RE: Kids w/ Classic Autism, PDD-NOS & Speech Delays

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Yes, he likes the second Mean Fridge (I liked the title "My Fridge" better). He always watches one after the other. My computer broke a month or so ago and I was mostly limited to a mobile device for a while (I have a computer again) ... I can't leave him alone with that, he loves deleting things, so because of that he hasn't racked up as many views as he would otherwise. It's very frustrating at how good he is at deleting things. He wants me to play Nintendo games while he watches which would be great except he deletes my game files and I'm sent back to the beginning. He doesn't like seeing games in progress he wants to see the beginning every time. He's deleted some family photos too. I also have to keep my phone hidden at all times now, last week he got a hold of it and promptly called 911 for fun.

I do back up my photos (thankfully I kept everything that mattered to me on an external hard drive or my computer shorting out would have been devastating) and have a separate PC account for him so he can't get into them. If I take pictures or video with the iphone or ipad however (I've given up using the ipad for anything like that) if I don't keep the iphone away from him or transfer them immeadiately and he decides to get into them they will be gone. My son also broke a Nintendo Wii by putting too many disks in it - our new one now resides in a homemade plastic lock box and when he was much younger he sank my Nintendo DS into a cup of coffee that I didn't realize someone had thoughtfully brought and left out for me....

Wrong planet now blocked at work.

I thought it was called "My Fridge" on the first and "Mean Fridge" on the second video. Maybe I only like My Fridge better because I was exposed to that first. I don't think the fridge has done anything truly mean yet like throwing rotten vegetables or closing his door on the kid's hand.

Hello everyone,

First of all, I'm a bit confused about this thread--is it a section (as it says at the top in bold) or just a thread?

I am the parent of a more moderate to low-functioning autistic child and I am seeking a group of parents in a similar situation. There is some discussion at the top of the thread that every part of the forum should be inclusive to all parents (across the spectrum) but I just don't feel the same way.

Parents of children who are very high functioning or Asperger's simply do not have the same issues to discuss. Every time I mention to a friend or acquaintance that my son is autistic I always hear some story about some brilliant autistic kid the person knows or has heard of, the implication being that it's some sort of a gift. It just makes me feel more isolated. Then if I try to share some clarification about how my son actually has some very significant cognitive deficits and is constantly talking nonsense (severe echolalia) to the point of driving us crazy most parents of typical kids just feel horrified/sorry for me and stop talking.

The only board I have found seems to be quite focused on the whole biomed treatment thing. I have tried that (to the best of my financial ability) and it did nothing, so now I am focused on educational topics (I am currently trying to teach my son reading readiness, as he has just basically flunked kindergarten--in a special school--after being in it for two years!).

So, if anyone on this thread knows of a forum (or some blogs) for parents of lower-functioning kids (or would like to start one), please respond! One thread like this is great (at least it gives me somewhere to state my issue) but it's very limiting to not be able to discuss separate topics!

Hi Anjikun, you can post in this thread. It was started for parents of lower-functioning kids. You have probably noticed that this board is more heavily geared towards Asperger's...your son sounds similar to mine.

Hello Wreck-Gar and Washi,

Thanks for your responses. It's nice to find a place where I can communicate with other parents about my son!

Yes, I had noticed that this was more of an Asperger's community. The reason I registered here is that there seems to be a dearth of forums for parents of autistic kids. Or perhaps I haven't found them??? I have found one (autismweb) that seems good for people doing Biomed (lot of traffic on that section) but they have very little traffic on the education section. Maybe parents working on education with their moderate-low functioning kids are just too darn busy to post on the Internet!

Something else happened today that made me again feel the need to find other parents in my situation (who are not focusing only on "curing" their kids with Biomed). I take a Yoga class and it happens that the teacher and several of the students have kids about the same age. I have a pretty good relationship with these women so I mentioned something about my issue concerning my son's reading. She (and the other students that were chatting) launched into a whole discussion about how it was terrible to push kids academically and that it was much better to let the motivation come from them internally. I think this may be completely valid when it comes to typical kids with typical school problems, but in my son's case if I didn't orchestrate ways to motivate him to learn (and push the school to actually teach him something) he would never learn anything at all and would just stim morning 'til night (when he wasn't riding a bus or metro .

