how do i best support my son

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Dear Travelmum, as long as you love your son and teach him to have no shame in truly being himself, he will be fine.

Autism is a fruit salad, as Donna Williams would say. At school I was a great athlete, hated maths & found science an awful poor. As an adult I am bored out of my mind with star track, alien & conspiracy stuff & I am a deeply emotional articulate & feeling individual. However, I am an autistic man.

I wish you well, God bless you and your beautiful boy.

Travelmom: if your son has AS, he is much more functional than I could have ever been. This does not mean he does not have AS, or that he is not on the spectrum. If you have concerns, you should get an appointment with a psychologist or psychiatrist so they can evaluate for AS. A diagnosis of AS is not something that hurts, it is something that helps. For years I felt like I was the ONLY person in the entire world that felt the way I did/do. If I had known there was a logical explanation for what I was feeling, it would have spared me a great deal of pain.

Travelmom....my son will be 16 in January. I just had him diagnosed with AS in April. He too is pretty high functioning. Never saw the point in grades except to keep me from yelling at him, so that's about how much effort he puts into it. He has played soccer since he was 3. Not terribly gifted at it, but does pretty well.

Our issues were the grades (he's got 150+ IQ), the attention level, difficult make friends, minimal eye contact, constant abrasiveness toward the other kids.....it was curious. An interesting problem. His biggest indicator was that when he hit puberty his sensory issues went through the roof.

I had mentioned it to his pediatrician, but he laughed at me. My insurance stopped covering him, so I had to switch. The new ped after having him for a year, thought that it might be AS too. His psychologist hasn't ever worked with a high functioning kid before, so he wasn't sure. The ped sent us to a neuropsychiatrist in a bigger city. Part of the problem is that he is the only AS kid that is as high functioning as he is in our county. So no one knew what to do with him or were even sure if it really was AS.

I say find a specialist like a neuropsych. Start thinking about how he's always been. Be prepared to answer lots of questions and to maybe even ask him some embarrassing questions for both of you. I had to ask my son what he did up there in his bedroom every night when I heard him doing what sounded like pacing. He had to admit that he was walking around the bed 50 times. He just couldn't get settled down without it. That was horribly embarrassing for him to admit. Unfortuneately, our kids fall into that odd group of kids that don't get diagnosed until later in life because of the fate of their age. AS wasn't even hardly known in the US before 1994 and unless you were lucky enough to have an autism specialist in your neighborhood that recognized the idiosyncracies than your kid didn't get diagnosed.

Now, before everyone jumps me or you, for that matter. Remember that the diversity of us in the first place has caused the AS diagnosis to even be one. We are characterized by not fitting into any other category. I would say the social difficulties and the eye contact would be warning signs that you should at least be attendant to. Especially since he is involved in very social things, but still has difficulty. I think it's worth it to check it out. Good luck.

Also, you need to think of AS has a hiccup in what is considered "normal" development in personality. I've always taught my son that it's okay to not be the same as everyone else. He's proud of being a "weirdo". He tells people, "yeah, I'm weird, get over it, I did." If he's already aware that he's different, then it's just building on realizing that it's okay.

We always say, "you laugh because we are different, we laugh because you are all the same". The more accepting and okay with it that you are, the better off he will be. Look at it as a variation that needs to be celebrated. Our thought patterns are so completely intricately different that learning how to channel it is a wondrous and beautiful things indeed. Especially when the talent is art. It's a perspective that is difficult to appreciate, but magnificent in it's uniqueness. In the meantime, do some research. I use "Quirky Kids" as my bible. I use it for my own personal reference and as a reference for the families that I work with.

My guess would be that your son has discovered that the movement in sports is the movement that he needs to do to make his system work. All that physcial exertion can be a kind of stimming.