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The Label of Asperger's Syndrome

© Barbara Fowler

When my son was first diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, an early comment my husband made after we researched this condition was:"Now, he has a license to behave the way he is". At that time we were both coming to terms with the diagnosis, struggling to understand it and coming out of the shock of a doctor telling us that our child was a special needs child. I didn't really understand the point my husband was making.

Not once in all the years that we struggled to find a cause for our child's unhappiness did we think we had a special needs child. We thought our child was extremely bright, very creative, extremely logical with a wonderful sense of humour. Our concern was always over the fact that he cried so much, so often and for reasons we could not understand. He also appeared sensitive to loud noises, bright lights, odours and was very rigid in his thinking to the point that if you disagreed with his way of thinking, he got extremely upset.

I had suspected a touch of autism but wondered if we were raising a genius because he is so smart, so logical and capable of such original thinking that he amazes us. However, these traits that we value in our child are often not valued by other people or the school system. In fact, when our son started school I spent many an hour trying to explain him to the teacher only to feel that I was speaking a different language. If I could easily see that my child was distracted by the noise in the classroom, why couldn't the teacher? Many things that seemed obvious to me caused great stress between my son and his teacher. The stress at school was so unbearable for him that he ran away from school in Grade 4, sobbing all the way home because he was totally fed up with the teacher changing where he sat in the classroom every Monday. (She switched everyone around on Mondays).

My husband and I had gotten very fed up with explaining our wonderful child to people who wanted only to change him, make him conform, be like the other children or put him on medication so that his behaviour at school was more agreeable. Since receiving the diagnosis, it is interesting to note the different reactions from the people involved with our son. It would appear that the label of Asperger's Syndrome is a license for our son to do the very things that the school system doesn't like. If anything, the label has backed up everything we have been telling the teachers for years. I no longer have to explain that my child doesn't want to be friends with every child in the classroom, one or two suit him just fine. The issue of where he sits every Monday is finally dead after two dreadful years.