Homeschooling and the Autism Spectrum

Growing up, the hardest part of the Erudite Aspie's life was school. Not academically, she always did fine there, but as she's mentioned, the social aspect of it was torture for her--and, as her Mum, for me as well.

For the first three years of her education, I homeschooled her. I loved it, and she thrived, but she and her sister decided that they wanted to go to public school. I let them, but knowing what I know now, I wish I hadn't. It's not that the school was bad, it wasn't. They had terrific teachers who were dedicated and caring and all that you want a teacher to be, but Erudite Aspie's fellow students, not so much. No matter how much she wanted to fit in, she didn't, couldn't.

Homeschooling wasn't as easy then as it is now with the internet, but it was doable, and it sure would have saved her a lot of heartache. I realize that you can't totally erase heartache from your kids' lives, but still...you don't do it on purpose, right?

With all this in mind I was very interested in this recent post on Ree Drummond's outstanding site The Pioneer Woman. PW isn't solely about homeschooling or about Autism, but she is homeschooling her four children and has several guest posters who are also teaching their kids at home, always worth reading. Last month one of her guests asked a question for a correspondent, Mary: Should we take our high-functioning autistic son out of public school and homeschool him? The debate was spirited and hugely supportive, and today she posts Mary's decision: yes, we should.

I think so, too, Mary, and God bless you for doing so. I truly believe that your son, like my daughter, will thrive at home, and can learn the social skills he'll need for adulthood in a more supportive environment than a public school (or any school, for that matter). For kids on the Spectrum, being forced into social situations is not the way to learn those necessary skills, in fact, if anything it's more likely to turn them away from social situations entirely. Autistic kids need to learn those skills by rote because they don't get them instinctively, and forcing them to deal without that training is not only ineffective, but counterproductive--and hurtful.

As a public school teacher--high school science--I heartily support home schooling, whether your kid is on the Spectrum or not. I hope my future grandchildren are homeschooled, and if their parents can't do it, I'd be happy to take a few hours out of my retirement days for some quality time with my kids' kids. No better contribution to their futures, sez I.

Hindsight is always 20-20, and while I do wish I had known then what I know now, I'm grateful that my daughter turned out pretty well despite our ignorance. Do I wish I could have saved her all that frustration? Sure, but as we often say to each other, Now we know. Everyone has painful times growing up, most of us come through adolescence unscathed nevertheless. But for those of you who are still in the position to make that schooling choice, especially if your child is on the Spectrum, I recommend you give it due consideration. I doubt you'll regret it.

People Who Need People

A post on EA and social interactions and why the two are like water and oil. They can be mixed but eventually they will always separate by Erudite Sister.


Today I wish to discuss my sister and crowds of people. For many of us being around a group of people is hardly a panic inducing, especially when several of them are people we know fairly well. We might not necessarily enjoy the situations in which we find ourselves. I don't like crowds of people and I'd rather be at home with a few people than in some crowded place forced to talk to people I don't know. Neither does my sister. The main difference between the two of us is that I can handle it; she can't.

One such example is the full blown anxiety attack she had at our cousin's wedding several years ago. It was a very nice outdoor wedding at a winery. Granted EA wasn't the only hungry person getting patient for the newly married couple to show up so we could eat. However, she was the only who got physically ill being in an enclosed room with two hundred of her closest strangers.

EA had brought a book to read during the off times during the wedding. The three of us told her to put the book away as it was pretty rude to read at a social function. She didn't exactly agree and became quite agitated when she was eventually forced to put the book away. Erudite Brother tried to reason with her. It was our impression that she was overreacting and being dramatic. EA has been known to be overly dramatic when people just didn't listen to her and see things her way.

Though she is much better at dealing with large groups of people now, at the time she had a very hard time interacting and making small talk with people she doesn't know or know well. What exactly is one supposed to say to the bride's great-aunt who wants to know who you are and how you know her niece? For most of us we put a nice smile and say that we're cousins to the groom and that his mother is our father's sister. We might even say that we don't know the bride well but we've met her a few times and we thought she was quite lovely. We might even make some comment about how lovely the ceremony was and how much we liked the bride's gown and we'd end the conversation by remarking how proud of her niece the aunt must be.

