When to tell my son/what about siblings?

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There is another post asking about when to tell your child about thier diagnosis and I too have wondered about this, but I also have wondered about my other children and how to deal with them. I have an 8 year old daughter , my probably asperger's son age 7, my daughter 6, and my 5 year old adopted son who has his own special needs dealing with different race and being adopted. My oldest daughter is not stupid and though she has not voiced any thing I would not be surprised if she is frustrated about our son's behavior and wonders about him. My two younger children are just that, young, I don't think at this time it would benifit them, but my 6 year old is hearing from kids at school about her brother getting in trouble at school, this affects her too. Parenting is so crazy sometimes! Whew.. At least I can't say it is boring around here.

Wow this is what I dealt with just a few years ago. My oldest daughter is 18 months older than her brother with AS and she heard how horrible he was and How I did not punish her brother enough. The kids at school would also give her a misserable time of it. I was very honest with her and told her and him as he was being diagonised that her brother has AS. I was honest and said that I didn't know for sure what that meant, but we would figure it out together. My younger one could care less and for awhile My son told everyone he had "cheeseburgers". They were 6 and 8 at the time. So much has changed. I have found that being honest with my kids about what is going on seems to work the best.
Hope this helps a little

telling siblings depends upon their ages and readiness. when my son was first dx-ed, he was 13. we were able to tell TONS to our 11 year old because he wanted to know how he could best help his brother.........our daughter was 6 at the time, and we pretty much told her that her brother had a difficult time with certain things because of his dx. that his dx wasn't "catchy", and that if she had problems with him, that she could come to us and we would help her figure out what to do.

Me and my ex has never been the ones not explaining to our children what has happened and that they may have a brother or sister (we was not interested in the sex) but we explained what was going on. One fun comment was from my daughter, "WHAT! Have you SWALLOWED my brother!", that was before she got to understand how children gets created....

We have a different approach to sexual education here in europe, thats apparently a fact, we simply don't over react nor under react on the question of flowers and bees. We also have a wonderful photographer showing the whole process from the sperm and egg to birth, just can't remember his name. I've got about 3 books in different editions my children loves to look in.

Children is never too young to learn the facts of life, and how it's created. It's more of a nausea if they learn it too late and don't know how to handle it IMHO.