Making friends

I just want to remind others, that I am giving tips of the day on autism and Asperger's Syndrome, yet, each child, each case can be different. These are stories of my son. These are stories about our life. Obviously they are all going to vary from home to home or person to person.

Most people with Asperger's have real issues when it comes to making friends. They think so differently, that it is hard for people to relate to them. In most cases, and in Taylor's case until only recently, he was the same way. He could care less if someone liked him or not. He had better things to do with his time. There are match box cars, legos, pokeman cards, video games and computer games. Who could want more?????

Since most of the people really don't care, then there are some things that go along with that. They don't care what their hair looks like, or if they have taken a shower or brushed their teeth. There really is not a point in their mind. It may be a part of their routine, as implemented by the family, but if that was not there, then, it would never happen.

Our Taylor has been wanting to make friends in the past couple of years. He really fell into the wrong crowd when a group of kids said that he could be their friend and they would protect him from the bullies. GREAT.... right? What every mother wants, someone sticking up for her son. Well these kids were very unsupervised kids whose parents don't give a darn about them. There were MANY issues. Taylor learned the hard way that they were using him. They took advantage of him. They used him and threatened him if he ever ratted them out. We went to the school about this. We did everything that we could, even getting the police involved. Where did that lead us???? Telephone calls in the middle of the night that were vulgar and threatening. We had one mother come to my home wanting to beat me up as I kept sending the police each time she would harbor my disabled child each time he ran away due to not being able to communicate. It was a HUGE mess!!!!

That then led Taylor into seeking friendships to people that were nice to him. Sometimes we are nice to people because it is the right thing to do, not because we want to be best buds with them. We have some people that really were trying to be nice to our son, and our son took that as them being his closest friends. They were over at our home often, so it was natural for them to connect with him. Now the social part of things however.... for example, as examples are the best. We had a birthday party for Taylor. He wanted it to be a poker party so that is what we did. We had a kitty of junk food.... chips, popcorn, sodas, candy, etc....etc... etc.... We invited people over that had been over to our home many times before and considered a part of our family. They were here to celebrate Taylor. We had the roughest time getting Taylor off of the computer. The social skills just aren't there. It was hard to watch but we kept trying to re direct him.

He would then run to these people when he wasn't able to communicate. He would run to them when he would no longer want to go to school for frustration in failing grades and for being bullied, and for fear. Instead of now sitting with those people that he wants to be his friend, he would get their attention and run from them also. It makes no sense to someone like you or I, yet, that is Taylor and that is how his brain works.

Autism Tip of the day! Early signs of autism in a small child are movements that repeat themselves. For many, this is flapping their hands. For some, it is clapping their hands often, and my son did this when he was small... for everything, he clapped. Sometimes it is a slow and steady rocking movement, and sometimes it is sitting on the floor and turning on their heineys in circles. I don't know if it was a sign of autism or not, but my son used to slobber on himself a lot when he was smaller. I would say that persisted until he was 7 or 8 a lot, but got somewhat better and stopped pretty much at 10. If he gets really worked up now, he will slobber from time to time.