I am not defective. I am different.

I will not sacrifice my self-worth for peer acceptance.

I am a good and interesting person.

I will take pride in myself.

I am capable of getting along with society.

I will ask for help when I need it.

I am a person who is worthy of others’ respect and acceptance.

I will find a career interest that is well suited to my abilities and interests.

I will be patient with those who need time to understand me.

I am never going to give up on myself.

I will accept myself for who I am.

The above self-affirmation pledge of those with Asperger’s syndrome was written by Liane Holliday Willey. She is an adult with an Asperger’s diagnosis. It could be said that she has a better self-image than most adults without a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.

Each person who is diagnosed with Asperger’s is not disabled, handicapped or defective. They have a different way of thinking, and for their benefit they are included in the autism spectrum disorders. How can that be true? Each and every one of us need to see all those who have developmental disabilities in a new light. We need to see that they are differently abled than us. By having a classification in the American Psychiatric Association diagnostic criteria, persons who have a diagnosis of Asperger’s can receive certain services to enhance their lives and allow them to live their lives in the most complete and full way possible.

Services that the child or adult is eligible for will assist them in the following areas.

KEY POINTS AND STRATEGIES

Stage One

*An adult trained in providing interventions can act as a friend to the child in order to train them on how a friend interacts

*Teach the child to take turns and ask for help.

*Organize a dress rehearsal with another child.

*Play pretend games with the child.

*Encourage the child to watch a video recording of children playing.

*Give encouragement to the child for being friendly.

*Write social stories to help the child understand specific social situations.

*Use ‘social signals’ activitiy to teach the social signs to prevent social accidents.

Stage Two

*Use role-play activities to provide practice in aspects of cooperative play.

*Provide a teacher assistant in the classroom and playground to offer guidance and feedback for the child and his or her friends.

*Encourage boys and girls to play with figures or dolls and read fiction.

*Seek shared interests with like-minded children.

*Help the child to develop a sense of humor.

*Use concentric circles to help the child to learn
social conventions for greetings, topics of conversations, touch and personal body space and gestures of affection.

*Teach the child what not to say.

*Be the guide to the child as ‘anthropologist’ in the classroom to explain social customs.

*Ensure that after-school social experiences are brief, structures, supervised, successful and voluntary.

*Enroll the child in social skills groups.

*Provide programs for peers on how to play with and be a friends of someone with Asperger’s syndrome.

Stage Three

*Encourage same-gender and opposite gender friendships.

*Encourage a peer to become a mentor or buddy to the child.

*Help the child to find and join an alternative group of freinds who have similar interests and values.

*Introduce programs to develop teamwork skills as a way to teach friendships skills.

*Encourage the child to attend drama classes.

*Use television programs, especially situation comedies and science fiction, to illustrate aspects of social behavior.

*Use books and resources to teach friendships skills.

Stage Four

*Encourage the person to view animals as potential friends.

*Encourage the person to use the internet as a source of friendship.

*Suggest the value of support groups for young adults with Asperger’s syndrome.

*Provide information on relationships.

*Explore different strategies to reduce performance anxiety in social situations.

*Encourage the person to limit the duration of socializing if necessary.

Real progress in children with Asperger’s syndome has been shown with consistent use of these stages.

Asperger’s Syndrome Cognitive Abilities

Key Points and Strategies

*Some young children with Asperger’s syndrome start school with acedemic abilities above their grade level.

*There seem to be ;moe children with Asperger’s syndrome than one might expect at the extrremes of cognitive ability.

*Profile of learning abilities at school.

+Teachers soon recognize that the child has a distinctive learning style, being talented in understanding the logical and physical world, noticing details and remembering and arranging facts in a systematic fashion.

+Children with Asperger’s syndrome can be easily distracted, especially in the classroom. When problem solving, they appear to have a ‘one track mind’ and a fear of failure.

+As the child progresses through the schools grades, teachers identify problems with organizational abilities, especially with regard to homework assignments and essays.

