He's clerly been studying dog behaviour and mentally teaching himself to mimic it. Not quite on all fours, but bending low and mock-growling at the pup, encouraging it to mock-attack and then rolling over pretending the pup had knocked him down. I haven't seen difficult child 1 do that before, but he doesn't live with us any more do he takes me by surprise sometimes. I wish I had filmed it. But he is also 27 and increasingly mature - he finally straightened up and walked over to us (when the pup was lying panting on the ground!) and engaged us in conversation. </p><p></p><p>It is moments like that which provide a lot of delight in my days.</p><p></p><p>Marg</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Marguerite, post: 398799, member: 1991"] I only seem to have answers because we've been there ahead of you, in triplicate! Experience is all. Happy, you said, He may not be lying to you. Not in the strict sense of the term. Although the younger they are, the more they are likely to try the more simple lies of "I didn't do it." But be careful - he may be tellnig the truth as he understands it to be. I used to believe that Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids can't lie. Then I observed my boys lying. Or trying to. I realise ALL kids lie, but Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids, due to their poorer social skills, are far less skilled at lying. They tend to tell less complex lies and also are more likely to be found out. Over time this builds up a conditioned response that teaches them that lying is not a good idea. Looking ay your list of Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) symptoms - first, few kids have all of the symptoms. Second, it's possible to NOT have Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) but still have some of the traits. That may still be your son. Now to look at your list - Asperger's people don't have the language issues (eliminates the first one). And even in kids like difficult child 3, it's called language DELAY. difficult child 3 was non-verbal for the first few years but if assessed now, he scores in the superior category for language. This will vary a lot, depending on the social situation the child is in. At home with people he feels safe with (even if you do have shouting matches, for him it is home and he understands it better than anywhere else) you will find much better eye contact than away from home in a changing situation. Back when difficult child 3 was being diagnosed, when we were going to a multidisciplinary diagnostic team when he was 4, we were asked to bring in his baby photos. They scrutinised those for signs of eye contact avoidance, and couldn't find it. Yet in the room with him they noted (according to their report) a reduction in eye contact. From my view at that time, difficult child 3 was showing intense interest in the toys they had there, and was focussing his attention on those. Anyone trying to talk to him had to take a back seat. Also at that time, difficult child 3 was mostly non-verbal (his diagnosis is autism, not Asperger's). But difficult child 1 and easy child 2/difficult child 2 at that age were highly verbal. difficult child 1 did not make good eye contact with strangers. Interestingly, easy child 2/difficult child 2 tells us that she has always had to work really hard to make eye contact in situations where she knows she should, such as when she was at school being yelled at by a teacher. She currently works as a "checkout chick" and has to force herself to make eye contact with customers. However, she has realised (and done the online test) that she has some degree of face blindness. Check this possibility out with your child too - it's a subtle thing and normal (non-Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD)) people can have it too, although form what I am seeing, I believe it is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) trait wherever it is found, even in someone who doesn't officially have Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). We have a celebrity scientist in Australia called Dr Karl, who is part of a duo with Adam Spencer called the Sleek Geeks. Dr Karl has quite severe face blindness. Adam Spencer filmed him at a book signing, Adam sent the same bloke up to Dr Karl (who writes a lot of popular science books) and the autograph hunter would change his shirt or his cap each time. They got up to about 6 times before Dr Karl began to say, "Have I met you before?" Face blindness is also called prosopagnosia. difficult child 1 does not have this despite having a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) diagnosis. However, easy child 2/difficult child 2 is quite bad, almost as bad as Dr Karl. This was a huge problem for us at school when difficult child 3 was being bullied - he could never be sure who it was who attacked him, and so the bullies learned they could get away with it easily by saying, "I wasn't there." easy child 2/difficult child 2's doctor (who isn't too fast on the uptake sometimes) insists she is not Aspie because she makes good eye contact with him. But as easy child 2/difficult child 2 has said to me, "I know him. I've been seeing him since I was 10 years old. Plus these days I know how to make myself look at someone in the eye." Pointing - have you ever tried to point something out to your dog? The dog looks at the end of your finger. A dog can be trained to recognise the abstraction of the signal, however. And so can a child, even a child with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). This particular bullet point is talking about social skills and social sense - young children tend to lack social skills to a certain extent anyway, so this in a high functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) child can be still very subtle at 7. On the lack of facial responses - that is an interesting one. difficult child 3 as a baby/toddler did not play the usual games a baby does. You know how you can say, "Where is baby's nose?" and teach the baby to touch his nose? difficult child 3 couldn't ever get that game. He just looked blank. But easy child easily taught him to mimic facial expressions! We would say, "Show me 'happy'," and smile, and difficult