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be helpful for me to explain some of the problems he has so that you might be able to see the affect that having this condition has on his life and the way he behaves.

James suffers from poor concentration. Standing still for more than a few minutes is really difficult for him. If I am trying to chat to him he will be hopping from leg to leg, moving his head so that he can look anywhere except at me and sometimes he will do silly things like stand on his own foot. We believe that he actually gets comfort from the sensation he gets when he hurts himself this way. Usually in this situation I would remind him that he is hurting himself and he will usually stop doing it. James is under the impression that we know exactly what he is thinking so sometimes he will stop in the middle of a conversation and expect us to automatically know what he was going to say. When someone else is talking to him he will expect them to know what he is thinking too and if I am in the room he will look at me, expecting me to answer for him.

Play for James is role play based. What I mean by that is if James is playing at something, it will always be a scene from his favourite TV programme and he will get very angry if someone tries to change the scene or move any of the props. If another child comes to play for any reason, James will not know what to do and I have to play with them for most of the time putting structures there that make him feel comfortable. Lining cars up is a game that is played to extremes in my house. So many times I have tripped over a line of cars in the living room as both boys have this habit of making really neat lines with their cars and both of them know exactly which car goes where and in what sequence.

James has difficulty with words. We had a problem at school recently where James was getting really angry and disruptive in the classrooms at school. It turned out that some of the teachers called the children by their surnames. Now James found this very difficult to cope with. He had be known as James or James Haxby, never just Haxby. He couldn't understand why the teacher was calling him by a name that was not his. So you see James was becoming upset because this teacher was looking at him but calling him by somebody elses name. Does that make sense? I hope so.

We have watched other children the same age as James shy away from him. He can be very strange at times but I have also watched them bully and be really nasty to him. James is always bullied. He has

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