Dear Journal,
How is possible to be so smart and so clueless at the exact same time? It seems like everyone else speaks a language I don’t. I watch them. I listen. I imitate. I act a lot. Have you heard my newest nickname? The tennis team has taken to calling me “Happy Head.” They actually mean it to be nice… the cute little [kid] with the smile plastered on her face – it’s plastered, all right. And plastic. I’m completely petrified of feeling left out. Again, it’s probably just a matter of time, though. We both know that I always manage to blow it somehow. Just give me long enough and I’ll screw up any friendship. Seriously, I wish someone would give me some rules on how to be “normal” … let me know when THAT book comes out. It seems to be the only one I haven’t read.
Love,
Jenny
Jennifer Cook O’Toole, the author of the passage above, wrote the book The Asperkid’s (Secret) Book of Social Rules: the Not-So-Obvious Guidelines for Tweens and Teens with Asperger Syndrome when she was thirty-four years old. Only as an adult was O’Toole diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. That’s when things fell into place for her. Rather than feeling alone and at fault for her social blunders, O’Toole realized that her brain was simply different than that of those around her. With her diagnosis she understood, “Turned out, I wasn’t defective, I was different.” She wrote her book in order to teach children with Asperger Syndrome about the “secret rules” or manners that other people automatically understand.
There is a lot of talk about Asperger Syndrome and whether it belongs on the autistic spectrum. It was first described in the 1940s by Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, who noticed that he had many patients with deficient social and communicative skills even though they had normal language development and cognitive abilities. While many children on the autistic scale have trouble functioning socially, they also tend to develop language skills later; therefore, Dr. Asperger felt these children stood in a class of their own.
Professionals still debate whether Asperger Syndrome is “high-functioning autism” or whether it is its own disorder completely. Regardless, in 1994, Asperger’s Syndrome was added to American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as a separate disorder. The main distinction between autism and Asperger Syndrome is that with Asperger there is no speech delay. In fact, those with the disorder generally have good language skills – even though their speech patterns might be unusual or their inflections inconsistent.
Children with autism often seem aloof and uninterested in others. This is not the case with children with Asperger Syndrome – they usually want to fit in and interact with others – but simply do not know how to do that. They may be socially awkward, not pick up on social cues, or show a lack of empathy. In terms of non-verbal communication, children with Asperger Syndrome will seem uninterested in a conversation, not understand the use of gestures, and, like Jenny above, feel in constant fear of making a mistake.
In their free time, children with Asperger often have particular interests that can border on obsession. They often like to collect categories of objects: baseball cards, rocks, cars, or clips. While many children with Asperger Syndrome have excellent memory skills for statistics and rote memorization, they have trouble with abstract concepts.
Their strengths, however, can be very frustrating for parents. We know that the child is cognitively capable, so we ask ourselves, “Why can’t he just act like everyone else?” While this frustration is a common phenomenon, it is important to understand that children with Asperger would love to function the way their siblings and family do. They simply cannot figure out how. It’s our job as parents and educators to give them the tools to better adapt to society.