Calling all teen and older Aspies...help me help my child!

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My son is 13, high functioning AS. As an only child and someone with AS, he is alone all the time. He has a lot of trouble in groups and we have just moved to a new area. I want to help him but not push him into things that make him uncomfortable. We home schooled this year and might do for next. But he is isolated and I want him to be happy. What can I do for him? I'd like it from the AS perspective. He has a lot of interests...he likes videogames, Pokemon, reading and so on. We live on a very fixed income so I can't afford a second car to get him around to activities and just feel stuck.

I love to spend time with him but I can't be his buddy....neither can his dad.

I am also worried about him being taken advantaged of by older 'typical' kids... He has been bullied in the past and has a lot of problems with someone always picking on him about being different.

We went to a family party the other day and he went off and watched tv instead of playing with the other kids. It was so sad. My husband (who I suspect of being on the spectrum) also did the same. He has trouble with noise (husband) and my son didn't care about playing with the kids.

I am so frustrated.

Thanks for listening.

You're doing what I did. You're projecting your feelings onto him. You feel sad because he went off to watch tv on his own. Was he sad?

I used to feel very sad for my lonely daughter who spends all her time in her room alone. She hardly ever goes out and I've tried so hard to get her involved in activities with other teenagers her age. I was really worried about how depressed I thought she was. Then the psychologist asked her outright about it. Turns out she's very happy in her room playing games and engaging in her special interests. She doesn't want to share her time or interests with others.

I've had to learn that this is how she is and that she's content and not to try and shape her into 'normal'. (Still learning really)

If I were you, I'd try hard to get together with other home schoolers and arrange to run small group classes so he will get at least some chance to mix with other kids. Home schooling can be great but for kids who aren't naturally sociable and don't already have a good circle of friends, it can be very isolating. Or you could ask him if he'd like to join this forum. It has a kids and teens section and he might like to chat online and make some 'virtual' buddies that way.

Is your son actually unhappy? Make sure you're not transferring your aspirations on to him and assuming that because you would feel sad and lonely if you were in his situation, he must feel that way too. You felt sad for him because he wasn't playing with the other kids, but perhaps he's happier than you think going off by himself (or with his dad) to quietly watch TV instead of hanging out with kids who wouldn't 'get' him...

As a kid, I was happiest left quietly to my own devices. When I was subjected to forced socialising, I was in hell...

Hi,

Home schooling is somthing that I don't know because in the netherlands that is not done, but as the previous messages already say, ask him self if he is happy, never asume alway verify with him, he kows best what he likes to do and not to do.

But forced sociolizing was the worst thing my parents torturred me with when I was young.
I think you have to offer him the possebilities to go out and explore but not force him, it is possible to discus this with him.
So try to get him to do things not by telling him to, but by explaining him that it is also a posseblity to do somthing else.
For he is probebly not very intrested in doing new things, this of cause orginate from his HFA, but if he is pointed to a new possebility he might suprice you.

Encourage the pursuit of his interests. One thing that would have been nice for me when I was your son's age, and a few years younger, would be for my parents to guide me through the depths of those interests, as adults tend to understand the wider context ("big picture") of a child's narrow interests. For example, if he likes reading books by a particular author, maybe help him find books by other authors he might like that write in a similar style. I used to like flattening out cardboard cereal boxes and building model road networks, complete with multi-level multi-freeway interchanges, and while my parents were supportive of this somewhat unusual hobby, what would have been even cooler is if they had used their worldly knowledge to point me in the direction of books about how such roads are engineered, road networks in other parts of the world, like Autobahns/Autostradas, etc.

While pushing him into socialising "normally" is going to be fruitless and frustrating for both of you, it is important that he be taught about "the outside world", as it will likely appear to him to be. He will probably have to do this to some degree through an intellectual learning process, with facts, observations, and reasoning, unlike the natural way you probably did when you were a child, more in the manner that you might have learned grammar or algebra. While you might have trouble convincing him he ought to socialise with other people merely because they are there and that that it is polite, an explanation of how "correct" social interaction helps him and helps society in general might go a long way toward social success when he wants to or has to socialise (eg: to go buy Pokemon cards). Does he have the opportunity to socialise with kids his age who share his interests?

