My oldest son has a lot of social challenges. I always thought he was funny and quirky and adorable but most other people found him to be incredibly unapproachable and very Aspie.
He once told me that I was the only adult in his life who saw him as having problems rather than as being a problem. Given how others treated him, it's hardly surprising that for most of his childhood he only really lit up around me and maybe his brother and mostly when there was no one else around.
When he was sixteen, I began and moderated an email list designed around his needs and interests called Wired for Science. This was not my first experience with moderating but it was likely the first time I founded a list.
We would post articles about research into how memory worked or other psycho-neurological stuff and discuss it on list. This was about meeting the social and emotional needs of my quirky kid who was real into science and not into people.
It was a discussion list about neurological stuff where the point was to help people with neurological quirks to relate that to their identity and how that caused them to experience life and feel about things. It was called Wired for Science because that's how we talked about his neurological stuff: He was very into science and good at that but not so good at the social stuff.
I saw that as two sides of the same coin and explicitly taught him to view it that way. I didn't tell him "You are broken because social stuff doesn't come easily to you." I told him "You have a certain profile and it makes you good at some things and bad at others. Being innately good at science and bad at social stuff are just two sides of the same profile. It's not a big deal. You are just wired for science."
I created a hand-picked list of names from a homeschooling list I was on and I invited both parents and their children to join this new list under separate email addresses, so these were family discussions and all members of the discussion group were one of two or sometimes three people from the same family (usually a mother and child or mother and children). At first, only me and my oldest son were on it out of our family but then he and I talked so much about it in person that his brother was feeling left out, so he asked to join as well and then all three of us were on it.
The list was explicitly designed by me around the needs and interests of my older son following a detailed discussion one night. Fittingly, he was the life of the party on the list. He was its heart and soul.
My son can be very wordy, moreso than me. I was getting teased on forums and email lists about being long-winded but when I was moderating Wired for Science I fairly often had to read my son's emails over the course of two separate sessions because he's not only long winded, he writes with a lot of density. It was almost always a lot to try to digest.
When he lost interest in the list, I could not breath life back into it. I eventually shut it down because once he had gotten his needs met and no longer wanted to participate, the list was simply dead.
The fact that I not only designed it around his needs but I moderated it made a big difference for him. It helped him come out of his shell socially for the first time and be his delightful, entertaining, quirky, funny self with other people, not just his mom.
He still picks and chooses when and where to share that side of himself. He doesn't share it with just anyone but when he does choose to share it these days, lots of people find him funny and interesting.
One of our on-list exchanges got edited into a webpage on a previous parenting blog of mine. I titled it Time Blind and quoted an exchange about what it's like to live with no sense of time. After describing how impairing that can be and what that's like in mostly negative terms, he quipped at the end:
He once told me that I was the only adult in his life who saw him as having problems rather than as being a problem. Given how others treated him, it's hardly surprising that for most of his childhood he only really lit up around me and maybe his brother and mostly when there was no one else around.
When he was sixteen, I began and moderated an email list designed around his needs and interests called Wired for Science. This was not my first experience with moderating but it was likely the first time I founded a list.
We would post articles about research into how memory worked or other psycho-neurological stuff and discuss it on list. This was about meeting the social and emotional needs of my quirky kid who was real into science and not into people.
It was a discussion list about neurological stuff where the point was to help people with neurological quirks to relate that to their identity and how that caused them to experience life and feel about things. It was called Wired for Science because that's how we talked about his neurological stuff: He was very into science and good at that but not so good at the social stuff.
I saw that as two sides of the same coin and explicitly taught him to view it that way. I didn't tell him "You are broken because social stuff doesn't come easily to you." I told him "You have a certain profile and it makes you good at some things and bad at others. Being innately good at science and bad at social stuff are just two sides of the same profile. It's not a big deal. You are just wired for science."
I created a hand-picked list of names from a homeschooling list I was on and I invited both parents and their children to join this new list under separate email addresses, so these were family discussions and all members of the discussion group were one of two or sometimes three people from the same family (usually a mother and child or mother and children). At first, only me and my oldest son were on it out of our family but then he and I talked so much about it in person that his brother was feeling left out, so he asked to join as well and then all three of us were on it.
The list was explicitly designed by me around the needs and interests of my older son following a detailed discussion one night. Fittingly, he was the life of the party on the list. He was its heart and soul.
My son can be very wordy, moreso than me. I was getting teased on forums and email lists about being long-winded but when I was moderating Wired for Science I fairly often had to read my son's emails over the course of two separate sessions because he's not only long winded, he writes with a lot of density. It was almost always a lot to try to digest.
When he lost interest in the list, I could not breath life back into it. I eventually shut it down because once he had gotten his needs met and no longer wanted to participate, the list was simply dead.
The fact that I not only designed it around his needs but I moderated it made a big difference for him. It helped him come out of his shell socially for the first time and be his delightful, entertaining, quirky, funny self with other people, not just his mom.
He still picks and chooses when and where to share that side of himself. He doesn't share it with just anyone but when he does choose to share it these days, lots of people find him funny and interesting.
One of our on-list exchanges got edited into a webpage on a previous parenting blog of mine. I titled it Time Blind and quoted an exchange about what it's like to live with no sense of time. After describing how impairing that can be and what that's like in mostly negative terms, he quipped at the end:
PS: You know what's cool about having no sense of time?
I'm immortal.
(No, I won't explain)