{"id":1347,"date":"2006-06-05T05:36:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T05:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2006\/06\/autism-and-will\/"},"modified":"2006-06-05T05:36:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-05T05:36:00","slug":"autism-and-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/autism-and-will\/","title":{"rendered":"Autism and Will"},"content":{"rendered":"

Autism is not, as so many think, about not perceiving the existence and or importance of other people’s minds<\/a>. Although I know and respect Simon Baron-Cohen, I think he got this a little backwards. For this neurotypical mom, autism can be more accurately described as an ongoing struggle to get my child to understand that he has a will and a mind of his own. I experience Nat’s autism as an extremely passive existence, whereby he is so unto himself <\/a>that he does not realize his own power. He also seems to attribute far too much power to me. I first understood this when he was a little guy, and did not know to ask me for juice, or did not know how to ask me for juice. He learned to say, “Want juice?” as a question, in effect imitating me so that he would get what he needed, which when you think about it is an ingenious adaptation. The autism experts explained to me that this is echolalia, a “problem” or “symptom” of autism. <\/p>\n

I used to think of Nat’s echolalia and silence as the relatively simple problem of not knowing how to ask; increasingly I believe it is that he does not know to<\/span> ask. I think that the latter is a far larger problem than the former. One can be taught various means of<\/span> getting words out, whether by signing, typing, using pictures, etc. <\/p>\n

But how do you teach someone that they should<\/span> get words out? That they should do something, for their own good, to fulfill their own needs? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember sighing to Ned that I wish I could get Nat to understand that playing with toys or other people was not just something I wanted him to do but was something that he wanted to do. Yesterday, Nat pinched both Ned and me because it was raining out. In this way, he still insists that we are in charge of everything, from the weather to when or what he is going to eat. I believe that this is a manifestation of the same ultimate passivity, or of being so completely unto himself that he does not perceive his own separate existence, will, and ability. Or perhaps passivity is not a good word; perhaps it is more the existentialist “en-soi,” the being so completely what one is that the quality of your very consciousness is different from others. Because I am aware of causation and my limitations as well as my strengths (at least, compared to Nat), I don’t blame other people for the shitty weather. I know to help myself whenever I can. And usually I know when that is, but not always. Nat, on the other hand, does not seem to know any of this.<\/p>\n

These days, Nat will not ask for anything without a prompt. The ABA-ists<\/a> will state simply that Nat is “prompt-dependent.” Perhaps there are techniques for “fixing” that. But perhaps it was the ABA that strengthened this tendency in the first place. Nat, who began life as someone so utterly within himself, has become so used to our structuring of his world that he may be incapable of structuring it for himself. <\/p>\n

I am not blaming ABA. I think that this is an educational technique, like all the others, that helps teach people certain skills. But the fatal flaw in ABA is that there is this magical fade-out of prompts, this expectation that there will be a leap from the specific skill acquisition to the general. But the leap from specific to general is a huge chasm for Nat. I now think it is the same underlying problem, the leap from feeling something within to realizing that he can be the master of his world.<\/p>\n

More mundanely, I am now considering placing simple reminder cards all over the house that read like this, “If you want to eat, go to the refrigerator or the cabinets and make a choice;” or “If you are bored, you can choose an activity, like listening to your Ipod, scootering, reading a book, watching t.v.” <\/p>\n

Anyone else have any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Autism is not, as so many think, about not perceiving the existence and or importance of other people’s minds. Although I know and respect Simon Baron-Cohen, I think he got this a little backwards. For this neurotypical mom, autism can be more accurately described as an ongoing struggle to get my child to understand that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-lJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}