Jennifer Byde Myers jennyalice.com Just after the recent murder of Alex Spourdalakis, yet another parent has attempted to murder her autistic child. Services to help families are not available to the degree they are needed, often leaving parents of children with intense needs feeling abandoned, depressed, suicidal and, in some cases, homicidal. I just sincerely wish these conversations could be separate. They must remain separate. I know how it happens, how the conversations seem like they should go together. As parents of kids with intense needs, medical, mental or physical, we are each slogging through life, with easy days and hard days and harder days, until something really bad happens, then we are triggered to say to the world, “See, look how hard this is. Why doesn’t anyone care?” But the problem is that caregivers say this at the very same same time that someone was trying to kill their…
Year: 2013
Beth Ryan www.loveexplosions.net So, as an administrator of Parenting Autistic Children with Love and Acceptance, I’ve seen a lot of questions from parents asking, “Where were you when Kelli Stapleton needed help with her daughter, Issy?” And, “Did you donate to Issy’s treatment?” These questions are asked of Autistic activists and parents of Autistic children who are outraged at the attempted murder of Issy by her own mother, Kelli. Those that have zero empathy for Kelli. Those that believe that parents that would murder their own disabled children are as accountable as parents that murder their own non-disabled children–and that the prosecution of these criminals should reflect that without exception. Oh no, you do not get to lay the blame of this massive tragedy at my feet or at those of Autistic activists. Let me start by telling you where I was. I was first, and foremost, taking care of my own…
Brenda Rothman mamabegood.blogspot.com An adult’s response to an autistic child’s upset is the single, most important factor in whether the child’s upset is escalated or calmed. We must remain calm. We must understand — at a gut level — that the child’s reaction — whether to yell, hit, bite, or flail — is frustration and that is all. As “disorientation is one of the least bearable of all psychological experiences” (Neufeld & Maté), we must understand that children are disoriented by their emotions, frustrated by communication. It is not personal. It is not hate. It is merely frustration. When we begin to feel overwhelming emotions in response to our children’s actions — like sadness, upset, anger, fear, or resentment — we need to calm ourselves for the immediate moment. However you need to do that — by breathing, talking to yourself, repeating a mantra. For the long term, you will…
Adam Thometz angryautie.wordpress.com I recently came across a post by Lydia Brown at Autistic Hoya, one of my favorite autism/disability blogs, in which she creates a glossary of ableist vocabulary. The reason for including some of the words should be immediately apparent to anyone with their head in this century (eg. “retard,” “mongoloid,” “suffers from ___”) but there are some words, the inclusion of which seems questionable or just overly sensitive or PC to the average person (eg. “idiot,” “dumb,” “moron”). I myself was shocked to find these words as well but it turns out that these words have a dark history that most people are not apparently aware of. When I debate with someone about autism in real life, I might perform what the average person would see as nitpicking: criticizing the use of certain words or phrases. My reason for doing this is that they invisibly propagate the…
We’re excited to let you know that Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism is coming to Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park on Tuesday June 25th at 7:30 pm. Editors Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Jennifer Byde Myers, and Emily Willingham, along with contributors Laura Shumaker and Susan Walton will be on the panel. We’ll do a bit of reading, and have plenty of time for questions and answers. We’re hoping there will be other Bay Area contributors at the event as well. If there is anything you’d like us to share at the reading please leave a comment below and we will do our best to cover the subject. Thank you for your continued support of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism. -The Editors Share this event on Facebook If you are interested in having someone from Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism speak at your event or local bookstore please contact us at…
Cynthia Kim musingsofanaspie.com There is a moment I dread in conversations with strangers: the moment when that stranger — that person I’ve been talking to for a minute or two or five — decides I’m “a little slow.” It doesn’t happen with every stranger, but it happens often enough that I can pinpoint the moment a conversation turns. To start, we’re both on our best interacting-with-a-stranger behavior, a bit wary, a bit too friendly, whatever. Then I slip. I miss some key bit of information, ask the other person to repeat something one too many times, stutter, backtrack, repeat myself, interrupt again, lose the thread of the conversation, take a joke literally, perseverate. There are a lot of ways it could play out. The response — the one that makes my skin heat up and my heart race and the blood in my ears pound — is subtle but sudden.…
Nicole Nicholsen womanwithaspergers.wordpress.com Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Autism and Empathy website started me thinking about the whole empathy question in regards to autistic people — again. In my first post about autistics and empathy, I mentioned Theory of Mind issues as one of the possible reasons why there is a perception that autistic people lack empathy. With what I had read about Theory of Mind at the time, I’m now reexamining the concept and wondering if I had gotten it slightly wrong, especially in light of the recent challenges that other autistic writers have made to the prevailing ideas about autistics and Theory of Mind. The Sally-Anne Test The prevailing idea about autistics and Theory of Mind goes something like this: having good Theory of Mind means that a person is able to determine the contents of both one’s own mind and the minds of others; conversely, autistic people are unable to…
Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.squidalicious.com Photo © Merrick Brown at Flickr “Is Your Son Really That Difficult?” That’s what the well-meaning blinds salesperson who just left my house asked me, after I told her I was leery of installing vertical blinds in our family room — mostly because I was worried Leo would love them to pieces, quite literally. I launched into kind-but-firm on-the-spot advocacy and acceptance mode. I didn’t cry (something I might have done in the past) or get strident (something I am still working on). Instead, I smiled to show how much I love my son, and let her know that she was misunderstanding my concerns. I told her that I wouldn’t call my son difficult, but that his autism means he sometimes has difficulty reining in his impulses. So even if we asked him to please not wrap himself up in or set in motion a…
Kerima Çevik theautismwars.blogspot.com Last week the body of Mikaela Lynch, age 9, Autistic, was found in a nearby lake where she apparently drowned. I am sorry to say that when I saw the red flags of a nonspeaking missing child, a nearby body of water, and unfenced backyard leading to woods, I feared the worst while praying for the best. I’m not going to comment on the article on Mikaela’s death in Cafe Mom’s The Stir because I don’t wish to increase hits on the Examiner article, which vilified the parents without a clear grasp of what happened that day. We weren’t there. We don’t know what happened. We only know what is reported to us. I will wait for the police to finish their autopsy and investigation, and pass on my sincere condolences to Mikaela’s family. We have been engaged in teaching our son water survival rather than swimming since…
We get frequent requests for puberty and sexuality resources and information. While in general, good frank resources are good frank resources — witness the UU Our Whole Lives Lifespan Sexuality Education Curricula — specific guides can be helpful too, such as The Girls’ Guide to Growing Up. This book takes girls through all the aspects of puberty: changing bodies, privacy, menstruation, masturbation, etc. It is also written with even more frankness than most puberty guides; I’ve never seen a photographic guide to understanding when it might be time to change a sanitary pad, for instance. And it reassures girls that while some people have crushes, others don’t (since many autistic people are asexual, this casual reassurance during such a foundational time is important). It also tends to use “person” instead of “boy” when discussing sexual feelings, which reflects reality. The tone overall is very friendly and comforting. It is written…