Communicating with Asperger's Children

It has taken me 11 years to really understand my child and even then, because he has Asperger's Syndrome, I am not at all sure that he understands me, or if I understand him the way he means to be understood.

Communicating with Asperger's Children can be very tricky due to their inability to read between the lines and their tendency to take everything you say literally. This difficulty with communication shows up in many ways. For example, I tried to teach my son the golden rule "Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated". He didn't get the logic behind this rule because a) why treat someone you don't like the way you want to be treated, isn't that hypocritical? b) why be polite to strangers when you are not even supposed to speak to them? My son has tried to follow that rule, but when a Teacher speaks to him in an authoritarian tone of voice, he speaks back in exactly the same tone of voice! When she then accuses him of being rude, he says she is too! Of course, you can imagine that this situation escalates to the point of explosive anger on both sides. For my son, it's a very difficult situation. On the one hand, he is following the rule he was taught, but on the other hand, he gets into trouble for it. Small wonder that he gets confused and frustrated with "neuro typical" people - we are not logical.

When my son was in Grade 1, I walked him to the classroom door every morning because he had great difficulty with the noise, crowded hallways and navigating his way through the school. When other children said "Hi" he never responded, so I got in the habit of prompting him "Can't you see Amy saying hi?". He would look at me as if I had two heads and just say "yes". Finally, he had enough of this prompting and asked me "Mum, why do you talk to me like I am an idiot?" When I explained to him that the other children would think he was unfriendly if he didn't say "hi" back, he responded "That's okay, I am not interested in them anyway."

When he was younger we used to wonder why we had to explain every little thing in life to him, it was like he was going though his days with blinders on. We now know that he perceives the world around him much differently than we do

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