Autism (4) (April 2008)

From April 2, 2008:

(Continued from a previous post)

The next year, I decided to start homeschooling one of my other kids, and it wasn’t long till a couple of the others came home as well. My little Duane’s Syndrome child loved homeschooling (she was always eating!) but had a very difficult time retaining any of the things she learned. I bought many books about how to teach children with learning disabilities, thinking these techniques would help regardless of whether she actually had a disability or not. I talked to my sister who has her Masters’ degree in teaching and got some good ideas. I tried everything. Some things worked, but many didn’t.

The one thing that did seem to work was consistency. She had to have the same routine every single day: the same chair to eat her meals in; the same chair to do her school work in (albeit a different chair than eating meals); schoolwork presented in the same order every day. Any disruption seemed to cause total chaos for her.

The Internet was no longer in its fledgling stage, and the “Yahoo!” list groups were exploding. I found a support group for Duane’s Syndrome there, and that was when the possibility of autism first entered my mind. I found that one-third to just over one-half of all children born with Duane’s Syndrome also have learning disabilities and/or autism. To me, that was a significant number! I wanted to get this checked out but never had the money to do so. I had already just had two kids diagnosed with ADHD and at $200/hour, I couldn’t afford another psychiatry bill. In the back of my mind, however, this answered many questions. It was as if the pieces to the puzzle were all fitting together, but the one final piece (the actual diagnosis) was missing.

When she was in 5th grade (homeschooled) someone said the public school could evaluate her for free. So we took her to the public school and they ran this evaluation on her. The staff psychologist could only say she tested “off the charts” for ADHD (he said she was a “spinner”, as I’d already known-- more about that later), and the other teachers involved simply said Middle School would be extremely difficult for her (changing classes and teachers every hour) so it was a good thing she was homeschooled. They also said she scored about average (nationally) or a little below on just about everything, so we had nothing to worry about. (Does that say anything about our public school system?)

I tried to explain her difficulties in retaining information even from day to day, but to no avail. One day she would ace everything, and the next day she wouldn’t remember a thing. We might come back to the same subject months later or a year later, and for some reason, and often out of the blue, she’d know every detail about it. And the next time, she wouldn’t.

I also expressed concern about her seeming inability to recognize danger, and that she had to be told (and taught) about things that could be dangerous-- rather than making these inferences on her own (such as how a child knows not to open a car door while it is moving because he might fall out), and though she has learned somewhat to recognize dangerous situations, it has been a long time coming.

I should add that at the evaluation by the public school, they admitted that they did not have the time to do a full evaluation but that she was a delightful child and hinted that I should be happy for that...

To be Continued...