I have moved over to WhittereronAutism.com. Please follow the link to find me there. Hope to see you after the jump! :)

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Time wasting


My good chum "moritherapy," who does all the psychobabble stuff, gives me a link to an article about how "autistic children read faces and interpret other people's emotional state." It is just the kind of thing I might have benefited from. [translation - at least three years ago]

Some autistic children are "notorious" for their inappropriate responses. Some poor luckless child scrapes their knee at playtime and the heartless autistic child with no soul nor empathy for the human condition, cackles with laughter. Some people are aware that the contrary is true, that in general autistic people have far more sensitivity to others, a greater degree of compassion, it is merely a bad wiring job in the "response department." Faulty cataloging and a dodgy retrieval system means that response 35a comes out instead of 53z.

The "paper" basically tells us that the autistic child is just dandy at reading a person's emotional state from their facial expression, although the paper far more detailed and interesting than that.

This information forces me to count the number of outrageously expensive books I have on this very topic. 'Picture' books with adult text, so that the parent can assist the child in learning this skill. When I think of the tortuous minutes I have wrestled with child and book on the sofa, in a vain attempt to persuade his eyes to look in the general direction of the very expensive book, it makes me want to sigh.

Whilst sighing is all very well and good for some, I prefer action. The most appropriate action for the current situation would be to hit myself on the head, with the very expensive book. More fool me for not realising, that if it is true, that this is a skill that he already had, then is it any wonder that he tried to escape? Diagnoses = terminal boredom.

6 comments:

Karianna said...

My son cries for people and animals he does not know when he sees they are hurt. And yet he definitely giggles when his younger brother is crying in pain. The magnitude of his response is either over or under, but never quite "just right!"

Anonymous said...

We get "opposite" emotions in our household--laughing when mad and visa versa. Great blog!!

Joeymom said...

I still have trouble convincing school personnel that Joey is just fine with reading emoitons- and is downright hypersensitive to mine. They keep staring at me saying things like, "But he's autistic!" and "but then you don't think he's disabled?" He just doesn't know what to DO about other people's emotions...

kills_with_arsenic said...

My son laughs at his sisters when they cry and at us, his parents, when disciplined. We're new to this whole autism thing, and we just don't know what to do about it. Can somebody please give me some advice? Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Dear Arsenic - I checked your blogger profile but can't find a blogsite or email address for you. My email address is on my profile.
Best wishes

kills_with_arsenic said...

Hi, Maddy, sorry...new to blogger also. :) My profile has been created, but kind of boring compared to yours.

 
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