The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I highly recommend Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which apprently now is being made into a movie. The main character Christopher is a 15 year old with Aspergers. He's high functioning but has severe sensory issues and lack of empathy.

I actually thought it was a mystery--a neighbor's dog has been killed and he is going to find out who did it. But that "investigation" doesn't go very far and instead the novel is really about understanding Christopher's view of the world but perhaps even more importantly, how the rest of the world--especially his parents--deals with it. From the perspective of a parent of a chile with Aspergers (though not nearly as severe), it succeeds in every way for me. I gobbled it up in half a day.

Adults constantly get annoyed at Christopher for his behavior, even swearing at him, not realizing that it corresponds to a clear logic. The problem is that logic is not immediately apparent to anyone except people who know him very well. That puts a strain on his parents, though without spoiling anything I will say that some of their reactions are a bit over the top.

But his navigation of new environments felt spot on. As he is inundated with new problems, he does his best to work them out according to his own logic, all the time largely unaware of how it affects other people. So as it turns out, the book is quite sad but he feels successful.

Read more...

Op-ed on CMS and autism

This blog focuses on Latin America, yet one of the most viewed posts was on Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and how it utterly fails with regard to autism. I took my family's own very negative experience and boiled it down to an op-ed, which was just published in Charlotte Viewpoint. My son has truly blossomed in the months since we finally removed him from CMS. It is a terrible and even damaging environment for children with autism.

Read more...

CMS and Autism: Does Anyone Care?

Picture this scene. The Dean of Students at a top CMS school, Irwin Elementary, openly mocks a 10 year old autistic child by calling him a two year old in the hallway. The Dean of Students then gets angry, indeed very vocally angry with the parents, at the child's response to the insult, and conveniently omits what he said to provoke it. Later the principal admits in writing it happened, but dismisses it as unimportant.

Just happened last week to my son. And no one in CMS cares.

Read more...

Autism at CMS Part 2

Very big news on the autism front is that the term "Asperger's" will no longer be used. A new term for autistic kids like mine who have behaviorial problems will be Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, a mouthful boiled down to the acronym DMDD.

Hopefully this will help officials at Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools understand autism better. At this point all we hear from the school system is that meltdowns are the child's choice, and we are told repeatedly just to talk to our son so he will understand he's making bad choices. Despite the fact that meltdowns are extraordinarily common in kids with high functioning autism--so common they now are part of a special label--CMS officials insist that they are not characteristic of how they understand autism. Update: reading more closely, the article doesn't explicitly link autism and meltdowns but rather just mentions them together. So we'll have to wait and see.

The problem is that CMS makes virtually no effort as an institution to understand autism. Teachers and EC teachers alike tell us how little training they have, and we know there are no programs--absolutely none in a huge school system--for kids with high functioning autism. I will not hold my breath, but with luck the DSM-5 shift will force CMS to acknowledge certain facts. Aside from a few committed individuals in some schools, there is incredible resistance to acceptance.

Read more...