Museums and Asperger's

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Hi Everybody,

This is my first time on this site, and I wish I'd found you sooner. I am in graduate school right now, and I am writing my thesis on how museums can be more accommodating for children and youth who have Asperger's. I have talked to 5 parents and have taken a few teens to the museum to see what their experiences were like. I am looking to get more feedback and get in touch with more parents (to interview them about their children's museum experiences), and teenagers as well. I am located in the Bay Area.

Any information you can provide about positive museum experiences you've had (or your children have had) and why would be very helpful. I'd also like to know what experiences were particularly negative or challenging too. It can be anything. The exhibit, the building, the subject matter in the museum, etc. The results will be compiled and presented to the greater museum community.

Here are the six questions I have been asking families:
1. How often does your family visit museums? 2. What museums does your child like to visit? 3. What has been their favorite museum experience? 4. What has been a particularly difficult experience? What made it so challenging? 5. How can museums be more accommodating for your family? 6. I have found a few museums in the country who host evening events for children with ASDs. Would your family be interested in going to an event like that in a museum in your community? If you are a teen, would you be interested in an evening event for people your age? What type of event?

Also, if you could improve museum tours, what would you suggest?

Thank you!!

Katie

I used to love going to museums when I was a kid, and still like them.

1. Keep them free. The main reason I don't go now is I can't afford to get in.
2. I used to love seeing the same exhibits over and over again. It was like visiting old friends. One museum in my home town changed locations and changed styles - now it's all changing exhibits except for the totem poles (boring). I miss the old version. Plus the new building isn't as symmetrical as the old building - it's much artier. Fortunately the other two museums I loved haven't changed their classic exhibits. I don't live there (Ottawa) now but when I did I'd go from time to time when they were free on Canada Day.

Welcome to WP!

Provide entertainment for parents who don't want to wait while I examine every brush stroke on every painting.

There's a reason we don't go to museums that often, other than that there are none in the area.

I don't have a family of my own, but I can give answers from when I remember going with my parents.

1. Not often. On average, once per report card, if I behaved and made the honor roll. If not, there would be no museum outing.
2. Science museums and planetariums.
3. A science and technology museum that had a lot of interactive exhibits (where I could press buttons and stuff), 3D simulators I could ride in, and exhibits about stuff from my science classes.
4. There was an exhibit I really wanted to see, and even though it was open, construction was blocking the entrance to it. So I insisted on finding the entrance no matter how long it took, which made my parents angry. Another time, I wanted some food, but parents refused, on the grounds that there is dinner at home.
5. Clearly mark all detours around construction; use big red letters if you have to.

In reference to #1, I was ecstatic when my parents gave me permission to take public transportation by myself. The link between my "performance" and museums was gone forever. So I started going to museums twice a month, and bringing money with me to buy lunch there. (Since I stayed home most of the time, the money I had was more than enough.)

I love museums. Visiting them can be physically exhausting, but it is often energy well spent. It would be nice to able to go for just an hour or so, but by the time you spend $8 on admission, you feel like you need to stay all day to get your money's worth. It would be nice to have some sort of season pass, where the more often you go, the less it costs! I also enjoy seeing the same exhibits over and over again and am really disappointed when a favorite exhibit closes. They should warn people before they close an exhibit that has been there for years. I remember spending hours trying desperately to find a favorite exhibit once before I finally figured out that it wasn't there anymore. I had thought that I was just looking in the wrong place for it.

My Aspie teenage son has always loved museums, and takes forever in them. He wants to read EVERYTHING and see EVERYTHING, down to the last detail. And I do mean EVERYTHING. So when you go to places like that with him, you have to make enough time for it to accomodate that and be patient with him while he's taking his good sweet time. And it actually makes it more interesting, because he'll see things in a way that wouldn't have occured to me or many other people, and he'll think of questions and possibilities that often haven't even occured to the guide or the curator, if they're available for him to ask.

He also really enjoys hands-on displays and experiments that are common to certain types of museums, he's always loved those.

He's had teachers who either really hate that because they just want to move everyone along like cattle, or who love it because he'll make it even more interesting for everyone else during field trips.

One thing that might be interesting for such children in museums is to have plenty of hands-on, real-time displays and experiments and to also have sections where they can use their "think outside the box" talents to try to find answers to some of their unusual questions and/or possibilities.

My husband has never seen a psychologist in person to be officially diagnosed and, thus, has never been so diagnosed, but I think he has a milder form of AS. Having raised an Aspie son, and having a learning disability myself, I think I can discern such things pretty well. He's very much like my son intellectually, which means he's like my son in museums, so maybe something for such adults as well. I love the way their minds work, their unique originality and creativity, the thinking outside the box, the intellectual focus. The right museums are heaven for both of them. Last July, my son was up visiting from OH where he lives with my mom, and he and my husband, then my fiance, went to a "reptile" museum on July 4. They were there ALL day and I mean ALL day, hours longer than they'd planned. And they still wanted to stay longer, lol. I'd known my fiance for a couple of years by that point, but my son was thrilled to find someone else who was just like him in that respect.

For part of our honeymoon last November, we went to the Little Bighorn Battlefield and he made it so much more alive and interesting by having to see and go through so much more detail than a lot of other people I know would have. He made me think of things that never would have occurred to me, and we explored many more trails and parts of the battlefield than I'd thought. My son would have done the same thing had he been there (he flew back to OH the afternoon following our wedding). I sometimes wish my son had come to Bighorn with us, the two of them together would have made it really come alive.