A bit of a harsh mother?

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  • Only to echo NT and FS - I've learnt so much through this thread about all aspects of these conditions and the truly amazing way in which people from all walks of live rise to meet the challenges thrown at them. Its also been interesting to look at some of the websites - I could never claim to be autisic or have aspergers but I have reached a degree of clarity on some of my behavioural patterns that hitherto I just thought were "odd".

    Thank you.

    And also - Fell Runner - the depth of love, care and affection you demonstrate on here for Mrs FR is astounding. If all of us ("normal" or otherwise) were lucky enough to have such a wonderfully giving and strong partner in our life, the world would indeed be a far better place. You are a complete marvel.
  • 'i know that it is deeply offensive to DG and to mrs FR for me to say that i would prefer it if boy1 did not have dyspraxia and Aspergers.'

    It's not. It's a reasonable & understandable response to most of the things you hear in the media & the 'horror stories' which stick in people's heads much better than 'person leads contented & productive life'. I'm lucky because with my family I've always had role models around to show that there are lots of dyspraxics & aspies who find themselves a niche, do well at work, have stable long-term relationships, bring up children, etc., and so i have to keep explaining this because it's the bit that no-one notices. No-one's ever going to run a news story on my Dad, a self-employed engineer who has only ever been in trouble over 2 speeding tickets. On Mum's side of the family then she's 5 brothers & a sister, & 4 of her brothers are definitely non-NT - one's married with 3 daughters, got a First from Oxford & has done something high-up in BT ever since, one has a long-term (20 yrs?) girlfriend & is stepfather to 2 & does forestry, one's a toxicologist & recently split up with his girlfriend of 10? years, & one's married with 5 children & runs a farm & campsite. Dad's brother (dyspraxic) is married with 2 children & is a consultant electrical engineer.
    My brother finding himself a girlfriend may have to wait upon a more conventional approach to personal hygiene though :(

    I can understand why people might want to compare me spending my GCSE year in a psychiatric ward to childhood cancer. But that wasn't caused by being dyspraxic, it was caused by bullying. there's a lot of ways being more NT would make my life more convenient, easier, more straightforward sometimes - but even the bad experiences have shaped who i am, and even giving me a pill to make me 'normal' from today onwards would make me a very different person. If all the Bad Stuff had never happened, then i don't think i'd have realised exactly how important the people everyone else wants to forget about are. and that would mean that i wouldn't be a charity trustee, i wouldn't make sandwiches for homeless people, i'd probably never have 'got religion'. I can completely understand wanting to be 'normal', but I'd loose too much by it. I'd like to think the rest of the world would too, without a different angle on things :)

    The other thing is that prenatal testing & selective abortion would probably mean me never having children. I can understand people being frightened of having a child who is 'different'. I'm not. But i do want to make sure that there is appropriate support around for any children i might have, and that people can learn to understand them, rather than engineer things so they don't exist. I never want to get into a position where i'm called 'irresponsible' for having children, without recognising that they could give to society more than they take. being dyspraxic is in itself annoying sometimes - i'd quite like it if it was a bit easier for me to learn the guitar, or if crowded pubs were less confusing. but what's really caused me problems is other people who just don't want to understand. Which is their problem, not mine.

    rather amusing thing happened at work on Monday (I work p/t in a bicycle shop). One of the workshop mechanics said 'We need to get an autistic person working here'
    Me: 'Why?'
    Mechanic: 'Cos then they could learn all the Shimano part codes, and we wouldn't have to keep looking them up all the time, we could just ask. Actually, they could learn all the Brompton parts, and all the part codes for everything. It'd be well useful!'
    [cue me launching into long explanation of why it doesn't quite work like that]
    This did make me happy though :)
  • After all my rants on People Who Dont Get It - many thanks to those of you who have read this. Hope it's interesting & I havent hopelessly confused everyone or got too muddled :)

    There's a few websites you might find interesting:

    Dyspraxia Foundation

    National Autistic Society

    The usual 'beware Wikipedia' rules apply, but this article on 'Autistic Community' might be a useful jumping-off point for the interested, & browsing Wikipedia further can come up with some really interesting stuff.