Does HE want a buddy ? or do you ?

Does HE mind the bulling and picking part ? or do you ?

I know it is hard to be confronted with these kind of questions but they will make your live and probebly his live much easier if you try comunicate with him over his way, his peceptions of the world. I'am not telling you how to live your life but I am a asperger myself and I wish my parents had done this with me, and this from the bottom of my heart.

so it is just a suggestion, nothing more.

If I remember right, I was reasonably happy in my own little world too, until puberty. Things changed then, so although he's OK now, I'd try to make sure he knows he can talk to you about it if he should one day begin to feel any different. He might never get like I did, but loneliness can be quite horrible, so I think it's best not to take any chances. I wasn't so lucky - my parents didn't value my social needs at all, so I couldn't talk to them when it became important.

This is how my Dad felt about me. They (parents) spent the last 6 years trying to MAKE me make friends and now I am more unhappy than when I was alone with my computer and rabbits. I find having friends hard work. The more I (in their words) 'emerge' into 'the real world' the more depressed and anxious I am getting. So yes, as per the others' advice, make sure not to push your son to socialise because YOU don't like to see him alone, make sure it is HIM who wants friends first. If he says he does, than I would suggest finding some caring people who don't see him for his autism but for who he is. These are hard to come by but they do exist

As other people have said, make sure you aren't projecting your own desires on to your child. Like many people on the spectrum, I was perfectly happy as a child sitting in my room on my own reading, writing, doing little science experiments, playing video games, or designing fantasy worlds complete with maps, culture analysis, and bits of new languages in my notebooks. When my mom saw this as "inappropriate" and antisocial behavior, she forced me to go outside with the other children, which was my own personal hell. I could have had a much happier childhood if my mother had just left me alone to do my own thing.

Eventually I reached an age where I "woke up" more to the world and started feeling a desire to interact with other people. This was the point where I should have been encouraged to make friends - but I should have been helped with this because I had no knowledge of social rules, no ability to read body language, and it was a mess start to finish. I was undiagnosed, so adults thought I acted inappropriately on purpose and I received no help - you have the advantage of knowing what's going on with your son, so you can try to help him - but only when he's ready.

Talk to him and find out if he's interested in making friends or socializing, or if he's happy where he is. If he's happy as he is, I wouldn't worry. Just keep tabs on him and check now and then to make sure he's satisfied. If he ever expresses a desire to socialize, do as others have said and find people who share his interests and accept him as he is. I highly recommend theater groups or other types of artistic settings - artists are generally much more open to differences and more accepting than other people tend to be. Does he have an interest in art or music? Chidren's theater groups can be very helpful for autistic kids, in my experience. I remember gravitating towards theater at an early age myself. I would definitely not push him towards sports, since physical contact and the fast pace can be really overwhelming and damaging, and we tend to have poor spacial perception, including depth perception. I was pushed to play football (soccer) for years and the primary result was that I developed an intense fear of things flying at my head, since I could never tell how far away the ball was. Computer clubs, "gaming" clubs, and libraries all have a lot to offer as well.

Sometimes I wish my son liked being alone. He wants friends so badly, and has such a hard time socially it's heartbreaking. He follows kids around who obviously don't want to play with him, I've seen others follow him around just to pick on him. On occasion he finds a nice kid who doesn't care that he's "weird", but they are few and far between. I spend a lot of time facilitating good behavior with my son and other people's kids just so he can have friends. He doesn't understand why they don't like him or why they react the way they do, and it's hard to tell him without him feeling like there is something "wrong" with him when there isn't.

Maybe wanting to be alone isn't such a bad thing. There are days where I wish for that.

