Aspie kids on TV
Nov. 11th, 2011 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
henry_the_cowThe last episode of Educating Essex including a storyline about a child in the final year of school who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. The programme showed the special needs teacher teaching him about basic social skills and meeting with his mother. We also saw some of his interactions with the other kids and his use of the special needs facility when he needed some space. He seemed a friendly kid and the other pupils seemed to get along with him. He clearly needed his teaching assistant. Apparently he used to live in Spain and the Spanish school held him back in primary school, so he was having a hard time keeping up with the rest of the class.
Another documentary showed a different Aspie kid. The programme's title, The Growing Pains of a Teenage Genius, pretty much summed up the story. This kid was obsessed with maths and had passed his A-level at 11. The programme showed him taking an OU maths degree at 13, and beginning to lose confidence in this self-definition because he was sruggling to keep up. (From my own experience, I'd say that can be a valuable lesson to learn, but it isn't a pleasant one). As with the first programme, we saw some of his attempts to make friends with other kids. He seemed generally less socially successful, because his oddities tended to push people away. By comparison, although the child in Educating Essex was still socially awkward, he was more endearing to his peers.
Both documentaries showed the importance of having a sympathetic school with some provision for AS support. Taken together, they showed some of the range of people who have Asperger's. I have the feeling that the "teenage genius" notion is quite widely held (perhaps as a result of films like Rain Man); the Educating Essex episode showed that academic success isn't a defining notion of Asperger's. Both showed the difficulty that the essentially good-natured children had in fitting in to the complex social world of school.
At first, I was surprised the "teenage genius" kid had only recently been diagnosed. Obviously, we only saw edited extracts of his life, but I'd have thought anyone with any experience of Aspie kids would have hazarded a diagnosis within five minutes. Although on reflection, parents often need an incentive to seek a diagnosis; it's only when something starts going wrong in their child's life that they look for a way to deal with it. Also, it can be quite hard to accept that your child is sufficiently un-normal that their behaviour constitutes a medical condition and that they may face problems for the rest of their life.
I hope both kids manage to find their way in adult life. I think they both have a good chance of doing so.
Another documentary showed a different Aspie kid. The programme's title, The Growing Pains of a Teenage Genius, pretty much summed up the story. This kid was obsessed with maths and had passed his A-level at 11. The programme showed him taking an OU maths degree at 13, and beginning to lose confidence in this self-definition because he was sruggling to keep up. (From my own experience, I'd say that can be a valuable lesson to learn, but it isn't a pleasant one). As with the first programme, we saw some of his attempts to make friends with other kids. He seemed generally less socially successful, because his oddities tended to push people away. By comparison, although the child in Educating Essex was still socially awkward, he was more endearing to his peers.
Both documentaries showed the importance of having a sympathetic school with some provision for AS support. Taken together, they showed some of the range of people who have Asperger's. I have the feeling that the "teenage genius" notion is quite widely held (perhaps as a result of films like Rain Man); the Educating Essex episode showed that academic success isn't a defining notion of Asperger's. Both showed the difficulty that the essentially good-natured children had in fitting in to the complex social world of school.
At first, I was surprised the "teenage genius" kid had only recently been diagnosed. Obviously, we only saw edited extracts of his life, but I'd have thought anyone with any experience of Aspie kids would have hazarded a diagnosis within five minutes. Although on reflection, parents often need an incentive to seek a diagnosis; it's only when something starts going wrong in their child's life that they look for a way to deal with it. Also, it can be quite hard to accept that your child is sufficiently un-normal that their behaviour constitutes a medical condition and that they may face problems for the rest of their life.
I hope both kids manage to find their way in adult life. I think they both have a good chance of doing so.
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Date: 2011-11-13 12:15 am (UTC)Particularly given that he had a severely autistic younger sister, so his parents were presumably at least a little tied into a community of people who'd recognise it!
However, I dunno... it's complicated, and especially so in children whose dramatically advanced abilities give them a reason to be out of sync with their peers. Giftedness, especially profound giftedness, often comes with a set of over-excitabilities which have, AIUI, a large overlap with ASD symptoms. And it's sufficiently understandable that one's 4yo who is intellectually 8yo has difficulty connecting with other 4yos that it can be hard to determine causes, if there isn't an obviously abnormal behaviour going on.
This useful book suggests that there are two keys to distinguishing just-gifted from gifted-with-ASD: in brief, (a) how does the child get on with others who are intellectual peers (b) how much insight the child has into how s/he is perceived by others.
Although on reflection, parents often need an incentive to seek a diagnosis; it's only when something starts going wrong in their child's life that they look for a way to deal with it.
And in fact, will psychologists diagnose an ASD if there is not something going wrong? The Baron-Cohen article (which I had misremembered - it does find the AQ distribution significantly shifted rightwards in mathematicians etc., just not as far as one would expect going from the stereotype) talks about a number of people they tested meeting the clinical criteria for Asperger's, but not being diagnosed because there was no distress.
Also, it can be quite hard to accept that your child is sufficiently un-normal that their behaviour constitutes a medical condition and that they may face problems for the rest of their life.
Undoubtedly! I do think it can sometimes also be hard to tell - and indeed, I'm not sure I believe that there is a Platonic answer. I'm sure I've mentioned the insight that came out of DH's illness for me, that diagnoses are labels on clusters of individuals with clustered sets of signs and symptoms - sometimes there's a convenient test that gives a yes/no answer, but not always. Sometimes (as in the multicentric Castleman's disease diagnosis that might or might not apply to DH) it's clear that the concept being labelled really is fuzzy, and the label is importantly socially constructed.
My suspicion - and I'd be seriously interested in hearing what you think - is that there are some people who clearly do have Asperger's, some who clearly do not, and some who TBH might get or not get a diagnosis depending on their circumstances, who does the diagnosing, what day it is when they see them, etc. etc., and where that isn't a question of whether they've been misdiagnosed but really of which side of a socially constructed line you choose to put them.
ETA: this impression mostly comes from conversations here where there are many parents whose children have been diagnosed with Asperger's, whose parents of teachers have suspected them of it but who on full evaluation have been said not to have it, and several who have had fluctuating sets of diagnoses, e.g. what was thought to be Asperger's later diagnosed as ADHD+dyspraxia, or weirder variants.
Currently, to put my cards on the table, I think: were I a child today, I would probably qualify for and perhaps benefit from an ASD diagnosis; DH's brother might well also have qualified and benefited; C would not qualify, but does benefit from some of the same kind of support that he'd get if he had one. None of us is very far from the line around that cluster, though!