<p>Of course, we don’t know for sure that this child has Asperger’s or is autistic. It is important that we not diagnosis via the internet.</p>
<p>I wonder if this kid will ever get the chance to go to summer camp?</p>
<p>Borderline Aspie nephew went to camp one summer. He liked the computer science class and did not make a single friend.</p>
<p>My feeling is that by the time Magnus went to summer camp: he would want an academic camp; 2. he would be too advanced for what most academic camps offer. 3. the kids who might function at his level would not be his age mates.
S took the Fast-Paced High School Physics course at CTY right after 7th grade and he was in with a bunch of students whose major concerns were applying to colleges and dating, neither of which interested him.</p>
<p>one can only hope about the summer camp. As for the “diagnosis”, many signs are there, and yes its not fair to diagnosis, but frankly, it can’t be ignored.</p>
<p>Maybe if the parents saw this thread, they might think about their child in a more “whole” fashion, if they aren’t already.</p>
<p>My gut was telling me something was “interesting” here about the little boy, and while it shouldn’t matter, it just doesn’t seem fair to him if there is something going on and his parents are ignoring it while marketing him. </p>
<p>If there is something going on, it will get more pronounced as he gets older if he isn’t given the tools to be in the world.</p>
<p>And its hard to tell if his carriage and demeanor are how he would be naturally, or if it is connected to living what appears to be a pretty isolated life.</p>
<p>Scansmom, I think a lot of us fake behaviors a bit till we become comfortable with them. They may never become second nature for your son, but surely it’s better that he can fit in when he needs/wants to. It’s been interesting to see changes in our son. He too seems to be fitting in better in some ways, though in others he’s just found his tribe. He’s listening to rock music! But his social life revolves around computer clusters! He went to the Carnival last spring! But with alumni he’d met on line! I don’t think my son is an Aspie, but his indifference to what people think about him, can certainly make him act like one at times. My son never made friends at camp (CTY and computer camp) - it just wasn’t long enough for him. But he always had a good time, and his teachers never seemed to think he was overly weird.</p>
<p>The parents seem like ■■■■■■■■ losers to me. I feel bad for the kid…he doesn’t know what he’s missing. What’s the point at being good at math and piano if you don’t have a life? The parents just disgust me…</p>
<p>
I thought they mentioned in the original article that they were looking at summer programs?</p>
<p>marmat,</p>
<p>The article mentioned university summer programs, not camp.</p>
<p>marite, </p>
<p>I find the contrast between your comments here and your comments on the summer helicopter parents thread in the cafe interesting.</p>
<p>And thanks for posting the MIT article; excellent read, that.</p>
<p>I just watched the news video for the first time. Certainly, the child’s speech is not up to his math or his musicianship. Asynchronous development is not uncommon among the PG, but I bow to the expertise of parents of 2E kids who say that he appears to be “on the spectrum,” as they say.</p>
<p>He seems like a sweet kid. His father obviously loves him. His talents are certainly very strong. I wish the best to the family and the child. If they or their friends are reading this thread, please check out Davidson. Many people seem to have found that support invaluable.</p>
<p>msl2008 …</p>
<p>“The parents seem like ■■■■■■■■ losers to me” …</p>
<p>I prefer to think of them as brilliant and out of touch. They need help with parenting. </p>
<p>Mathmom … thanks for the book referral … I will find and read it this week. </p>
<p>As I mentioned in another post … GO HUG A NERD … they need it!</p>
<p>owlice, I’m afraid I don’t follow you. University summer programs for school-aged kids ARE camps. Did you have in mind a cabin-in-the-woods kind of camp? Sorry about the misunderstanding, my kids went to several university-based camps, and that’s what I thought of when I saw your question…</p>
<p>marite … thx for the MIT article …</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I find this heartbreakingly sad. Every child needs and wants to have a friend. For some children social skills come easily, but for others including, sometimes, the PG they don’t but can be learned. If I had a child like this, I’d be first and foremost and from the very beginning, making a huge effort with socialization, where the skills are clearly weaker. I’d be pushing group activities that are interactive, and not just solo pursuits or opportunities for parallel play. And if there had never been a friend, ever, I’d definitely have long since considered an evaluation by a professional, particularly important since the family is home schooling and there are no teachers to point out potential red flags in areas like speech or behavior. </p>
<p>I have no issue with the pride the child and his parents should feel in his exceptional abilities, home schooling or in his taking an AP math exam and being proud of the results. I do feel uncomfortable with the tenor of the parents’ promotion of all this - and would feel that way regarding the privacy of an 8 year old boy, no matter what his talent. The academics will always be there, the boy will always be gifted and talented - but no one gets a second chance at a childhood.</p>
<p>marmat, </p>
<p>I took “university summer programs” to mean something more along the lines of college summer school – programs for those of college age, not camp for elementary school kids. But maybe I’m wrong; maybe they are looking into space camp or math camp or some such for elementary school kids.</p>
<p>(My kid is on a college campus now, but he’s with other kids in the 12-16 age range, not with 21-year-olds, so I wouldn’t say his program is a “university summer program.”)</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>One thing that struck me was the parents deciding, because the kid could read at three years of age and do addition and subtraction, that the kid was a prodigy. Yet I have read many posts here from parents whose kids also read at three, and also could do arithmetic at that age. Should all of these kids also be labeled as prodigies?</p>
<p>As a homeschooling parent, I also need to chime in that not all socialization is positive. There’s socialization in prison too!</p>
<p>And to everyone who laments the amount of time the boy spends on his particular endeavors, do you feel the same way about children who train for the Olympics?</p>
<p>I’d say they were precocious not prodigies, but calculus at nine strikes me as prodigious. :)</p>
<p>owlice:
When a child is unusual, parents need to be far more involved in his (or her) upbringing. That happened to us. We could rely on S1’s teachers to do a wonderful job for him because they were almost all of them wonderful. The exact same teachers were not able to address the needs ot S2 (and some of them resisted the idea of providing a more advanced curriculum out of purely ideological reasons), and so we had to be far more involved in his education than with S2. In the process, I learned about CTY, about sites for gifted children, and so forth. It was not my original desire to be that involved in his education.
