Raising Future Adults

The title of the movie has nothing to do with autism. It's the toddler nickname of a forgotten older brother, Raymond being mispronounced as Rain Man by a two or three year old. Good points: The movie shows and argues that there's more to Raymond than his limitations. It's a reasonably accurate depiction of the big strengths and big weaknesses of an idiot-savant. Bad points: I look at the behavior of Raymond and see someone who has been institutionalized for decades and never learned to navigate the larger world and the movie doesn't really adequately make that point in my opinion. If you have a socially challenged child in any way similar to Raymond: 1. A lot of his issues are rooted in sensory issues. They may never completely resolve, but treating underlying medical issues can reduce them and you can arrange your life to be quieter and calmer and less triggering. FYI: Raymond should have been losing it in the face of the lights and noise in the casino too. It's ...

As an adult, people have seen me as extremely articulate and have expressed surprise when I have told anecdotes about speech challenges I had as a toddler, as if toddlers who struggle to pronounce things can't possibly grow up to be articulate adults. But it's developmentally normal for toddlers to have some speech challenges and highly unusual for a child to skip that awkward stage -- though it does seem to happen in rare cases. Some kids who  talk late  sometimes just start speaking in full sentences that are relatively articulate for their age, skipping the earlier developmental stages of one word alone and then two words which typically precede the use of sentences. I've heard more than one personal anecdote over the years from people I knew online or knew in person.  "Einstein Syndrome" is a term some people use for this pattern of development and that phrase may help you find relevant articles if you know a speech delayed child and are fretting about it. The...

Many years ago, I attended one conference in the gifted world. One of the presenters told a story about a young girl who was simultaneously being denied gifted education appropriate to her needs and allowed to pursue some kind of sport in which she was talented. They were telling her it would be harmful to her in some way to adequately feed her mind. She made some kind of cutting remark along the lines of "Well, then, why is it okay to harm me so your sports team does better in competition?" IQ is a measure of intelligence relative to age . Children with a high IQ are viewed as being the mental age of someone older than they are. This comes with inherent social, emotional and other developmental changes. They aren't necessarily more emotionally mature than children their age and even if they are, their emotional maturity may fall somewhere between physical age and mental age. Small children with a high IQ may have a keen interest in science, but be as clumsy as your typic...

Remember that the goal of my writing on this site is helping people with difficult kids raise future adults. In other words, the plan is to empower children with personal challenges to grow up to be functional members of society who are willing and able to take responsibility for their lives no matter their personal shortcomings. This is not a piece intended to make excuses for adults who didn't have the kind of information I am trying to make available nor to merely excuse bad behavior on the part of a child. I am trying to give parents tools for effective mitigation. As a small child, he was a lying little brat who thought he was being clever to just say whatever BS popped into his head. I began checking his story and he came to live in fear of The Momminator or Darth Mom checking his story because I would go ASK other people questions. I broke him of lying and he began proactively making sure his friends told me stuff ahead of time so he didn't need his story checked. That...

Small children sometimes blow a gasket and have a tantrum. I never allowed that to become a situation where they got the idea you could use a tantrum to manipulate mom into giving you your way. I also didn't punish them. One son has flat feet and he used to have a meltdown periodically when we were out and about and I would sit down next to him and wait and occasionally ask if he was done yet. I eventually realized he fell apart due to foot pain and began arranging to have a stroller or cart or some means to not put him in that position. One of my sons needed more sleep than average and trended towards ONLY sleeping well in his bed. While moving or traveling, he sometimes got overly tired and had a meltdown and I would send him to bed to get the rest he clearly needed. One son once was literally hopping mad and apparently literally burst a blood vessel. His fit ended completely and suddenly when he began gushing blood from his nose. Years later, he told me that it served as a kind ...

I was a full-time homemaker and homeschooling mom, so I cooked a lot and nutrition and health was a big part of raising my kids. I was trying to make sure they had a sound mind in a sound body and everything I understand about life says that's an important part of what parents do. But people have often reacted really negatively and really strongly to me talking about nutrition and health, as if that's somehow not the responsibility of the parents and amounts to me trying to "practice medicine without a license." Even if your kid is on prescription medication under the care of a physician, there are pieces of the puzzle you can and should handle yourself without calling the doctor every five minutes for permission to feed your kid. Staying Legal should help you figure out where to draw that line. I have two blogs that are health focused: Atypical Cystic Fibrosis  Formulary of Life   I recommend reading both in their entirety while you start a health journal recording...

There's no single test for ADHD and they have to go through a process of elimination and rule out other things first that may be causing the issues. ADHD was at one time a diagnosis given to a small number of children and now it gets described as being at epidemic levels. My oldest son was assessed for ADHD when he was five and attending an unusually good public school in a small city with a big university where there was enormous competition for teaching positions by qualified people. They concluded he had some kind of attention span issue, but it wasn't ADHD because he weirdly paid more attention to longer, more complex sentences and they had no idea what that meant. Years later while involved with the gifted community online, I dubbed that Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome. Prior to that, at one school his frustrated teacher said we should "Put him on Ritalin." to control his behavioral issues and made no mention of assessment for ADHD and didn't bother to ask if he ha...