Just joined this site.
I'm a 39 year old father of two. My eldest boy was diagnosed with autism a year ago he is now 4 1/2 years old and has just started school.
His autism is what I would say is "mid range" he has language delay but is verbal and will definitely go on to catch up and speak. He has significant issues with social interactions but is not closed off in his own world entirely. So he's not profoundly autistic but neither is he mildly affected. We are not sure about any actual learning difficulties at this stage and we are tying a split placement with his schooling, 3 days at a special school and 2 days at a mainstream setting. So far its going "ok" but we will need to see if he can cope with mainstream, just don;t know yet. The good news is that the special school are amazing!
My younger son is 2 years old and is almost certainly neurotypical. Its just been a completely different experience with him. Its like having to learn to parent all over again.
Anyway I'm really interested in speaking to aspies and others with ASD because I need to increase my understanding of how my son thinks and sees the world. He can't self report on this at the moment because, well, he's only 4 1/2 with significant language delay! So I really want to find out more. I think most of the problems faces by most autistic people can be lessened or even eliminated if the NT world had better understanding of the condition. To me it all boils down to a failure of communication between different cognitive styles. If we can get that communication going then everyone benefits.
I write a blog about our experiences with a laughably miniscule number of followers for anyone that wants to know more about our experiences as a family ( I'll post a link to it when I reach the correct post count level - its autistic bean at wordpress if anyone is inclined to look it up)
Look forward to some interesting discusions.
02 Oct 2014, 6:22 am
