Article about a parent connecting with autistic child..

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...through his special interest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magaz ... .html?_r=1

I like the colorful rock crystal as your avatar!

The language in the beginning really pisses me off...I mean its great the parents were able to figure out a way to re-connect with their child. But 'our son disappeared' kids with this form of autism are 'gone' by the age of three? While this kid was lucky enough to have parents who did keep trying and eventually were able to connect....just imagine all the poor kids who get treated as a shell with the person in it being 'gone' or 'dead' no wonder someone in that position might remain entirely stuck in their own head. They can probably perceive people think no ones there so why should they be there at all?

So yeah maybe some research as to what actually happens instead of the explination 'oh your child is gone now...nothing you can do' would be better for both the parents of such children and such children themselves as I am sure they are still 'there' just for whatever reason regress and lose skills they have doesn't mean the person is gone. SO yeah I don't know it just bothered me how it kept saying that in the article.

Cool article.

As for the language in the beginning, that's how it seems to these parents, that their child has just left.
The rest of the article goes on to explain how this is not the case at all and that to reconnect with their child they were able to engage in his interest and use it as a lever to draw him out into the world.
By doing so they discovered that their child was in fact very much still there and that he could be reached.

I really liked this story, thanks for sharing it.

I feel happy for the boy that his mother cared enough to connect with him through his special interest in Disney movies. Many children on the spectrum aren't so lucky to have a mother like her.

I was also bothered by the language that his mum used in the beginning. I didn't like her saying that her son had disappeared and he was gone either. I know I wouldn't want to be seen by an empty shell if I had his type of autism.

However, she did a lot of hard work connecting with her son instead of casting him aside.

I found the article very interesting. I enjoyed reading it.
As for the language at the start, its how it feels to them. this place is all about how things are from our perspective and how other people should learn to appreciate / deal with that. But when someone else describes their feelings from the other side its a problem?
i appreciated the honesty.