New to Site, I think my son has AS, thank goodness

nlj · Hummingbird Joined: Jun 23, 2008 Posts: 21

In the past couple of weeks, I've come to realize that my 11 year old son probably has Asperger's - and I'm so relieved. Here's the story

I married my husband a year and a half ago. He has full custody of his two kids, a boy and a girl, separated by only 13 months. The mother is absent (and who neglected them as babies), and has been for 6-7 years. So they call me mom. And I call them my kids.

My son, when I met him, was gifted with l.d. and was in speech therapy. He also had behavioral issues. We began counseling. The counselor (who had previously been at a highly respected developmental disabilities school), believed that all of his issues were related to his absent biological mother. This, of course, made sense.

My daughter, who is younger, spent less time with her bio mom, so that explained why she didn't have these issues.

My son entered 5th grade last fall and got all Fs his second quarter. He was moved out of the gifted class and into a "regular" class.

We stopped the counseling when my husband lost his job. He got another one soon, but we never returned to counseling. We were hearing about kids having success through martial arts. So we put him in Tae Kwon Do.

The third quarter he had the best grades of his life. Turns out his new "regular" class didn't have the bullies that his gifted class did.

But he started acting out the 4th quarter, right after knowing his good grades. So we thought he was just struggling to embrace achievement b/c of his low self-esteem.

FINALLY, a couple weeks ago, my mom suggested that the hand-flipping that he does was something that autistic kids do. She's a pre-school teacher (but she has her master's) - and she has autistic/AS kids almost every year.

I looked up symptoms of Autism and Asperger's and something CLICKED. Suddenly, I understood my son -

His one-sided conversations
His obsession with Transformers
Why he doesn't get our jokes
Why he takes everything so literally
His tendency to get bullied
His "inability" to return emotions
Fast speech
Hard time learning to ride bike, throw ball (despite loving baseball)

Anyway, my husband agrees with me, but he doesn't feel the need for an eval.

Also, I'm pretty sure my son also has AD/HD, the aforementioned L.D., and ODD, possibly anxiety and he definitely gets depressed.

We're homeschooling him and his sister next year (she became classified as gifted this year too!). They're barely learning anything at school and their non-school social experiences are way better than their public school ones (which are more anti-social than social).

Plus, we can let him begin learning about robotics earlier - he's said for years he wants to be a Robotics Engineer.

Anyway that's our story.