What is it like to be a Parent of an Aspie?

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my son is almost 13 years old, and I've raised him and his brother (16) by myself. I can tell you being his mom has been both a test of my patience and brightness to my days. He gets extremely moody sometimes, which is difficult to handle because I hate to see my boy in pain. He literally will cry over spilt milk. But on the flip side, he has the best sense of humor, great artistic abilities, and writes his own books. School has been quite a challenge because he doesn't make friends easily, but he is getting better at that. His big problem there is that he doesn't understand why other kids don't think the same way he does and he gets frustrated. It's hard to explain to him that he can't negotiate or rationalize with people who aren't at his level of intelligence. As I said, it has been, and probably will continue to be, a struggle, But I wouldn't change that boy for anything.

I just learned about my 14 yo son being an aspie. It would have been easier if I had known a long time ago since it explains a lot of behavior.

I find it exhausting and exasperating when you don't know about the diagnosis but now that I know its liberating.

Now, I can enjoy my tremendously talented son (he is gifted in art and writing) without getting frustrated about the challenges in math, keeping schedules and his social oddities.

having only been the parent of an aspie, and an aspie, it's been just fine.

Now that we have some insights into our son, overall, I love having an Aspie child. Before diagnosis, without the insight that followed, it was more confusing and difficult. Understanding is such a key.

My son is a mix of amazing abilities, and surprising inabilities. He can blow you out of the water with his sophisticated/creative ideas, his ability to suck it up and perform when it's most critical, all the while frustrating you because he can't remember so many basic every day hygenic things.

He can make me so very, very proud. Someday he may do great things.

For the rest, we're learning just to shake our heads and laugh it off. It's just who he is.

how much I don't really know and how visceral parenting a child can be.
I love deeper because of him. I laugh at life more because he does and while it's a myriad of circumstances having a child with Asperger's it has also been a blessing!

My life has more dimension because of him.

I see him as both a student and a teacher.

Challenging but rewarding.

I think having an aspie is awesome! It is also, at times, frustrating and heart wrenching to see the struggles he goes through but he is in general very happy and so sweet and lovable. I wouldn't change him for anything. I would like to get other people to be more tolerant and understand that, as well as respecting cultural diversity, we need to respect individual diversity among all children. He is very eccentric and thankfully, he has a great group of friends at school that love him and help him. His classmates take turns eating lunch with him in the resource room and they all understand when he has a meltdown to give him space. I think if he hadn't found this group of friends it would be a lot harder for him. Asperger's is a part of him, just like his beautiful blue eyes. Watching him makes me smile (even when I have a hard time listening to all the train talk!!)

Well, I'm an Aspie and my child is an Aspie. Quite frankly, I've understood and enjoyed her since the day I laid eyes on her. She makes perfect sense - it's the rest of the world "out there" that would appear to have the issues. We've never gone through the obsession with how we look ("Am I think enough" "My teeth look funny" "OMG I've got a zit") that the neighbors' kids do. We've never had the shallow, meaningless conversation that seems rampant - we don't say anything unless we have something to say. She decides she has an interest, and that's fine with me. Everybody has interests. If she decides she doesn't care for something, that's fine, too. She's just graduated from college and is working, seems happy, and has friends.

I don't know Cockney Rebel, it's been really a good, good ride. Wouldn't change it for the world, nor her.

my son has only just been diagnosed and he is 6. I love him more than my life but our life as a family is very stresfull, difficult and isolated, having said that, life would not be the ! he is clever, kisses me lots (which I cherish) and he is my son. I wish for his sake he didnt have to suffer being "different" whatever that is? My daughter suffers from his behaviour, she gets thrown about and I find this hard. To be honest I envy the way he looks at life, he is like this is how it is and thats it, no big picture - he will go on to do great things, as long as im there to kick him up the but hehehhe x

I'm new here; my 7 year-old son was just diagnosed. I'm having some very mixed feelings right now. I adore this little boy, but at the same time I find myself constantly stressed out and often annoyed by his continual demands that I do everything for him--get him something to drink, put in a movie, change it to another movie, no he said a video game, get him something to eat, help him button his pants . . . He rarely listens, often talks, talks loudly . . . He's into reptiles, bugs, rocks, fish. His dad, probably an aspie himself, is a scientist. I teach literature, have abstract thinking skills in the 99 percentile, and I've given birth to this sweet little kid who misunderstands half of what I say and ignores much of the other half.

He's very smart, yes. His grades are all A's this year. But he soils his pants and/or wets himself when stressed and has no more emotional control than a very small child at this point.

We started a little over a year ago seeking help; at frst I thought the problem was a very painful divorce we were going through (or I was) from his dad, who found a 19 year old (I was 46 at the time). That's a very long, complicated story indicative of God knows what kind of boundary confusion among us; he wanted to bring her into our home sort of as a foster child; I let him; she came, she saw, she conquered; things happened . . .. A long, long story!


In any event when I took my son to a psychiatrist, she said he had ADHD; our counselor speculated that he might be oppositional defiiant, though I never quite yielded to that idea, seeing much of his behavior as more helpless than anything else. I thought that (like me) he might be bipolar.