I have learned from experience that is that it is just not worthwhile to try to explain this to most other parents who are not very, very good friends, so I end up feeling isolated because I can't participate in most parent discussions.

My son is going through the evaluation process for special needs Kindergarten now. He has a lot of issues, his language comprehension isn't very good, he uses a lot of echolalia, I got him potty trained but he can't wipe himself, his mood can switch from bubbly/super happy to angry and completely uncooperative in an instant and back again. I didn't send him to preschool because at 3 he was still mostly non-verbal, was very difficult to feed, not potty trained and in the habit of pulling his clothes off and running around naked, high risk for elopement with no fear. I didn't want strangers dealing with those issues and because he was mostly non-verbal he wouldn't have been able to tell me if he wasn't being treated well. He's hyperlexic so his one strength is reading, I didn't ask the lady many questions after an evaluation he had yesterday except what grade level did she think his reading skills were on (trying to focus on the positive). She said he was reading vocabulary words suitable for 6th graders without hesitation (he doesn't have that level of reading comprehension, but still....). Although it's an area he's naturally doing well in there were a lot of things I did along the way that helped bring it out. I read him books and did alphabet flash cards with him before I realized he was autistic, usually at meal times. (This was very stressful, he was very difficult to feed and screamed a lot for no apparent reason when he was a baby but I kept doing it, it was a long while before I was sure some of it was sinking in). He frequently would stay up all night long and would scream non-stop unless I gave him 110% of my attention - I didn't want to use a TV as a baby sitter but after a year of sleep deprivation I caved on that notion and put a TV and a bunch of (mostly) educational videos in his room which ran almost constantly (he was 4 before he started sleeping through the night with any regularity) ... some of the videos that probably helped the most with reading and language were English as a second language videos, anything that had subtitles turned on, and the more standard Sesame Street/PBS kids type videos. If there's a TV show he likes, even if it's not educational just turning on the subtitles can help. Video games that require a little bit of reading are motivational too.

Hi Washi,

I can certainly understand why you were hesitant to put your son in pre-K given these issues. I had never heard about hyperlexia. That's interesting that your son has that ability. From what I have read recently in trying to get my son on track with reading, learning to sight read words can be a great advantage for cognitive development. Since I have started teaching my son letters and words (the names of the subway stations in Montreal, which he is sort of obsessed with) he is much more motivated in school in all areas. Almost like for him the insight that letters are all different, they have names and make words has caused some cognitive shifts or something!

It definitely can help to use whatever he's already interested in to help him learn. When my son was 18 mos. to 3 years instead of babbling or using basic words he would talk in letters and numbers, like "A,B,2,7,R,6!" So I put his toys in painted containers with numbers on them to assign meaning to them. Even if I knew it wasn't what he meant, if he said 2 I'd say, oh, you want the #2 can, you want your play food? Or oh, #6 ... you want your cars?

Hi Washi,

It's really interesting the way he was saying those letters/numbers in a sort of nonsense fashion and you made them meaningful. Very smart on your part!

In fact, my son started saying metro station names in a similar nonsense fashion. He started saying names of metro stations we never even go to over and over, and I had no idea where he was getting them. Then we started taking the bus/metro to and from school after a move, and I could see he was very, very excited about the metro and would get excited when he heard the announcement of what station we were passing and kept repeating the names. So then when his teacher started telling me she had been unable to teach him the alphabet, I got the idea of using the metro station names to teach him the alphabet. At first we were just looking at the letters and naming them (both at home printed out, and in the metro stations on the signs) and now he is reading the whole names!

I had another conversation with his teacher. It seems that the problem with the 1st year curriculum is that they are forced to use the mainstream curriculum because of a ministry policy that is very unpopular with the special needs teachers. I had told her that I intended to talk to the principal to clarify what he would be learning next year, and she encouraged me to complain!