    WrongPlanet by & for autistic people.
  • slo shoslo sho ✭✭✭
    Another voice of appreciation here - thanks, this thread has given me lots of food for thought.
  • Another lurker here and more thanks.

    I think another reason not to eradicate people that are different in some way is that if we develop better mechanisms to enable them to become all they can become, it is likely to benefit other people too.
    Bit of an awkward sentence that... but what I mean is that it has happened before that someone designed a tap that was easier to use for disabled people, and then it turned out that a lot of elderly people were very happy with it too. They were not officially dissabled, just had less strength, and could just cope with normal taps, but the special taps were just easier for them. Similarly, I think the Ford Focus was designed specifically to make it easy for older people to get in and out, even though it wasn't marketed that way, and it's a very succesfull design.

    So I'm thinking that if we learn better to offer help and support to people with ASD and other conditions, it will also benefit the large number of people who have very mild aspects of it. When I read Temple Grandin's books I recognised a lot of traits in me and my family, just not as extreme. (I'm very visual and relatively easily sensory overloaded, one nephew had trouble learning to talk and struggled with social skills, other nephew is dyslexic and has some motor problems). My sister realised her son was dyslexic early on and took steps to help him, but it took another year before the school diagnosed him and got him 'official' help. If school are more aware of diversity and problems and solutions it should help more people than just the extremely affected ones.
  • just one light note on taking things literally


    boy1 watched the recent film awards on the news

    "guess what mum? turns out Borat is English. who'd have thought that?"

    :-)

  • Not only is he English, but cousin of one of the UK's top autism researchers (Simon Baron-Cohen). Prof. B-C is very quiet, & turned up to my 6th form wearing a neat brown suit to do a talk & some research on people there - exactly what you'd expect a Cambridge Academic to look like, except tidier. we were told lots 'DON'T MENTION ALI G!!! he'll get really upset about it!'.
  • When we first moved here I had to explain very carefully about fly fishing. :-))

    But I'm very embarrassed that people think I'm such a good partner for Mrs. I've made my share of mistakes, and we've had some very dark times, and our fair share of adventures too.

    Its very much a partnership of mutual strength. Once someone like Mrs commits themselves to anything they are frighteningly focussed on it, marriage and child rearing are no exceptions.

    She's a remarkable woman, with a brilliant mind. I simply thought it prudent at the time to grab her before anyone else did.

  • lol re the fly fishing FR



    you don't realise how complicated the english language is until you have to explain things to someone else.

    Boy1 asked me what "dark horse" meant, so i explained, and later heard him talking about something being the "light horse". then had to explain that we don't say that
    "but why not?"

    We just don't

    :-)

  • DG - someone suggested to me that since boy1 is able to remember minute detail about football and cricket statistics

    we should set him to looking at the form books in horse racing and make some money out of him

    (i am thinking about it)

    :-)

  • except that i don't agree with horse racing

  • Jasmine Lee O'neil says it all far better than I ever could:-

    http://greg.quuxuum.org/journal/o_neill.html
  • there was an article in this weeks sunday times magazine about dyspraxia

    it is actually looking at the Dore center - which we have used and we felt that it helped boy1
    although like the boy in the article, my son puts his improvement down to himself , not the exercises

    :-)

    but it also talks about what dyspraxia is

    can't find an online link to it
    it was called
    "making the right move"

