Call for Help from new HS mom w/ socially-challenged son

[dharmacat]

My dh and others are trying to get me to reconsider idea of HS ds (7) who isn't interested in peer social interactions. (DS may have "Asbergers", though not diagnosed) Anyhow, can anyone reassure me that social skills/ experience, etc. CAN be done while HS such a child (who would need more "coaching" than a typical 7 yr old). Further--can someone point to a program/ system that they used for this? A "program" would satisfy my Engineer-minded doubting dh.

[Verity]

I am homeschooling my three boys, oldest has Aspergers. One of the common issues with Aspies is that they experience anxietym especially in groups and the added stress of the teasing and constant social interactions in a classroom really set my son off.

Bringing him home allowed him to decompress and really focus on the issues he needed to focus on - some academic. some social.

We ended up going to a local non-profit organization that offered Social Skills Groups, met once a week and had other kids in our son's age range that all struggled with social issues, there were several boys with Aspergers, some with ADD, some with OCD/anxiety. They all learned how to play games and interact with others in a safe environment. It was great - would recommend something like this to anyone.

Good luck with finding the right set off curriculums and assistance for your son!

[Critterfixer]

The younger of my twin boys is hFA, and I'm an Aspie. One reason I elected to home-school my boys is to socialize them! I endured enough teasing and mental abuse to ensure that I am very cautious around people and always more likely to mistrust than trust anyone. I wanted to be sure that my children did not grow up with that legacy of torture. I spent most of my time at the private schools I attended (up until my mother decided to home-school me) hiding and trying to avoid the other children.

In contrast, both of my boys are ready to play with anyone, regardless of whether the child is older or younger. My hFA son shares his toys readily, and will join in any game being played, even if he ends up playing around the game, rather than in it. He has not been forced to see himself as different and therfore inferior, as would likely have happened had he been in a regular school.

[dharmacat]

Thank you Critterfixer & Verity for your valuable input.

[Jennifer-72]

I have a 6 1/2 year old ds with asd. A couple of books that I have found helpful that are not necessarily for kids on the spectrum are Raise Your Child's Social IQ by Cathi Cohen and Teaching Your Child The Language of Social Success by Duke, Nowicki and Martin. Both have lots of practical ideas in them.

 

HTH

[dkpalaska]

He has not been forced to see himself as different and therfore inferior, as would likely have happened had he been in a regular school.

 

:iagree:

 

Mine has had the same experience. He is figuring out as he grows (now almost 10) that he is different, but it is being done in a gentle and supportive atmosphere, at his pace. I don't think there's anything that can replace that.

 

I understand your husband's questioning; I'm a mechanical engineer myself and like to see proofs. Unfortunately there is going to be an element of trust involved, because who knows what would have happened on the paths not chosen? There are some schools, private and public, that I've read about that are exceptional at helping children on the spectrum. But they seem to be few and far between. The statistics, and autobiographies of adult Aspies/HFAs, would seem to show that the vast majority of private and public schools are nondescript at best at helping kids on the spectrum prepare for life, and quite often become personal hells.

 

That said, there are very good programs out there to help with socialization while homeschooling: the social skills classes (although quality varies), speech therapy that focuses on pragmatics, Social Stories, facial recognition software, and perhaps most of all - your ability as the one who loves him most to build on his individual strengths and help him learn to compensate for his weaknesses.

 

You can find books about Asperger's and homeschooling on Amazon.

 

Good luck!

[heart'sjoy]

RDI works on the part of the brain that is the most underconnected to build up weak nerve pathways.

 

The newest autism research uses MRI's of active brain activity during actual brain processes that autistic persons are weak on.

 

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08261/912610-114.stm

 

 

And a more technical version of how the brain can remyelinate in targeted therapy/use of the underconnected/ underused pathways.

 

 

New Brain Imaging Research Reveals Why Autistic Individuals Confuse Pronouns

 

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2011) — Autism is a mysterious developmental disease because it often leaves complex abilities intact while impairing seemingly elementary ones. For example, it is well documented that autistic children often have difficulty correctly using pronouns, sometimes referring to themselves as "you" instead of "I."

See Also:

Mind & Brain

• Autism
  
• Child Development
  
• Neuroscience
  
• Disorders and Syndromes
  
• Intelligence
  
• Psychology
  

Reference

• Autistic spectrum
  
• Functional neuroimaging
  
• Social cognition
  
• Gluten-free, casein-free diet
  

 

A new brain imaging study published in the journal Brain by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University provides an explanation as to why autistic individuals' use of the wrong pronoun is more than simply a word choice problem. Marcel Just, Akiki Mizuno and their collaborators at CMU's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) found that errors in choosing a self-referring pronoun reflect a disordered neural representation of the self, a function processed by at least two brain areas -- one frontal and one posterior.

