The Kids Who Beat Autism

[SheilaT]

3. This is what I got from the article.

Some kids, if they have the right kind of intensive one on one therapy, will come out more or less normal. Some will be more so than others. Other kids, will always be autistic.

My oldest son was always different from other kids, but it wasn't until he was 18 years old and half way through his senior year of high school that I got a name for that difference: Asperger's Syndrome.

Because he was different, I wound up doing what amounted to a lot of therapy with him, even though I wasn't doing it formally and certainly never thought of it that way. I didn't understand why I needed to rehearse many social things with him, but I did. It helped. He's now 31 and if you were to meet him, you'd simply see a somewhat shy and very intelligent young man.

It also helped that his first two jobs were working at a Warner Brother's store at the local mall over Christmas, and then working at a movie theater. Those are exactly the kind of dealing with the public jobs that most Aspies won't do well with, but he did, and probably helped him be more "normal".

He's currently getting a degree in physics.