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Aspergers: A mother's story

At first glance you would never know that my child was autistic. He was just diagnosed at age 12 years old with Aspergers syndrome (a mild form of autism). This has made life for my son a lot easier, because before the diagnosis we spent years trying to understand why he would do the things he did or why was it so hard to get him to understand simple directions, when he could explain in great detail how and why each dinosaur was different. Sometimes he could not explain his actions.

He was 3 years old when we first noticed that he struggled with simple every day situations and was having trouble with speech. He was then diagnosed with being Developmentally Delayed with a speech impairment. We thought, ok good we can fix this. He went through a year of special education pre k with the school system. After his first year of kindergarten he was dropped from the special Ed program. We expressed our concerns with the school board and told them that he still needed help in school. They would only tell us that he did not meet their criteria for any resources from the school system. He would still struggle most days at school with academics and social issues.

Most of his school years leading up to now, we were always told that he was misbehaving and knew what he was doing. He would even get sent home from school because the teachers would not be able to get him to do any work, sometimes they could not even get him to stay up off the floor curled in a ball. We now know that a lot of those things would happen because he did not know how to ask for help with class work and sometimes he did not even know that he needed help, so he would just shut down. He would be so frustrated and not understand why he felt that way. He also has always had a hard time making and keeping friends. I would watch him, with my heart breaking, try to approach a group of peers and seem so out of place, so he would retreat back to his video games that was his safe haven. We would try to encourage him to do sports or activities that would help him socialize and he would still seem to be in a world of his own. Sometimes he would seem so alone, but at the same time he act like he did not care. I would wonder, did he realize that he was different than his peers.

I finally decided to do my own research on behavior problems in children and that is when I discovered Aspergers. The more I researched the more I realized that my son had a lot of the behavior traits of Aspergers.

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