Bringing Out the Talents of Autistic Spectrum Kids

Monthly Archives: August 2013

Tired young man
Why would a person who is young, brilliant, and talented be incorrigibly lazy?  Everyone tells him he has all the talent he needs to succeed, but he can’t figure out how other people do it.

He’s been told what an action plan is.  But even thinking about planning is already exhausting.  How can he line up his tasks so that the first step in the plan leads to a logical sequence of intermediate steps which would need to be taken in just the right order to achieve his goal?  He knows where he is beginning; he… Continue reading

Why should your Kindergartner take music lessons or practice playing an instrument when his chances of growing up to be a musician are next to nil?

According to neuroscientists, you probably have the very best tool for language comprehension training lying around your house somewhere.  Practicing an instrument rigorously trains the entire brain via a feedback loop that moves from the cochlea of the ear, through the more primitive brain stem (responsible for coordination of physical movement) to the cortex (the locus of higher-level brain functions) and back around again.

Nothing can match musical training for fine tuning language… Continue reading

At the age of five, all my son cared about was this silly game, Pokémon.  Any reasonable parent should try to persuade a child, who wasted the entire day organizing the “bug-like” Pokémon figurines into neat little rows, to take at least a fifteen minute break from the game, and learn his letters, or, at the very least, go outside and play on the swing.

I rued the day that I ever gifted him with the Pokémon game, which turned into such an all-consuming obsession!  I tried persuasion.  I tried bribery.  Nothing would take his attention… Continue reading

Slave DriversEver felt guilty about expecting too much from your Aspergers child?  Shouldn’t you indulge him because your heart is bursting with sorrow over his plight?  It’s not his fault, so shouldn’t you be the one to adapt?

Not according to the young adults I know who have come to terms with their condition.  They either rejoice in the payoffs from a heavy handed workload imposed on them as children, or wish they had been pushed to learn more as they grew up.  The large percentage of autistics, who stand a good chance of recovery, don’t mind… Continue reading

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