Someone like my sister doesn't get small talk. She would never go up to a complete stranger and just talk to them unless she believed they had something in common. That a complete stranger would come up to her and start talking as if they knew each other is not within her parameters of things that make sense. And so she freezes. She hates small talk, doesn't understand the purpose of it. It's pointless and makes absolutely no sense. And knowing that she is going to be expected to talk to someone's Great Aunt Muriel* about random things is something that is going to cause her a bit of anxiety.

The logical assumption would be that she would feel anxious being around any large group of people, after all, no matter where you go there will always be those instances of small talk. It would also be logical to assume that going somewhere like Disneyland would give an Apsie like EA fits to be surrounded by so many people. The difference is expectation. Different social groups have different expectations.

At our family reunions EA has never had any anxiety attacks. She has a pretty good idea as to who is going to be there and what they expect of her. She knows that her great aunts are going to want to know about her work and love life and she has answers ready for them. She knows that her cousins are going to ask about her job and her love life and she has answers ready for them too. And then she has outs. She knows that she can escape when it gets to be a bit too much. And she does. No one expects her to be front and center all day every day. And if she chooses to sit in a corner and read the day away no one is going to accuse her of being anti-social. Someone might come and talk to her, make her play a game or two of cards but she knows that she can escape.

Similarly when we go somewhere where there are just gads of people, she knows that she doesn't actually have to interact with anyone she doesn't know. She doesn't have to smile and think of witty answers to questions nor does she have to pretend as if she cares about the orange taffeta dress the maid of honor wore that clashed with her red hair. She doesn't have to pretend she noticed that the maid of honor had red hair or that her dress was a summer color when it is obvious the MOH is a winter person. My sister doesn't even know what that means. God bless her.

What I have found to be helpful to my sister in cases where I know that floundering is to take over the conversation. EA has voiced her frustrations in small talk over the years. I have never understood why she can't just make small talk. It's not hard. It's been frustrating for me to understand why she always has a problem with something as simple as small talk. It's pointless conversation that you don't always mean and isn't really important. A concept she also doesn't understand.

But as she is my sister and I love her I have taken to watching her and noticing signs of distress. If I feel that she is at her limit I interject myself into the conversation and take over. I have no problems with commandeering a conversation and doing all the talking. It's easy for me and EA knows that, so long as I am talking she isn't expected to contribute to the conversation.

Again, it all boils down to expectations. If she knows what is expected of her in a conversation or if she knows that she doesn't have to worry about talking too much or too little then she isn't going to be anxious.

To make an Aspie's life easier when going into any social setting, help them know exactly what they are expected to do or say and I am sure that they will be grateful for the assistance.

Heck, your favorite aspie might even begin to expect it.


*Not to be confused with Great Aunt Agnes or anyone who is real or living.

Treatment for Asperger's disorder (the nitty gritty)

Yesterday I was discussing having Asperger's with a group of people, and the topic of medication came up.  The simple question is:  Are there medications specifically designed for treating people with Asperger's?

The simple answer is, no. Autism, no matter where you are on the spectrum, isn't something that can be cured or controlled through medication.  That being said, however, there are many drugs that can be prescribed to treat the symptoms of Asperger's, which are detailed in the excellent Mayo Clinic page on the subject.  SSRIs can be used to help control the repetitive movements as well as help anxiety, for example, and stimulants (much as would be prescribed for ADHD or ADD) can help the Autistic person to remain focused on a task.  I don't take any medication, but my psychiatrist has suggested that I might consider an SSRI and has a prescription for me whenever I might choose to fill it. 