I laugh at helicopter parents because there is absolutely no need for them to be helicoptering. I would not care in the least if my kid was not at the front of pictures (actually, both preferred to make themselves invisible); or if they had sneakers of different colors on their feet. But neither have Asperger’s. I know the toll it takes on parents of Aspie’s from my relatives, and I’m thankful that I don’t have to be that involved in so many aspects of my kids’ lives.</p>
<p>Roshke:
You and I find it sad that Magnus does not have friends besides his parents. My nephew’s parents find it sad that he does not have friends his own age. My nephew does not care at all. All he wants is to be at his computer.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You could kill a spectrum child with an aggressive “socialization” program. When my D was ten, we made a huge effort to push interactive group activities. D was so traumatized that she became profoundly clinically depressed, lying in bed in a fetal position for hours, eyes closed, sucking her fingers, too tired to live any more. Once she entered an autism-centered placement, she received an “autism awareness” curriculum that included self acceptance at its core.</p>
<p>“Social skills”–as in acceptable and constructive behaviors– can be taught to spectrum youths, but reciprocal empathy, which is critical for peer friendship, cannot be taught. There are deficits in the neural wiring that make peer friendship impossible, no matter how desperately the individual might yearn for it. After ten years of social skills interventions, my D still only finds friendship with much older women in our neighborhood and church, surrogate aunties and grandmas, to whom she can pour out her heart. She is beloved wherever she goes, but may never have a friend in the typical sense. This causes her deep anguish and despair, but the psycho-social deficits are profound and innate.</p>
<p>Journalist Emily Bazelon wrote an excellent article, “What Autistic Girls Are Made Of”, in the NY Times Sunday Magazine last year. Many young women with HFA and Asperger’s become profoundly depressed and anxious from their failure to make social connections. For many females, the secondary emotional consequences of the spectrum condition are more debilitating than the DX itself. </p>
<p>I’m not an SLP, only a parent who has met many HFA and AS youths in the last ten years. Magnus’ speech irregularities–odd prosody & impoverished verbal constructions–are not typical “asynchronies” seen in many pg kids. I think that an undiagnosed spectrum condition is a reasonable hypothesis.</p>
<p>I want to echo MQD’s wish for empathy and hugs for Magnus’ parents. There are few life experiences as humbling as parenting a child who develops abnormally. In another lifetime I was full of energetic “can-do” opinions about how other parents should fix their problems. A little more humility, and a little less judgementalism, would do more for this child than disparaging his very devoted parents.</p>
<p>^^ Thanks for this insightful post.</p>
<p>Our nephew has only borderline Asperger’s, but we are aware of the difficulties he has with ordinary interactions with others. Through a huge amount of effort on the part of his parents, he is well-mannered and is able to have normal conversations; But it is clear that he only tolerates talking with others and being away from his beloved computer is torture. He is also utterly uninterested in issues others than those pertaining to computers.
He has improved a great deal since he was first diagnosed (labeled as ■■■■■■■■ by a kindergarten teacher despite being able to read chapter books) but he will go through life faking it rather than being able to have real empathy. I think he’d be in his element in Silicon Valley and other nerd-havens, not because they are populated by nerds, but because, as the MIT article makes clear, chances are there are many many others just like him in those places, so that his behavior would not be considered abnormal.</p>
<p>I do feel sorry for his parents, but not in the same way. I feel sorry because they seem to take pride in what their little boy has done than who he is. They take pride in bragging about his scores, and that he rides a bike alot. </p>
<p>This a little boy who should be nutured, and there are so many “warning” signs that there is other stuff going on and those parents need (if they are not) pay some attention, or at least acknowledge the very likelyhood that their soon is on this spectrum.</p>
<p>Devoted, well, I don’t agree. Devoted means you do it not for yourself, but for another, These parents come across as looking to get publcity for themselves. I just find it creepy, especially the website.</p>
<p>Devotion means looking at your whole child, not just the “pretty bits”.</p>