+If the child AS is not successful socially at school, then academic success becomes more important
as the primary motivation to attend school and for the development of self-esteem.

+THe profile or pattern of intellectual abilities is mroe important than the overall or Full Scalle IQ.l

+At least 75 percent of children with AS also have a profile of learning disabilities indicative of an additional diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder.

+Psychologists divide attention into four components; the ability to sustain attention when needed, and to encoude attention-that is, to remember what was attended to. Children with Asperger’s syndrome appear to have problems with all four aspects of attention.

*Executive Function-We now have consderable research evidence to confirm that some children, but more especially adolescents and adults, with AS have imparied Executive Function.

+The psychological term EXECUTIVE FUNCTION includes:

+Organizational and planning abilitiies

+Working memory

+inhibition and impulse control

+Self-reflection and self-monitoring

+Time management and prioritizing

+Understanding complexs or abstract concepts

+Using new stgrategies

*One strategy to reduce the problems assiciated with impaired executive functioning is to have someone act as an ‘EXECUTIVE SECRETARY’

*Problem solving

+Research has indicated that children with AS tend to continue using incorrect strategies and are less likely to learn from their mistakes, even when they know their strategies are not working.

+The child with AS may prefer to use his or her own idiosyncratic approach to problem solving.

+It is important to encourage flexibility in thinnking and this can start at an early age. When playing with very young children with AS, an adult can play the game of ‘what else could it be?’

+An adult can vocalize his or her thoughts when problem solving so that the child with AS can listen to the various approaches the adult is considering in order to solve the problem.

*Coping with Mistakes

+The learning profile of children and adults with AS can include a tendency to focus on errors, a need to fix an irregularity and a desire to be a perfectionist.

+It is important to change the child’s perception of errors and mistakes.

+Social stories can be used to explain that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes; mistakes can lead to interesting discoveries, and an error is an opportunity, not a disaster.

*School achievement in reading and mathmatics

+ There are more children with AS at the extremes of school achievement in reading and innumeracy that one would expect.

+From clinical experience,conventional remedial reading programs have not been as effective with children with AS as one would expect.

+The difficulty for children with AS who are able to solve complex mathematical problems can be explaining in words how they achieved the answer.

*Weak Central Coherence;

+Children with AS can be remarkably good at attending to detail but appear to have considerable difficulty perceiving and understanding the overall picture or gist.

+Parents of a child or adult with AS often remark on their son or daughter’s ability to give a vivid and accurate descriptions of events that occurred during infancy.

*Classroom strategies to encourage cognitive development

+Children with AS appear to make the greatest advances in cognitive and academic abilities in a quiet, well-structured classroom.

+The class teacher needs to create an “Asperger’s Friendly” environment based on the social, linguistic and cognitive abilities of the child. To create such an environment, it is essential that the class teacher should have access to information and expertise on AS and attend relevant training courses.

+The greatest cognitive and academic progress has been achieved by teachers who show an empathic understanding of the child, respect his or her abilities and know the child’s motivators and learning profile.

*Homework

+A major cause of anguish for children and teenagers with AS, their families and teachers is the satisfactory completion of homework.

+The area where the child works at home mjust be conducive to concentration and learning.

+It is extremely helpful if parents create a daily homework timetable for the child and exchange a diary or log book between home and school.

+The teacher can highlight key aspects of the homework sheet, provide written explaination and ask questions to ensure the child knows which aspect of the homework material are relevant to his or her preparation of the assignment.

+It is of common opinion that the child with AS should be exempt from punishment for not completing homework assignments on time, and there should be a maximum duration of homework of 30 minutes, unless the child or adolescents wants to spend more time on his or her homework.

*It is now recognized that significant advances in science and the arts have been attributable to individuals who had a different way of thinking and possessed many of the cognitive characteristics associated with AS.

It is possible for the child and adult to live a full and productive life with a diagnosis of Asperger’s. Using positive interventions and receiving services will allow the highest level of success to be accomplished.

taking care of the written word,
dannielyn