child 3 would put a smile on his face. We extended his expressions 'vocabulary' to include angry, sad, confused, surprised - you get the picture. Of course these expressions were fake because this was a game. Interestingly, when he started school (age 5) he was still using these fake expressions to demonstrate his real inner feelings. His teacher laughed at his put-on angry face, but it took her time to realise that when he put on that face, he really was angry! What I'm saying here - this can be more complex than you realise. But it's OK - because the brighter the kid, the more likely they are to modify and adapt what they can do, to mask what they have difficulty with. So you get a kid who can slide past a more obvious diagnosis. However, as we have found with easy child 2/difficult child 2, later on there will be baffling problems until you look at the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) possibilities and realise - "bingo!" This is not always rigid. Some kids will ONLY line up their Matchbox cars. Others will only spin the wheels of the cars and never go "vroom, vroom!" But other kids, difficult child 3 and his best friend among them, will happily play with Lego appropriately. or be able to play a board game well. Over New Year difficult child 3 was playing Connect 4x4 with me and other people. And thrashing us. The thing about this bullet point - if you ever observe a tendency to focus on part of a toy and not the main purpose of the toy, and if the child tends to return to this activity, you need to consider this criterion met. But it's not mandatory. it can often appear in a 'normal' activity perhaps played to excess, such as stacking cups, Babushka dolls or similar. My kids focussed on toys which let them post shapes through specially shaped holes. difficult child 3 liked toys which were beads on wires which you could slide along. A friend gave him an abacus - in the movie "The Black Balloon" where difficult child 3 is playing Noah, he is holding an abacus. Your son has this. This is the difficulty in coping with change in activity or task. He has this strongly. However, he is capable of learning to manage, as these kids (especially the bright ones) are capable of learning to adapt in ANY way. difficult child 3 never flapped his hands or did anything like that. No rocking, no foot tapping. Instead, he watched the trees. What we DID have, however, was certain noises. Often, especially as they learn to adapt, these noises will be the normal noises a person might make, but in these kids the noises will be made with greater frequency and with no need for the noise to be made. For example, throat clearing, sniffing, saying, "mm," or similar. You can get gestures that work similarly, such as the gesture to push glasses up the bridge of the nose, even if the glasses are not sliding down. These are still 'tics' and are actually a coping strategy. They soothe the agitation and anxiety that is going on inside, as the person is trying to adapt. it's subconscious and if you try to control it or punish it, you will risk increasing it because it is anxiety-driven. Again, this is a very simplistic statement and also does not apply to all or even most Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids. difficult child 1 would cling like a koala bear; you couldn't prise him off. difficult child 3 was always a loving child, but you could't force him to give you a hug or cuddle if he was busy doing something else. But if you held your arms out in a gesture asking for a hug, he would almost always come and give you a hug. From toddlerhood. And he has a diagnosis of autism! easy child 2/difficult child 2 is an interesting case - she was always wanting to be in physical contact, but not with the apparent insecurity of difficult child 1. Instead, I would be walking past and easy child 2/difficult child 2 would grab me for a hug. She still is a very 'huggy' person, her friends all love her for it and give her lots of hugs. The angle here is - these people LOVE being touched and love hugs, BUT ON THEIR TERMS. Temple Grandin, one of the world's most famous autistic people, knows just how much a hug can help. But she also can't cope with other people being in control of the hug. She actually invented her own hugging machine, to help her. She can give herself the gentle pressure she feels she needs, and is in full control of it. It calms her down, it helps her cope. She is also more severely autistic than difficult child 3. Interestingly, easy child (my allegedly 'normal' child) from infancy was not wanting physical contact much. I would breastfeed her, and as soon as she decided she was done, she would push away from me and lean towards the floor, wanting to be put down to play. Even before she was old enough to do more than roll over, she would 'ask' to be put down immediately after a feed. She did not cuddle. When difficult child 1 was born (and, oh joy! I had a baby who loved to be held!) easy child realised that maybe she had been missing something, and for a while she tried to cuddle more. She never really took to it. It is difficult when Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) information is so specific - "Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) is always like this" - because every child can be so different. When difficult child 3 was going into 1st grade I arranged to talk to his teacher ahead of time. We only talked on the phone, but it was very helpful. The teacher said to me, "Don't worry, I do understand autism. I have twin boys, and one of them has Asperger's." I said to her, "You will find difficult child 3 is very different. He likes people, does not avoid them at all." "We will be fine, I do understand," she repeated. But at the end of her first day with difficult child 3 she met me at the classroom door. "You're right, he IS different, isn't he?" She was a good teacher but he had her at times at screaming point. I later met her son (we all went on a school excursion a few years later) and yes, her son was more typical (a lot like difficult child 1 in the shyness and insecurity). It has often been difficult for lay people to meet difficult child 3 and accept that he has autism. Until they see him melt down over a