  • Lurker - this article?
    I love this quote '“I’ve heard that Maggie Snowling is a very aggressive lady,” '. Well, she seems to like giving me tea & biscuits in exchange for experiments even if I can't make head nor tail of phonics. They are right that there are a lot of argumentative people about - but that applies across all fields i think, at least in Psychology. last week i heard from a lecturer in another field about an actual punch-up breaking out at a conference because one of the scientist had used in their paper title 'Anhedonia in the Rat', and True Behaviourists don't do that sort of thing because rats (and people) don't have objectively-measurable mental states. And these are the people who decide what is population-normal. (the week before the same lecturer was pretending to be a female rats displaying courting behaviour. They flap their ears round like helicopters).

    interesting series on wired. Personally I'm not too sure about using 'sensory integration' 'treatments' on children - when they used 'brushing' for me, they were deliberately trying to use the most overloading stimulus they could, repeated several times a day - which if you think about it is actually worse in sensory terms than hitting someone, except that it's allowed because NTs don't think like that.
    Nevertheless, I'll be following with interest - if once they actually start the treatment Caleb doesn't mind it, I'll be intrigued. But I don't think it's OK to give anyone an unpleasant experimental treatment without consent, especially if they can't get away.
  • that's the one


    boy1 was turned down by a study at cardiff this week
    as he does not come in the bottom 5% acording to the assessment i did on him
    can't remember the name of it - it was a gross motor check list thing

    he can catch small balls one handed - thanks to hours of practise using the "dore" exercises - so he scores higher - or lower can't remember
    than he would have if he had been tested before doing all the exercises



  • Dyscovery centre? They've seen brother a few times (& done some very useful stuff).
    I suspect that a lot of the Dore stuff is just a practice effect - if you make people throw beanbags enough, eventually they will get better at throwing beanbags. I know someone who uses it & swears by it, but i really can't see much improvement in them beyond simple practice that hasn't generalised much.
    Bottom 5% depends on what population norms you are using - which is the problem with a lot of these tests, that they aren't that well validated on NTs.
  • well, throwing bean bags whilst stading on a wobble board and doing distraction tasks has meant that he can throw and catch a cricket ball at speed
    he couldn't catch a big sponge football before we started
    so i think some movements can generalise
  • doesn't matter if it is practise effect
    if having a chart and a schedule and paying money motivates us and him and he gets more control and co-ordination

    end justifies the means


  • 'throw and catch a cricket ball at speed'
    <jaw drops>
    well done little lurker - I am seriously impressed!
    but... well.. i have never actually needed to throw a beanbag into a shoebox. i have needed to spend a lot of time learning to do specific things like typing, and time to mess around, read, be with friends... i do worry about very time-intensive programmes which promise a lot. even NT children need to learn things that aren't about how to be NT, too.
  • left and right handed!!












    not really

    :-)


    don't worry DG
    we stopped in the end because we all got sick of it
    even though it was only 20 minutes a day
    but i still think he has more co-ordintation with it than he had before

  • and his eye tracking is definately better
    he can and will read now
    he reads biographies

  • when i say he can read
    i mean he is able to keep his eye on the line
    i think he skim reads - which is ok for pleasure - he gets the gist and guesses the words he doesn't know

    actual reading is a whole other issue
    whih school don't seem to think is a problem
  • hmmm - given most of my family are hyperlexic not something i've so much experience of - but what is wrong with skim reading, then? most of what i do could be described as 'skim reading' journal articles, and guessing at silly words like 'tortuosity effects' - best way to get the gist of a lot of technical articles quickly. & if he reads for pleasure that is a muchly good thing.
  • WOOOOO WOOOOO

    boy1 is in the school rugby squad!!!!!!!!



    :-)))))))



  • he may not be the most skilled player
    but
    he always turns up
    always gives 100%
    and always listens to instructions and acts on them
    i think that is why they have picked him

    i feel like he just won a gold medal


    :-)

  • i'll be honest
    i was ready to comfort him
    we had already found out that you could still go to the training even if you weren't in the squad

    he
    never doubted he would be in the team
    although he thought the b team
    but i don't think there is a b team
    just a 20 boy squad

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