Thanks to Wendy for pointing me to My Aspergers Child, a great website for lots of parenting advice. I particularly liked the breakdown of various types of Aspergers. Someone I know is very much Emotion Boy – Fantasy subtype.
Last week, I read George & Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism
. It's a memoir written by a woman who has two severely affected boys. It's well written enough that I'm sure that anybody, not just parents of autistic kids, would like it. She finds humanity in her two boys, who seem to be entirely disconnected from others. Even though they'll lick sugar out of unattended sugar bowl and they'll poop on the sidewalk, they are still boys. She does gloss over the bad bits though. I'll give a longer review, if people want it.
Apt. 11d 
Yes, I want a longer review. I very much enjoyed Vicky Forman’s book about Evan, precisely for the same reason you describe here “she finds humanity” (and reasons to love). Looks like this book might have a similar message.
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I guess, after raising two kids with autism spectrum disorders, I find a lot of websites and books to be too narrow in both expectation for the kids and explanation for the parents. While I see that the “breakdown of Aspergers sub-types” might be interesting, it seems to exclude way too much.
The most important thing I see missing from most books and most sites is that kids can learn behaviors that are more acceptable and function at higher levels, even though they are still “autistic”. For example that Emotion Boy-Fantasy subtype could be used to describe almost any teenager these days, and shifting from OCD to Fantasy might be a positive move, (although it’s all still OCD behavior)
I’ll have to see if there are more subtypes listed on another page, because it seems to me that they’re missing some, but perhaps it’s because those kids are still considered “autistic” rather than “Aspergers”.
The other point is that kids can move up and down the spectrum with therapy and education. My child, for instance, has, with a LOT of hard work, moved from being almost totally non-responsive and sensory defensive (to an EXTREME) to the Fantasy subtype over the last 16 years.
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When I clicked through to the asperger’s site, I thought Laura might be giving us an example of a content farm (it read and felt like that to me). I guess it’s written by one person, so it’s not in a technical definition of a content farm?
My reaction was prompted by the juxtaposition of “stereotype myths” (which pointed out that people with asperbergs are individual and not stereotypic collections of characteristics) with the aspergers’ subtype classification (which ends with lines like “the police will often be called” and “medication is almost always necessary”).
But, given my lack of experience, what do you (Wendy & Laura) find useful about the site? Is it that the recommendations ring true?
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I often say, If you know one kid with AS, you know one kid with AS. So many of the books I’ve read tend to treat all AS the same. To break the kids down into different subtypes is quite useful and validating to me, because my son isn’t like a lot of the “typical” AS I see in books.
A lot of the stuff from the post I linked comes from this book. I was in a rush and Googled “logic boy” and came up with that site.
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That’s why I liked this breakdown, too, Wendy. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. I also hadn’t seen anything written about kids with crazy imaginations. Actually, I prefer Temple Grandin’s typology of different types of autism. She forms her categories not based on disabilities, but on abilities. Some kids have special abilities with language and others are more spacial types. Someone in this house has fantastic abilities in this department.
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