My son, Emerson, is autistic.
Every now and then I get riled up about the news about Autism and what some folks think about it. Sometimes they are persuasive enough that I wonder, is discipline what my child is missing?
This is a farly personal post, but I wanted to share what autism is like in our life.
Emerson was diagnosed as moderately autistic, with hyper-activity and OCD. He's verbal and fairly well functioning, but has a lot of tics and is easily over-stimulated.
Here's a few examples of how autism affects our life:
- When driving in the car, if the baby starts crying, within 30 seconds of that Emerson starts tic'ing. He clicks his teeth, pulls his hair, and hums "his" song loudly. These are all signs of him being overwhelmed and overstimulated. If this happens, we have just a few minutes to pull over and get the baby calmed down, before he starts really tricking out (head slamming against the seats, biting himself, etc). Imagine this on a road trip. So no trips for us. The baby cries anytime we drive at night, so we can't go anywhere at night with the two of them together.
- This same thing happens to most any instance with noise stimulation. So if we pull up beside the lovely young teens blaring their music, we have the same problem as above. Makes for a long red light and a huge delay when we get where we were going as we have to calm him down.
- At school, every kid gets to sit on the first letter of their name on the alphabet rug. He can't. His letter is in front of the air conditioning vent and the feel of the air blowing against him "hurts."
- He can/will only eat beige foods. We have gotten that expanded to the browns/mauves and pale yellows though. When all the kids at school finished their project graphing candies, they got to eat them. He ate nothing. We haven't yet figured out whether we should make him "special" by having brownish foods for him alone every night while we eat something else. So far, we all eat brown food. Yay.
- to feel secure, he collects objects and stashes them in "his" corner. within minutes, he willl have a 3 foot tall pile of stuff collected and lined up in patterns underneath the dining room table and he panics when someone comes near it.
Those are just a few ways that it affects us, day to day. I don't want to debate whether it is or isn't medical, neurological, discipline, whatever. I just wanted to share some of the life of my brilliantly odd son.
To share your autism story, email me at sheree@ksgreathomes.com
~sheree~
Comments(14)