Criterion E

Post Reply New Topic

What are the age-appropriate non-social self-help skills and adaptive behaviors that children with Asperger's develop that children with Kanner's don't?

Social skills are for example having completed potty training, feeding oneself, dressing oneself, washing up.

Adaptive skills is all beyond that but also got to do with personal independence.

You meant self-help where you said social skills there, right? If so, that makes sense..

When I read that I realized I didn't really know what they meant by that, I thought maybe it was more like emotional regulation kind of stuff.. in which case I might not have met that criterion, but most methods of regulating emotions seem to have social involvement. .. if that makes sense

You think THOSE are social skills!?!?!? WOW! I would have pegged "potty training, feeding oneself, dressing oneself, washing up." as self help skills!! !! !! !!



It is vague because they mean EVERYTHING, and people develop differently.

age appropriate non social self help skills are potty training, feeding oneself, dressing oneself, washing up. tieing shoes, counting money, etc.... Basically day to day tasks the average person has to do. SOCIAL has to do with customs, mitigating rudeness, non verbal communication, etc..... Hey, if I knew it all, I wouldn't even suspect I had AS!

So where do you fall if you know how to do it, but don't because something else gets in the way? Being technically capable of making your bed is all well and good, but if you have to be reminded to do it and even then take half an hour, you're not really capable of making the bed, are you?

I think that's called "adolescence." Whether or not you're actually an adolescent.

Ah. Then I've been an adolescent all my life.

As they say.. growing old is mandatory. Growing up is not.

That sounds like self help skills.

The full text (it's still vague if you don't know what clinically significant and cognitive development/age-appropriate self-help skills mean):

How about shoe-tying? That wasn't inability to do it, though, just to understand the way they wanted to explain it.

The thing with the bunny in the whole.. doesn't make one tiny bit of sense! I tie a shoelace bow like I tie a knot, except the second part is loops instead of straight laces.. and usually a surgeon's knot (where it's twisted around a second time) but that's just cause it's my grandfather's way.
So anyways, I think I do it the same way, I just don't get why they always went on and on about the bunny going around and into the hole... that's just nonsense! If I tried to do it that way, I still wouldn't be able to tie my shoes! (*snorts indignantly* bunny-in-the-hole indeed.. grr)

I think the bunny in the hole is to help the child to tie their shoes so the grown ups try to make it easier for the kid to learn to tie their own shoes by trying to make it easier for them to remember how and maybe it's to motivate them to learn because the parent is telling them a little story.

If I kept trying to put the frickin' bunny in the hole, I STILL wouldn't be able to tie my shoes!

Interesting to read that. Makes me think I could have been diagnosed when I was younger. My parents just thought I was gifted and a bit eccentric until I got to school and there were problems. I was the first child so they didn't know what normal kids social skills were like.

What I don't understand, is don't a lot of kids with Asperger's have problems with things like dressing themselves, due to rubbish motor co-ordination and executive dysfunction

As for shoelaces, I could never learn the normal way to tie shoelaces, so my dad taught me to make two loops and tie them together. I still tie my shoes like that, and my dad laughs sometimes because I tie my shoes like a small child does, but he didn't teach me any different way when I'd got the hang of the one I use now. I don't remember ever being told anything like 'put the bunny in the hole' - if I was I would have got very confused as I can't imagine how a shoelace can resemble a rabbit.

The loops-around-each-other thing is exactly the same as the bunny-in-the-hole thing, except the former acknowledges that it's shoelaces/string, rather than a stupid rabbit! The loop being a bunny going around and into the hole is the same as the way you twist the two loops together, which is what I do too... apparently it's easier for normal children to think of their shoelaces as a rabbit and a hole. I think it's stupid, but that's probably because I don't get it. and I loop the loops around an extra time so it doesn't slip. (not a double knot, that's tying it and tying it again. this is just looping around a second time when you're looping the loops.)

The ability to tie one's shoelaces or getting ready for school in the mornings most likely isn't severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of AD, and nor is it life threatening in most cases, whereas being unable to understand the consequences of running across roads is quite dangerous, and this is something people with AD have as young children (where their peers don't have this), and many times well into adulthood.

It's probably the whole severity thingy; the inability to get dressed in the mornings for school is fairly minor compared to swallowing sharp objects--I had the problem with getting dressed for school, but I just slept in my school clothes (it was a very minor thing to rectify with a little thought. Wearing shoes that don't have laces is something if you can't tie your shoes). It includes motor problems in the DSM-IV-TR in AS, and it even states that bullying can be a problem due to being poor at sport, but it then goes on to say that it's a relatively minor thing (I'm assuming they mean in comparison to disorders that involve primary motor functioning, and also in comparison to the core areas of AS).