There have been days I felt, quite contrary to fact apparently, that he was messing with my mind. Last summer he entered into several people's apartments without knocking (to show them his gecko, apparently) and had no clue that he'd done anything wrong. It had never occured to me to explain that people don't enter into other people's houses without permission.

He makes up scientific facts and then gets mad when I don't agree with them. He sounds like a science book in terms of the structure of the language, but even so, people are not reptiles or cold-blooded, etc, no matter how loudly he screams that we are. (That was last year. He may have accepted our mammalian nature by now.

He gets so mad at me--often completely unpredictably--that I cannot control him at all, and he can't control himself either. Sometimes he hits or pinches me, sometimes himself. He's already 4 feet tall and better than 80 pounds, which is what I attributed his underdeveloped moter skills to. He has a hard time dressing himself, can't tie shoes or loop belts at all. He just learned finally to ride a bike this year; his fine motor skillls are also problematic especially for teachers who expect to be able to read what he prints (though truthfully mine was far worse at his age).

He goes nuts when he doesn't understand a homework problem; I told him once or twice that rather than cry and scream and beg me to do it for him he should just finish the work and get one wrong. That idea was absolutely unacceptable--anathema.

His teacher told me he was a very literal thinker. It never really occurred to me--not even a little. I did not realize that certain sorts of jokes went past him because I never shared jokes with him.

Now it all adds up. Yesterday I felt relieved to have a clear sense of his behaviors and attitudes as a sign of genuine difference, not deliberate misbehavior. The coherence of all the behaviors as indicative of a single condition made sense of some of the chaos we've been going through. I felt like I could begin a process of understanding and of developing patience and acquiring skills to help him.

Today I'm feeling saddened by the prospect of a long hard road ahead of him. There's a lot I can identify with--being a social outcast, being perceived as "weird," being awkward, uncoordinated, easily frustrated, etc. There are other reasons why, but I've been down a similar path. I had hoped he could have the sort of happiness I never had--that giving happiness to him would somehow compensate for all the pain I've been through in my life.

But maybe, instead, he's mine because I have been there, for whatever reasons, and can understand hs pain if not all his thinking. I realize I frustrate him awfully because I do not always know what he means and can't magically fulflill his demands in those moments when he can't articulate them except in screams or tears. I read that people perceive Asperger's children as lacking in empathy. I wonder if my child feels a lack of empathy from me. I do not intend to miss the messages; teach me to speak his language. Help.

I'm sitting here reading all of these replies.. laughing at times b/c my son does a lot of the same things and yet sad b/c he does some of the same things. You always tend to feel alone when dealing with your child and their "quirks/issues" but now I don't feel so alone. My son is so smart but struggles with daily homework, he gets so frustrated that he has melt downs left and right. His world revolves around video games and he would play them all day and night if we'd let him-not a chance He really doesn't have any friends at school and the ones he would consider his friends are just the kids who haven't picked on him. He has to be so lonely being him...thats what really breaks me heart the most. He's such a sweet kid that still loves to cuddle and hug I just wish everyone could know him the way I do.

I am new to this site and also new to Asperger's Syndrome, although, my son is 29 yrs. old!
I related very much to the posting of EnglishRose. My son has studied behavorial disorders in college and discovered on his own that he may have Asperger's Syndrome. Anthony, is a warm and very compassionate person. He had lots of trouble getting along in school with classmates and just seemed to "not fit in".

Anthony is above average in intellegence and due to a diagnosis of ADD when he was young he attended public school but was in special education, self-contained classrooms.

Along the way, he discovered that he found working with other children with disabilites was very rewarding for him. He used to take two boys, one with Ceberal Palsey and the other had Downs Syndrome, around the block to trick or treat on Halloween. Once he began to drive, he decided that he wanted to take his new friends out every Friday night as a treat to them. So he would pick up the boys wheelchair and all and take them wherever they wanted to go, the mall, Fridays for dinner or whatever they wanted. Soon he decided that he would like to work with disabled population as a career so he studied behavorial disorers in college. One day he just came to me and said, "Mom, I think I may have Asperger's Syndrome" and began to list the very clinical reasons why.

I was shocked, and almost did not know how to react. Everything he was saying was so true to his personality. It was like a calming feeling of relief came over me................AHHH .. FINALLY... an explaination to all the difficulties that Anthony experienced througout his life!! ! Finally we have a path that we could follow. For all his life we knew that Anthony was on the "WRONG PLANET" but we were clueless to the term Asperger's Syndrome.

Looking back, I now realize that Anthony was not only being a giving and caring person by taking the boys out, but HE truly enjoyed their company. When he was with them he was relaxed, they laughed and talked together like best friends. He was comfortable with them, they laughed at his jokes and looked to him for guidence. This was a rewarding situation for Anthony, unlike any of his experiences with mainstream society.

We are currently seeking a Developmental Psyciatrist in our area with hopes of reaching a diagnosis for Anthony. I look forward to learning how we can help him fell confident and have a productive and happy life. Anthony has had so much difficulty fitting in to society that the greatest joy we could find is to see him have a happy and productive life.

Oh, and by the way, he still take the two boys out EVERY friday night..!