Some Asperger's Books Are Just Idiotic

Cool rain. Wet pavement smell wafting on the ocean breeze.

Marching band booming. Drumbeats. Christmas carols beaming through the air. Steady rain coming down.

The annual Holiday Parade in our small town on Florida's Atlantic coast was rainy. But blessedly cool, and appropriately holiday-feeling.

NJ marched in the parade with his Scout pack. Not only that, he was one of the volunteers who didn't ride on the float - he wanted to walk alongside it and hand out Christmas flyers to the spectators along the route.

Kid loves to play to the crowd. It's kind of counterintuitive. He really enjoys selling and talking with total strangers and making his "spiel."

And he's damn good at it. Like, seriously.

When he sold popcorn for the Cub Scouts at the mall, a woman came up to me after falling victim (er, I mean, being swayed) by his persistent sales pitch. She said: "Is this your kid?" I was like, oh hell, here we go. She says: "He is the best salesman I have ever met, period. And I am being totally serious." She was about 70 years old and fully under his spell.

Now.

If I had read certain books about Aspergian kids, and believed that every word applied to NJ, it's possible we never would have joined the Cub Scouts in the first place.

I remember reading one particularly crappy book that literally said: Asperger's kids don't form friendships. They can't manage the subtle non-verbal communication, blah blah blah.

It didn't say that they had difficulty. It said, they didn't form friendships. Period.

If that's true, then why would we even bother with Cub Scouts? Why even go through the trouble of enrolling him in social group therapy? For that matter, why not just shut him up in his room and let him pursue his bizarre "special interest" whatever that might be (I hear it's supposed to be train schedules, but so far, no luck...)?

Because apparently he has one special interest and he doesn't care about people or anything outside of that.

I still am not sure what his one special interest is. Swimming? Spongebob?

Computer games?

Volunteering to help homeless families with his mom?

Playing "cowboys" on the bed?

Reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.

Playing with Legos.

Playing tag with his best friend Darren.

Going fishing.

Walking along the lakeshore behind his mother's house, collecting shells, sticks, rocks and waterlogged coconuts.

One of these, I'm sure, is his "special interest." I am just trying to get him to narrow it down. I wish he would hurry up and start excluding everything else so I could make more sense of him, and really start to pin him down.

You get my point.

He's certainly very focused in on his passions, when he's pursuing them. That's especially true of video games.

But he doesn't have one or even two areas that he pursues at the exclusion of all others.

And he DOES get non-verbal communication. He gets irony. He gets sarcasm. He gets and tells very good jokes. And yes, many of them are made up, and very off the wall... and very funny.

And yet... and yet. I am not in denial. He's an Aspergian.

Despite the huge growth strides he's been making, he still prefers to do his own thing. He still monologues (I think that's his main Aspie trait, actually, which he shares with his grandfather, big time).

And we still love him to pieces because of it, not in spite of it.

This past weekend, as I watched him handing out flyers to strangers along the two-mile parade route, charming them as he went, I didn't see AS. I wasn't thinking about symptoms, or fixes, or diagnoses. I wasn't worried about whether he was following the behavior patters outlined in the books at Barnes & Noble.

I was just drinking in the picture: a strong, outgoing, involved and beautiful seven-year-old Cub Scout doing his daddy very, very proud.

And to think: according to some of the "literature" out there, none of this could have happened.

Yet it did. And I thank God for it.

The Importance of Mastery

There is no doubt: Aspergians are, as a group, very bright.

In fact, if everyone were Asperger's, there would probably be no Gifted and Talented Education programs. Because everyone would be Gifted and Talented.

But pure intelligence only goes so far in life.

Unless someone can apply that intelligence in the real world, what's the point? I suppose you could say that you can simply enjoy your own profound thoughts. And many people do enjoy their own thoughts, profound or not.

But the real juice of life - the real fun - comes when you apply those thoughts to the world around you. When you help to shape reality for the better, and contribute your personal note to the ongoing symphony of reality... the One Big Song.

NJ certainly helps to shape his world. Just look at his mother's living room! There you'll find an entire civilization populated by small, plastic people. They are engaged in the most marvelous interpersonal struggles and triumphs. Often those struggles end with someone going to Playmobil jail, or falling out of a boat. I'm not saying life is easy in this world.

He also volunteers, serving in programs to help the homeless. And he really volunteers - he asks to do this stuff, and we pave the way.

But what he doesn't do on his own is... homework. Particularly math.

You might think that as an Aspie NJ would excel at math. But it's not his favorite. He much prefers reading, designing systems and virtual societies on the computer, etc.

Just goes to show you: Aspergians are just people. Just when you think you can make a generalization, it dissolves. That's why it's critical to "treat the symptoms, not the syndrome."

However, as much as he squirms and gripes about math homework, he's not wriggling off the hook.

We sit there with him every night. He does his math homework. And we emphasize effort, concentration and progress... and try to downplay outcome (whether he gets the answers right).

It can be a slog. Last night we sat there for 30 minutes. He worked through about 20 addition problems. They were three-digit numbers! Carrying the 1, and so forth. Pretty major stuff for a 1st grader!

But he made progress, even as he completed the night's work.

I found that trying different ways "in" to NJ's brain really helped. Instead of just telling him what to do, I wrote the problems out using grids and drew arrows to the different steps. I "overexplained" the steps. We emphasized the basics: start with the right-hand column, add those two numbers, put the right-hand number of that answer here... etc.

With effort, he learned. He noodled it. It just took what it took.

Bottom line: I believe NJ will be good at math. I believe there will be days when he enjoys math. The key thing - the most important outcome to me - is that he gains a sense of mastery over each phase of the learning process. Learning to add number is important. It can be very useful in life. But learning that you CAN master things that don't come easy... that's an even more useful lesson, to me.

By the end, we were high-five-ing... and he was doing the problems all on his own.

Even though NJ hates math, he's going to learn it.

The reward this night was two cookies and a glass of milk.

The rewards later - for learning how sustained effort can lead to mastery - will be much greater.

Peace.