"The psychology of self -- the thought of one's own identity -- is especially important in social interaction, a facet of behavior that is usually disrupted in autism," said Just, a leading cognitive neuroscientist and the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at CMU who directs the CCBI. "Most children don't need to receive any instruction in which pronoun to use. It just comes naturally, unless a child has autism."

For the study, the research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the brain activation pattern and the synchronization of activation across brain areas in young adults with high-functioning autism with control participants during a language task that required rapid pronoun comprehension.

The results revealed a significantly diminished synchronization in autism between a frontal area (the right anterior insula) and a posterior area (precuneus) during pronoun use in the autism group. The participants with autism also were slower and less accurate in their behavioral processing of the pronouns. In particular, the synchronization was lower in autistic participants' brains between the right anterior insula and precuneus when answering a question that contained the pronoun "you," querying something about the participant's view.

"Shifting from one pronoun to another, depending on who the speaker is, constitutes a challenge not just for children with autism but also for adults with high-functioning autism, particularly when referring to one's self," Just said. "The functional collaboration of two brain areas may play a critical role for perspective shifting by supporting an attention shift between oneself and others.

"Pronoun reversals also characterize an atypical understanding of the social world in autism. The ability to flexibly shift viewpoints is vital to social communication, so the autistic impairment affects not just language but social communication," Just added.

Autism was documented for the first time in 1943, in a landmark article by Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University. In that first article, Kanner noted the puzzling misuse of pronouns by children with the disorder. "When he [the child] wanted his mother to pull his shoe off, he said: 'Pull off your shoe.'" Kanner added that, "Personal pronouns are repeated [by the child with autism] just as heard, with no change to suit the altered situation." Because his mother referred to him as "you," so did the child.

Just's previous brain imaging research in autism has shown that other facets of thinking that are disrupted in autism, such as social difficulties and language impairments, also may be attributed to a reduced communication bandwidth between the frontal and posterior parts of the brain. He refers to this as the "Theory of Frontal-Posterior Underconnectivity." In each of these types of thinking, the processing is done by a set of different brain regions that includes key frontal regions, and the lower frontal-posterior bandwidth limits how well the frontal regions can contribute to the brain's networked computations.

The brain's communication network is its white matter, the 45 percent of the brain that consists of myelinated (insulated) axons that carry information between brain regions. An emerging view is that the white matter is compromised in autism, specifically in the frontal-posterior tracts. In a groundbreaking study published in 2009, Just and his colleagues showed for the first time that compromised white matter in children with reading difficulties could be repaired with extensive behavioral therapy. Their imaging study showed that the brain locations that had been abnormal prior to the remedial training improved to normal levels after the training, and the reading performance in individual children improved by an amount that corresponded to the amount of white matter change. Ongoing research at the CCBI is assessing the white matter in detail, measuring its integrity and topology, trying to pinpoint the difference in the autistic brain's networks.

"This new understanding of what causes pronoun confusion in autism helps make sense of the larger problems of autism as well as the idiosyncrasies," Just said. "Moreover, it points to new types of therapies that may help rehab the white matter in autism."

In addition to Just and Mizuno, a psychology doctoral candidate and first author of the study, the research team included CMU's Yanni Liu, a postdoctoral associate, and Timothy A. Keller, a senior research psychologist; Duquesne University's Diane L. Williams, an assistant professor of speech-language pathology; and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Nancy J. Minshew, a professor of psychiatry and neurology.

This research was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Autism Speaks Foundation.

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If you want more research: Dr. Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

All of this yet, there is not any longterm research MRI's to prove that any particular therapy remyelinates the underconnected areas that show up in all autistic adults regardless of how high or low they start out as children.

 

After a year of RDI therapy ds9 has improved from about age 2 in some nonverbal social skills to age 6.

 

I wanted to work on something that would rebuild the foundation since the autistic brain gets progressively worse in underconnectivity into adulthood.

 

Please take all of this FWIW because I'm not a research scientist. I'm just a mom who had to make a decision for mine.:grouphug:

[heart'sjoy]

I missed answering part of your originally question about homeschooling.

 

RDI recommends homeschooling because it allows for more targeted therapy interactions with your child than after school when they are already tired and stressed.

 

There are several posts on this subforum on how people use RDI at home.

 

A quick example for us: DS and I are working on drawing a square, and then coloring in 1/2, then 1/2 of what is left over, then again 1/2 of what is left as part of a kids into to calculus. But my main goal as we both draw and color on our individual papers is to give him an opportunity to match my work in speed and accuracy without any type of prompting. As a bonus we even came up with a joke about having your cake and eating it too. It's truly possible in this scenario. Learning to joke is another skill we're working on.:)