Functional, every day profile of a HFA child

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My son is very friendly and very outgoing. Has been since a small child. He was actually too friendly. I always worried he would go off with a stranger. He is now 10 and while he knows the boundaries of walking off with anyone, he does still tend to talk to complete starnger too much. He doesn't "get" that feeling in some places where it just isn't the right time or place to start a conversation with a stranger. He doesn't pick upo on any of the body language tha might say "don't talk to me".

He also tend to talks too much. For instance, yesterday we went to the local fire station that does summer classes on a variety of subjects. They had a bycicle safety class and they have a small town built with roads, stoplights, stop signs, one way roads, etc. for them to practice biking on. Before we bike, one of the firemen has a powerpoint presentation about bike and other wheel sport safety. This fireman welcomed any and all answers to his questions and comments. My son was appropriate in raising his hand and being okay if he wasn't chosen, but the fireman did call him many times and my son had a ton of appropriate comments and answers. Everything he added was great; however, I could tell he was going to keep raising his had 100 more times and no one was ever going to get to actually ride the bikes unless I said something to him. He wants to be that little professor.

Most of his group issues are all about sensory overload. People bumping his desk, making noise, etc. The larger the group, the more agitated he becomes. One on one, he seems like anyone else. It also comes and goes. Some days he acts like nothing bothers him and he will stand there and all the things that drove him mad the day before rolls off of him like nothing. I wish I could bottle those days.

He joined the amatuer summer swim team this year. In our town this is a pretty big group. About 350 kids of all ages. They practice with their age group only. Unfortunately, his age group happened to be the one with the highest numbers of any age group, so their practices could get crowded somedays. That meant somedays there would be 7-8 boys sharing swim lanes. Two things happen when he is on sensory overload. He acts unbelievably silly (I am talking if someone watched him and didn't know him, they would think he was mentally challenged.) or he gets annoyed and angry. It wasn't the best experience most days. In the beginning, he was making enemies because he would get annoyed if the other kids didn't swim on the appropriate side and would bump him, then he would get annoyed if the person behind him ran up on him or horror, swam around him. He wasn't even getting good swims because he was constantly stopping to see how close the person behind him was, which made him slower and them want to pass him. I finally talked to him and asked him what we were going to do. I asked him if perhaps he thought his AS was too big for him to be able to do swim team. He broke my heart during our conversation when he got tears in his eyes and said his AS was too big for him to do most of the things he wanted to do and he if it was too big for swim team, it was too big for everything. We then talked about how he could manage practice and we decided that he was going to be in the back of the line all the time from now on (Which is a very big deal for him in anything. He hates to be last.) This worked better most days. He finally was able to swim without worry about someone swimming up behind him. Unfortuantely, there was one boy always in his lane that was the slowest boy in the whole swim team. I am talking this boy needed swim lessons, not swim team. So now my son thought he had to stay behind this boy and then he had to stop every 2 strokes to not run the boy over. I then tried to tell him to get in front of that one boy only as he would never catch up to him, but it was constantly a challenge to manage practice.

That is what it is with our son most days. We teach him how to manage things to help him fit in and be the most comfortable and then some variable gets thrown his way that messes it all up.

Autism is a spectrum disorder meaning that there is no typical profile, categories such as LFA, HFA and Aspergers are constructs and have some familial similarities with shared characteristics. But there is considerable overlap.

I have a 6 yr old daughter with HFA and I can give you a comparative profile with your son.



My daughter plans her days using a calendar and will complain about change in venue i.e. a trip to the zoo cancelled in favor of a trip to the park. However if we warn her in advance she has time to prepare. She never really complains about changes in the structure of the routine i.e. school day reading was replaced with maths.



My daughter prefers playgrounds when there is more children than less. She is fine with playing alongside children and groups although she doesn't bother making friends or make eye contact.



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She hates bird noises and sound of machinery, coughing and sneezing. Interesting similarities.