How to help my son starting school?

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Hi,
I've just registered here and I really hope someone will be able to give me some good advice to help my son.

My son is nearly six and he has just started school.

He was diagnosed with austism when he was little. He was non-verbal and all he ever did was cry, or spin toys with wheels in front of his eyes. Later we found out he had "Lyme disease induced autism" and now, after 2 years taking antibiotics, he has made a lot of mental development. He can talk perfectly well and most people think he shows no sign of being autistic at all.

The only thing that he has trouble with is people. He just ignores people! His best friend lives next door and with this kid, it's almost like he is in love, he is always ready to play with him and cries when we separate them at bedtime. But he ignores just about all other children. He refuses to share toys with them and takes ABSOLUTELY no notice if they try to talk to him. He acts like he's deaf. Yet the thing that makes this most baffling to me is that he doesn't do it all the time. Sometimes he chats to them and loves their company. It's like he's autistic part time!

Now he has started school and he is doing the same with the other children there. If he doesn't interact with the kids on at least a basic level, he is going to get branded a weirdo and probably bullied sooner or later. How can I help him understand this? I just wish I could understand why he is like this. When I try to get him conversing with other children, he ignores me as well.

If anyone can help me with any insight or ideas about how I can help him I would be REALLY grateful.

Yup. Count on it.

Athene, at some point you have got to understand that your son has a form of brain damage. Autism rewires the brain so that one's experiences and impressions are all askew from the norm and you can't change that just by insisting that the autistic person simply has to change for their own good.

I've been living with this condition for 52 years now and I can tell you from personal experience that pressure from parents, teachers, friends and employers not only doesn't help, it actually makes things harder. The best analogy I've come up with so far is that of computer processors - our processors, especially where social interactions are concerned are lower capacity than the norm. We can handle the data, but we can't process it as fast.

All those nonverbal signals that humans are sending out every moment that they interact together - facial expressions, hand movements, postures - all that body language that most people read and interpret without even realizing that they're doing it - is too much for our processors. When one other person enters the room, we start to struggle, but we can (barely) keep up. With every new person who comes in, the pressure increases exponentially, and the little hourglass icon starts spinning. It quickly becomes overwhelming, almost physically painful.

Its easier with people we know, but even then if its forced on us suddenly, its like being ambushed. Sometimes other sensory input, like certain sounds or types of light can be just as overwhelming, irritating and even painful.

Over the course of a lifetime, the hardest part of dealing with all this is that because our handicaps are invisible, those around us forget, or are sometimes never aware, that we're struggling - all the time. Your son will develop his own coping mechanisms over time, but he'll just have to find what works for him. You certainly should teach him what other people expect socially, as he's able to understand. My folks worked with me endlessly about eye contact (which I learned to do when necessary, but its still very uncomfortable), how to give a firm handshake, extend the common social amenities, eventually I even learned to fumble my way through minimal small talk.

I made friends (a few), had a career (I can talk up a storm in a closed room with a microphone, just don't ask me to speak up in a room full of people), married, raised children - and I have no doubt your son will manage okay, too, in the long run. But fitting in is always going to be a struggle and he'll just have to find his own ways of making connections. Pressure from others is just another overwhelming sensory input that causes us to shut down.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult, but my Mother told me a story recently about how she had become a Cub Scout Den Mother to try to get me involved with other kids my age. She wound up leading a roomful of other people's kids in group activities, while I played by myself in the corner.

We am what we am. Just be patient.

Homeschool him? I wish my parents did that with me. Either that, or find a small private school. I think a lot of my problem was, my transition from private Christian school to public in 7th grade. It was like going from, I don't know, a peaceful village in the Swiss Alps and then "Welcome to Compton, California! *gunshots in background*" The Christian school took a lot of time to just work with students individually, and the small class size of only max 20 people was easy for me to deal with. That, and the fact bullying sorta wasn't encouraged for religious reasons. Oh, and financial, obviously if kids have problems there, the parents can just withdraw them, public school doesn't have that financial incentive really to have the teachers bother to keep kids in check, or have the kids do or learn anything really. My school wasn't perfect, and was very much too "legalistic" religiously but looking back, yeah, better.

