It honestly was, to find out about the Asperger’s Syndrome! For years I’d felt and wondered about why my son was so different from the others – much more intense, particular, lack of imagination, rigid, sensorial, socially & behaviourally ‘can’t make it’, than the other kids I know – and feeling rather a failure as a mother, and a stay-home one at that!  Now I feel like I understand the ‘why’ part,  although I’m determined not to let this be an excuse for misbehavior, but to use a bit more understanding to redirect and train using more effective methods.

What this wonderful psychologist – Louise Clark from Stepping Stones (more good stuff about her in another post) remarked (and I thought quite good for normal kids even) was to:

1) Structure his environment even more than it already is – to the minute details, like sitting down at table time, drinking water time, washing hands time, play with rabbits time, … even for homework time, which we already break into 15min segments, to break even further to “after this paragraph, you may have a drink of water”, or “after 5 sums you may play with the rabbits for 1 minute”. Gosh…….I can feel the minutes ticking away already…

2) Provide more visual cues for all those areas that are a struggle – draw out and paste on wall, literally. Aspies are well known to tune out verbal cues but respond to visuals - verbal somehow doesn’t process so well in their head compared to visuals (which i found was true after trying couple of times writing out “Homework time” and pointing to it versus nagging) E.g sitting on chair for mealtimes (a real battle at our household with this guy who – with caning and scoldings stubbornly refuses to make friends with his chair) I have to draw or print out – food on table, boy on chair, boy holding fork & spoon, boy eating, boy continue to hold fork & spoon, boy continues eating, all done sitting on chair, boy done eating, finally can leave chair.

Object of all this is to change the ‘nagging’ to ‘pointing’ – to the pictures instead of verbal, which relieves the nagger (me) of the need to exercise the vocal chords unnecessarily and overly. Hmmm. It’s worth a try! Come out of the cupboards, you markers and velcro!

3) Social Stories. Now this is a new one for me. Social Stories were started primarily for kids with asperger’s and autism, but upon hearing of it (only just!) I thought it would work perfectly for all kids who are struggling with various issues throughout their lives! Basically Mum writes or collects social stories of whatever areas their kid is struggling in. Let’s say Greeting People (major major struggle for us). Write a real-life story of how Sam (my boy) is going to meet Third Grandaunt. He’d go up to the door, probably feel a bit nervous and shy, maybe feeling like he’d wanna hide or be someplace else, but when Third Grandaunt opens the door, he’ll try (no absolutes here like WILL which causes undue stress- just say “try”) to say HELLO, THIRD GRANDAUNT, and then he may enter the house and play with the dog. If he failed, story should end with how next time, he’ll try his best to do all that again and say hello to third grandaunt.

Social stories should be printed out and collected together, like in a book! And reviewed frequently so the child recollects the situation and rehearses the correct behaviour next time he encounters a similar situation. It should not only be on situations where they failed, but also record those where they did well, e.g the time he played well and shared with his younger brother Matthew. Write out the whole situation, maybe evn with pics, and keep them all in a book or file to be reviewed.

I thought this is quite a novel tool to do – time consuming though, but i can see why it would work through reinforcement – visually and through recollection. And what kid doesn’t like to read about his own life story in writing?!

You can find out more about social stories here. http://www.thegraycenter.org/store/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.display&page_id=30 

I thought the sample stories they wrote here were excellent. I’m going to try writing some for my boy and I’ll post them here! http://www.thegraycenter.org/store/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.display&page_id=20&CFID=1727293&CFTOKEN=94813459