A home-schooling group would be good. You'll probably want one, anyway, so you can cooperate to teach high-school classes. Like, say you're good at teaching math and another parent's good at teaching biology, that sort of thing.

But, yeah, at his age I wasn't ready to start having friends, either. It just irritated me when my parents tried to force me. I was able to socialize somewhat by the sixth grade, but I had my first real friends when I was about seventeen and in college, and I still don't socialize more than once or twice a month. My primary social contact has always come from activities I like to do that require more than one person. In my teen years, that was being part of a choir; now I play tabletop RPGs.

REALLY!! ! I used to do that too! I'm not alone! I created a country which used Cyrillic alphabet in the north and it's own unique language in the south! I think it was called Ziyanta. But yeah I can see how parents might see this as worrying because I suppose it could look like we are withdrawing from real life, whereas in reality this is just our way of enjoying ourselves. Plus my obsession with language/buildings/maps and cultures has come in handy for real life anyway so it's win-win!

Sorry for going a bit off topic

Try to lurk him into MMORPG's maybe it don't look so social, but if I didn't have interest for MMORPG's I wouldn't have as much confidence as today.
I began playing MMORPG's when I was 12 which is 4 years back. It made me mature socially, but not as much as other people, but small talk is something I atleast can do today.
And I'm not as scared anymore when I'm in a group
So it's a great tip

I did much the same, though I never understood how someone could create a whole language themselves.

Like Tolkien? With his elven language

I have a few thoughts on this... I am also HFA (and/or Asperger's), age 44. I can't be sure of the similarities between your son and me (at age 13), but it sounds like he might be feeling some of the same apprehension that I was, regarding school and peer interaction. I was always a loner, and very much enjoyed being by myself. I had my own interests, and played with my own toys, etc. I was put in therapy around the second grade, and was at that time misdiagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic. What led to that was my fear of engaging with others my age, and my statements that the other kids "didn't like me", and chased me, teased, threw food, etc. And that they would say nasty things about me. That indeed sounds quite paranoid, but the fact was that those events were really happening and not in my mind, as alleged by some therapists who made the misdiagnosis.

Now as for how this could apply to your son: I wonder if he just doesn't feel comfortable around "normal" kids his age? If so, I don't think he can be forced to become the boy who is "one of the group". From the age of about 9, all of my friends; people in the neighborhood with whom I felt comfortable, and even felt to be my peers, were of grandparents' ages. I never had friends in my own age group UNTIL I was into my 20s and 30s. All of a sudden, I felt that I was truly comfortable with my own age group at that time. However, I to this day am very uncomfortable and uneasy around anyone age 20 and under. I don't know why, but that's just the way I am. I look back on all the hard-focused plans to force me to interact with my peers as a teen, and how I hated it! It felt like a war I couldn't fight, never mind win. Today I'm happily married, successful in life and in business, and doing just fine. I tend to hope that your son may be able to look forward to a similar future, and maybe the whole peer interaction thing is not so big as some people think it is.

I guess my lack of peer interaction skills did cause me to miss out on things like a high school prom, and I was very unsuccessful at dating, and all those things. But since I was not interested in those, I let one of my Autism special interests turn into an early career. I was always interested in electronics and TV sets, so while the other kids were at football practice after school, I was at a local TV repair shop where I had procured an after-school job, which led me to starting my own licensed TV/VCR/Camcorder repair business by age 18 in my mother's garage. So I was a nerd, but that has it's merits. Now I have plenty of friends, and I wish my parents could have know it would turn out this way. They were convinced that I'd have no friends all my life, and all kinds of awful fates.

I hope all works out well in the long run for you and you son, and somehow I think it will. He might be "weird" as viewed by the mainstream yuppie crowd, but after all, weird isn't so bad when you consider how it can shelter people from some of the daily pitfalls in life, such as materialism.... My "peers" all mortgaged their houses to 200% value and bought boats and cars. Our mortgage was paid off 5 years ago, and we have used cars and no boat. .

Charles