I'd say just look around this board, see how happy all the adult Aspergers and autistics are from school. In middle school through high school, I got in trouble for truancy, had legal problems over it all. Nobody listened to my cries for help, nobody listened that I wanted out. Highschool, I was miserable everyday, I only literally went to school out of legal obligation. I beat all their arguments about why I should go to school, and they conceded that to me, but they said I had to go to school because it was the law. I wanted to learn, I'd read encyclopedias for hours a day in 6th grade, but I couldn't learn in school. I ended up in a special ed class full of kids who did drugs and didn't want to do anything. Finally, what happened basically was, But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. I saw I wasn't going to learn anything in school, that nobody was going to listen to me. I'd show up to school without even a pencil, over 2 hours late, everyday, and just not caring anymore. Eventually, I got arrested, falsely accused of assaulting people from school who robbed me, and ended up taking my GED in jail, and finding out I was completely right about being able to take it in 8th grade. Sucks when you're right and it doesn't matter at all.

This all made me stronger, but so will going and fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq. Does that mean you want your kid to go there? By putting him in public school, you're putting him out to just sink or swim. This is a very long article (not by me) that sums up my thoughts on public school almost exactly, please read it.

Just take your time with him, please. In time he will have friends, in time it'll all happen, but if you rush it all, it could be disastrous. I'm sorry for being overly emotional on this topic, but it's something that hurts me dearly even now, my experience in school as a child, so try not to disregard what I'm saying just due to my age and the fact that I sound very harsh.

Thank you both for your messages, which were really helpful.

1000knives, you school life sounds so completely awful, I was really sorry to read how much you suffered. I sincerely hope my son won't have similar experiences.
I read the article but the main thing that struck me was how different American culture is from ours in England (where I'm from) and Europe, specifically Italy where I live now. For a start, people who are good at sports but not academically great, are branded as lesbians (the girls) or "meat-heads" (the boys) in England, and are generally regarded as completely embarrassing to be associated with. In Italy they don't even do sports at school. Dressing trendy or whatever isn't really an option because everyone has to wear a uniform to school. It's all about personality, and the ability to socialise and make friends. In England in particular, the most important quality is sharp wit and the ability to make jokes. In Italy it's about being a very active social networker.... exactly the things that my son is almost certainly never going to be good at.

I want to persist with school for the time being though. Apart from the fact that I think he should at least give it a try, I am also too unwell myself to consider home schooling for now. I have Lyme disease too and I have to spend huge amounts of time resting or sleeping.

Willard, your description of the brain having a very small processor for interactions was so helpful!
You mentioned that some noises or types of light can also be a problem. Would you mind telling me a bit more about that?

I can tell you people with Lyme disease have a lot of problems with sensory stimuli of all types and I have noticed some of these problems in my son... but the reaction seems to be different.
When I go to places with strip lighting (supermarkets or shopping centres) my brain just ceases to function. I feel so doped out I cannot even talk sometimes. My son can't cope with these lights either but he reacts differently, he screams and goes nuts and hysterical and can get very aggressive. I don't understand why the effect is so different when it's the same stimulus causing us both problems.
It would be really useful to know if there are other things that give you problems, and what exactly it feels like.
Smells give me really big problems and definitely have an effect of my son as well. They either cause instant headache or pain all over and it feels like a panic attack; I cannot figure out what goes on with my son but he is not himself when people wear perfume near him. We both get problems with clothes hurting (especially labels) and relative noises, eg. where you cannot hear the TV on max volume because my husband is reading some letter in the other room and rustling the paper.

Anyway, can you think of anything that your parents or other people taught you that was helpful, from your point of view, in coping at school and with other people in later life? I just want to know what is the best way to help my son be a happy person. I took him to a therapist briefly but she was awful. She wanted to coach him to behave in certain ways that other people would find acceptable, taking no notice of what was going on inside his head. It was like watching someone train a dog to perform tricks.

Anyway, thank you both again for replying. Any other advice or opinions you can give me, would be really helpful.

Play therapy could prove as an asset to explore. My psychologist works with children with developmental disabilities and is quite successful with it. Even more so, horse therapy, she takes children out with horses and walks them. Horses are very sensitive to how people interact with them and one can learn a lot by working with them. If you have any therapists who use horses with their therapy, i believe it is defiantly worth looking into. Horses perceive tone and body language like people do and most children have a lot of fun working with them. Hope this helps.