need to transition! Another of difficult child 3's best friends is a 12 year old girl who is genius-level but with no Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) at all. Her mother is difficult child 3's speech therapist. When difficult child 3 first met the girl, he said to her mother, "Is your daughter autistic?" The mother was almost outraged - only her training as therapist had her pause before she exploded. "Why would you think that?" she asked him. "Because she's so very, very smart," he explained. To difficult child 3, being autistic is being smart, being capable academically (in some areas especially) and being gifted at problem-solving and almost instantly understanding how something works. He saw this in his friend, and made an interesting (if incorrect) assumption. Meanwhile young friend who was about 6 at the time, thought difficult child 3 was wonderful. And normal. Until she witnessed his first tantrum. "I didn't know anyone knew words like that," she told her mother. Living with this has been quite an education for us, but it has also been an adventure. Temple Grandin says that if she were given the chance to wake up tomorrow and not have autism, she would refuse. Yes, it has its problems, but it has enriched her life in ways that would not be possible without the autism. When you look at what Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) really is, boiling it down to basics - it is a disorder of communication, of social skills and some repetitive behaviours at some stage. The repetitive behaviours can be masked or hidden especially as the child gets older and learns it is not appropriate; or they find other ways to get their 'fix' of repetition or stims. For example, the hand-flapping so commonly associated with autism is actually providing a flickering light effect to the child's eyes. difficult child 3 learned in infancy (he was a week old!) to look at the light flickering through the trees. We were amazed at this baby, on his first day home form hospital, fixing his eyes on the trees. From that day if I wanted to soothe him for sleep, I would take him outside under the trees and he would look at the light through the trees for a little while and fall asleep. So he never flapped his hands - he just looked at trees! And we never realised until years later, what was really going on. difficult child 1 got a volunteer job at a zoo and loved to watch the birds. He took note of the emus and noted the sound the male emus make. difficult child 1 tried to imitate it. He practiced the sound until he felt he had it. But it had already become a habit and it became his new stimulant - the "emu boom" which is a sort of quiet gulping noise in the throat, like a flap valve closing in a long pipe (which is probably what the noise really is!). It took years for difficult child 1 to change to a more acceptable stimulant. We've explained to our kids - this is how your brain was made, this is how it functions best. So find the way your brain works best and use your gifts wisely and to the full. It's a disorder of social interaction - they don't learn to follow social rules the same way other people do. But they can learn. They just need to find a different way to learn, generally by mimicry, having it modelled for them. Contrary to popular opinion, autistic people are NOT socially withdrawn by definition; they are socially inappropriate or mismatched. easy child 2/difficult child 2 grabbing me for a hug, even if my hands were full with a hot tray of biscuits from the oven - inappropriate timing. But it was HER choice to hug, she was in control of it. And she so desperately craves physical contact. They don't always do obvious repetitive movements. difficult child 3 gets his jollies by blowing bubbles (when younger); throwing paper planes; firing darts from his Nerf armoury; building elaborate machines which lift balls high up to then run through a complex roller coaster system. He can watch those for hours. He also loves to make things work, especially if they're made up of lots of small things. Electronics. Chemistry. Anything that goes bang, that fizzes, that bubbles - he loves it. he wants to understand it so he studies it. Studying animal behaviour, or human behaviour, is often something a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) person will choose to do, as a means of learning to understand people. Temple Grandin became an animal behaviour expert. She wrote a book called "An Anthropologist on Mars" because she said tat is what she feels like sometimes - like in observing people, she is studying s species alien to her own. These are the kids that can watch an ants nest for hours, then come and explain the complex intricacies of ant behaviour to you, until you never want to hear about ants again. difficult child 1 used to feed the white cockatoos outside (much to the annoyance of neighbours - these birds will eat timber houses if they get bored). They all look identical, but difficult child 1 sat and watched their behaviour, so he could understand them. And as he did, he noticed something - the bolder birds that approached first, had slightly darker eyes. He rang the museum and discussed this with their birds curator - yes, difficult child 1 had just independently discovered the difference between male and female cockatoos in appearance and behaviour. Just after Christmas difficult child 1 & I dropped in on friends who have a new labrador puppy. We watched difficult child 1 play with the puppy - he became a dog too, and played like a dog would. He's clerly been studying dog behaviour and mentally teaching himself to mimic it. Not quite on all fours, but bending low and mock-growling at the pup, encouraging it to mock-attack and then rolling over pretending the pup had knocked him down. I haven't seen difficult child 1 do that before, but he doesn't live with us any more do he takes me by surprise sometimes. I wish I had filmed it. But he is also 27 and increasingly mature - he finally straightened up and walked over to us (when the pup was lying panting on the ground!) and engaged us in conversation. It is moments like that which provide a lot of delight in my days. Marg [/QUOTE]
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