[In_The_Darkness]

I found out just yesterday that my sister’s freind’s son has aspergers. This intrigues me…espcially because of my mental health awareness company . And by that I don’t mean I want to interview him and assess him because I have gone through that **** with my depression and it’s horrible. I just want to get to know about him.


Y’know, maybe I can be there for him whenever he needs some support or perhaps even a friend. I know people with aspergers and autism have problems with making freinds but I have met him before and well, we’re almost step family

It is a shame. It really is. It took a very long time for his mum to reveal the truth about her son. And my heart goes out to her. BLESS him and her (son and mother).

I think its great you want to be this persons friend.
My son has PDD , the label is gone now. As he was so high functioning.
I wanted to say the ppl in his life who took the time to be his friend made a huge difference in his life.
I think more than anything if sometimes its not that they have a hard time making friends .Its that they are so afraid ppl will not except them for who they are.
Of course this is just coming from me whos child was and i am blessed ((he was high functioning)) but was not at the beginning.
There were I think 4 ppl who made a huge difference in his life. One when he was in kindergarden. Sounds silly., But this little girl understood almost every thing he said. No one knew how??? she spoke for him to the teacher . It was amazing..he still remembers her.
Next was a man i knew who owned a biz i dealt with. He would spend at least a hour every day with him. WHile i was working.He treated him like a normal child,. Even thou he never had a clue what my son was saying. P.S. he can talk now np
Next was my best friend . Who let him set up her dish displays with out worry. He did this every weeeked, over and over
I m rambeling Im sorry.

What im trying to say is yes,. Be a friend to this child and his Mom. Bless you for doing that. Sorry i went on.
I accepted it right away , thats just me. My mom his grandmother Never did .
good luck to you and this child
as i said sorry for going on

[In_The_Darkness]

Yes. I think it will help also as I am only 4 years older than him (he's 11 and I am 15) so we can probably both ya no chat or something ?

[robin620]

Having someone who has been through something similar helps. Just remember that people with autism pick who they call friends with difficulty and sometimes for random reasons - one day he wore a blue shirt so I decided to make him a friend. They also have been known to ask people they see as normal what "normal" is - which sometimes end up being very personal questions.
It's almost like they need a guide to society.
Thank you for taking this on, you never know how much of a difference you can make in someone else's life.

[Callista]

*sigh* Why do people think their kids don't deserve to know their own diagnosis? When they won't tell their kids, it's a sort of betrayal... it implies that it's so horrible that it has to be avoided, instead of a neutral sort of fact that you take into account when you go through life. If I had any say about it, I'd make people tell their kids as soon as they could understand words.

I am glad he finally got told, though. At least there's that.

Quite a few kids will lose their labels; the last estimate I saw was 25% diagnosed at two lose it by twelve. It doesn't mean their brains have magically become identical to their peers'; just that they've learned enough that their autism is no longer diagnosable. Kids learn. Autistic ones, too. Sometimes they learn enough that they catch up with other kids in the areas where they were behind to begin with.

When something doesn't cause impairment, you can't diagnose anything: Thus, the "lost diagnosis". It's still important to know about it, though, because it usually means that you'll have a different learning style you can take advantage of, and because--like being an immigrant from a different country--you might want to learn about where you started out. The autism community actually includes people who identify as "cousins" or "BAP" (broader autism phenotype)--people who don't have autism, but are on the autistic side of normal; or who have a diagnosis that's related to autism in some way, like non-verbal learning disorder, ADHD, and synesthesia.