Saturday, July 22, 2017

Emotions Without Words

As the mother of two autistic children, I face a lot of challenges.  My two children are very different from each other in terms of abilities:  Rowan, age 8, is extremely bright in all the obvious ways.  He has read through The Chronicles of Narnia; he listens to Roald Dahl and J.R.R. Tolkien on audio book; he is finishing Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series.  He has read Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little.  He excels in math, and is very articulate.  He has been speaking his mind in complete sentences since he was two.  He has an uncanny ability to use logic, and he is extremely creative.





Henry, age 5, is less obvious in his genius.  He is very low verbal, and much of what he does say is echolalia--repeating what he hears around him.  If he is hungry, he asks me, "Do you want food?"  If he pees his pants, he asks me, "Are you wet?"  He still wears pullups, although we are trying to get him fully potty trained before he starts kindergarten this fall.

However, Henry has been reading since he was three.  He continually astounds us with just how much he can read.  He reads everything he can get his hands on, and loves the text more than pictures.  Once we figured out that Henry's preferred method of communication is writing, things got a lot easier.  The first thing he said to us via "writing" was to spell "CHEERIOS" on the fridge with magnets.  He got the point across.

Thanks to two years in an extremely good preschool, Henry's verbal skills have improved.  Talking to him used to generate no response at all.  Now he answers simple questions and talks to let us know what he wants.  However, emotions are more difficult to convey.  Yesterday morning Henry went into meltdown mode, with nothing I could do helping at all.

He wanted his shoes off.  I took them off.  The howling continued.  He wanted to build train tracks.  Okay, I got those set up on the coffee table.  Then he threw a fit because he wanted to put them together himself.  I kept asking him what was wrong, but he couldn't find the words to tell me.  It's frustrating when you know there's something wrong, and you just can't get the message across!

At last, as he sat sobbing on the couch, Henry managed to say, "Where's the train?  Where's the train?  Where's the train?"  Aha!  He couldn't find a train to put on the train track!  Once the problem was known, it could be quickly addressed.

I think communication is probably the most challenging bit of parenting an autistic child.  What is your experience with that?  Do you have any tricks that work for you?