The Next Thing You Know

A parent asks: Our son is finishing his first year of middle school. The IEP goals offered by the school team, from the first section to the last, are completely inappropriate and almost irrelevant to his recent developmental changes. We can pinpoint the academic problems he had sixth grade and carry them forward into seventh grade. But there are other [...]

Originally published in Ellen Notbohm's newsletter, August 2012 Four years ago a publisher on the other side of the world commissioned me to write an article on teaching children with autism to apologize. The editor didn’t want a typical American list of numbered or bulleted points, but rather a “flowing prose” discussion of teaching empathy to children with recognized social [...]

So, your child or student with autism does not listen, will not listen, never listens. This seems to be the theme in my mailbox this week. Here's my answer: How do you know? Gotta ask: Do you equate listening with compliance? Just because she doesn’t give the response you want doesn’t mean she’s not listening. He may hear, but not [...]

A paraeducator asks: I work with a student with autism. Yesterday an incident came up that I didn’t know how to handle. The children were returning to the classroom from library time, and my student wanted to be lights-on monitor, although it wasn’t her turn. When another student began to do the job, my student went into meltdown. I showed [...]

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This, from one of the 20th century’s foremost complex thinkers, Albert Einstein, who also said, “I very rarely think in words at all.” And a couple of millenia before Einstein,  Cicero deemed brevity “a great charm of eloquence.” Legions of authors nowadays try to live by William Zinsser’s [...]

As parents of children with autism, one of our most beloved clichés advises us that our journey is a marathon, not a sprint. We need stamina more than fast starts. We need patience. We need to pace ourselves. We need to remember to enjoy the scenery along the way.  The metaphor seems so fitting, I used it myself for years. [...]

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  What’s the difference between a smarty and a dummy? Merriam-Webster.com defines a smarty as “a person who thinks and behaves as if s/he knows everything,” while a dummy is “a stupid person.” As an autism parent, the smarties vex me [...]

Like any warm-blooded parent, my friend flushed with delight when her daughter handed her a lovely crayon-inscribed homemade card. On the front, it read “Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy! Even though . . .” But my friend’s warm-blooded glow cooled to mortification when she opened the card: “. . . your breath smells really bad in the morning!” Then there’s the [...]

 A therapist asks: I’m a family therapist offering in-home sessions. I have a client with a three year old boy with autism. Each time he sees me, he throws a screaming autistic tantrum, hitting his head with his fist and raking his fingers across his face until red.  There’s no outward reason for the tantrums. They aren’t typical toddler tantrums, such as when [...]

A grandparent asks: I have a beautiful 4-year-old grandchild who may be on the spectrum somewhere.  His parents do not want to have him tested.  I need to get this child potty trained and he seems to be resisting their efforts.  He reads and does math on the 4th grade level, can spell words that I have to think about [...]