So, how do you treat Asperger's?  Training, training, training, and practice in social skills, behavioral and educational intervention, psychotherapy, and similar treatments that depend on the severity of the symptoms and each individual's manifestation of the disorder.  What it all comes down to is practice, and training, and learning by rote.  We Aspies have to learn to recognize social cues, body language, general diplomatic social mores (this was and still is my particular difficulty) and a myriad of other things with the same difficulty as if learning a foreign language, and this just takes discipline and practice.  It's a tough road to follow, but it is possible.  I did it, with the erudite mom guiding me every step of the way.  Neither of us knew at the time that I had Asperger's or that she was doing exactly the right thing to train me to handle it and to be a productive, educated, and competent individual, but through the grace of God that is exactly what happened.  

Emotions

One of the reasons therapists really REALLY wanted to classify EA as bipolar was because she was so "emotional," and it really does seem like she is. I cannot tell you how many times we--especially the Erudite Brother, who is extremely rational to the point of being rather annoying about it--would tell her to take a deep breath, calm down, and try to think rationally...which she had a very difficult time doing.

It's commonly thought that those on the Autism Spectrum are lacking on the emotional front, at least when it comes to wearing your heart of your sleeve, which our EA definitely does. This is not only NOT true, because they of course do have emotions to varying degrees, it's not what the problem was all along anyway.

EA sees the world from her own unique perspective and has a very hard time seeing it from any other. It's not that she lacks empathy, she has it, but it's limited to what she understands viscerally--at the easy kind of empathy that comes naturally to most moral, ethical people. If she has to learn it by rote because it's beyond that visceral understanding, she has a harder time recognizing it in others, and finds it utterly impossible to replicate it in herself.

I've come to realize that she's not really being emotional, per se, but frustrated. She sees the world entirely through EA glasses, and feels very strongly that she is right about...well, whatever the issue is. If someone doesn't share her unique EA vision about the right thing to do in any given situation, she gets extremely agitated because for pete's sake, can't that other person see that she's right and they aren't? Since she sees the world in black and white she has never understood why she couldn't just tell the other person what they were doing wrong--with many disastrous results growing up, especially in her teens. Once she got worked up about any aspect of this she'd get distraught, and it took me hours--HOURS--to talk her down back to reality. It was exhausting for both of us because she really didn't understand and I could see that she didn't understand, worse, there was no way I could help her understand. It always came down to "Honey, the rest of the world doesn't see it the way you do, and you just don't have any more right to tell people what to do than they have to tell you what to do (and you know much you hate that)."

"But they're wrong," she'd wail, and we'd have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Did I mention hours? Add to this the unequivocal fact that she's as pigheaded as I am (although not as experienced and I always outlasted her, not that I had much choice, I couldn't leave her like that), it was exhausting, all right. Try as she might, she never understood why this happened over and over again--until now.

She is certainly capable of deep and abiding emotion, and she recognizes it in others when it's something she shares--love, honesty, loyalty, compassion, etc. She's not so good at recognizing emotions she doesn't share, like hatred, distrust, envy, bitterness and the like. This is very endearing in her, but it also gets her in trouble from time to time.

But that's another story for another time from the Erudite Mom.

Erudite Sister

Greetings All!

I'm the sister and from time to time I too shall be logging on and giving my own two cents about what it was like to grow up with an aspie for a sister. Ever since she's been properly diagnosed all of those weird things she's said and done now make a whole world of sense. I have almost 5 years of experience working with kids from first grade to high school who have a wide range of special needs both physically and mentally, which allows me to look back and understand much better why it is my sister behaved or reacted the way she did in certain situations. If only we knew then what we know now. But because the use of Time Turners are heavily monitored by the Bureau of Magic (in the US it's the bureau not ministry), we don't have the ability to turn back time and correct the incidents that have made her life harder. What I hope to do is give little vignettes into our lives as kids and reflect on my reactions and discuss what I did or did not do and what would have been easier on my sister.

Of course, as a kid, when your sister is driving you crazy and you want to drive her crazy right back, you're not about to take her tweaked brain into account. No matter how much you might love her.