My oldest son is very aspie. I had a second child while terrified my marriage was about to end in divorce because I felt my child needed a full blooded sibling to have any hope of being socially functional.
I fundamentally don't agree with a lot of the nonsense we hear about how children today are being born with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder.
Spiders are born with certain social behaviors hard wired in. Humans get raised for eighteen years and much of their social stuff is learned behavior.
When I was growing up, I was one of three kids. My mom was one of twelve kids. My dad was one of five. I had an aunt, uncle and four cousins down the street and a next door neighbor with eight kids.
We have a lot fewer children per household on average today and that means a lot fewer siblings, cousins and neighbor kids. And then we jump to the brilliant conclusion that kids today are simply born with serious social deficits that we imagine didn't exist in prior generations.
It's possible there's some truth to that because we've created a toxic world full of poisons invented in the last hundred years. It's probable that is not the entire explanation.
One online friend had a kid diagnosed with selective mutism. This an official medical diagnosis that means she clams up and is incapable of speaking in certain social situations.
Mom found that telling people the diagnosis made things worse. She soon went back to saying "She's just shy."
The word shy has been around a long time. Previous generations had ugly words, like retard, for some things and we mostly no longer use those words. But their existence is evidence that past generations weren't living in some perfect social paradise of wonderfulness.
We over medicalize the issues our kids have and then we imagine that those problems didn't previously exist because that diagnosis wasn't widely given out.
My second child was 9.5 pounds at birth. He was nearly 27 pounds the week he turned a year old. I ran into a woman and her baby who shared the same hospital room with me. Her baby had been 9 pounds at birth and he was just 18 pounds the week our kids turned one.
This baby grew like a WEED and he slept twenty hours a day until he was ten months old. Then over the course of a few weeks, he dropped down to sleeping fourteen hours a day.
So I suddenly had a ten months old not much smaller than my three year old and for the first time they were playing together. And they didn't know how and were fighting.
I cleared my busy schedule and spent much of the afternoon every day for a week sitting on the floor with them actively TEACHING them to play nice. I would hand someone a toy and let them play for a bit, then say "Now hand it to him."
One week of that and the kids got along vastly better thereafter.
When they were three and five, I taught them to negotiate. They both wanted to sit in the front seat -- remember my stories are probably older than some of the parents reading this and get over your hissy about how kids under twelve shouldn't be in the front seat at ALL -- and this was a constant point of contention. I used that fact to teach negotiation.
For one week, I would host a negotiation process for up to thirty minutes every single time we got in the car and I prompted each kid to argue his side of it and state why he should be in front. They looked at me real funny the first few times because they thought I was backing the other kid whom I had just helped frame an argument.
After a week of practice negotiations I instituted a rule: You two have FIVE minutes to negotiate whose turn it is to sit up front. After FIVE minutes if you don't have an agreement, BOTH of you will sit in the backseat.
They began proactively ASKING me our schedule and how many stops we would make etc. so they could figure out how to divide up their time in the front seat.
They applied this skill to other aspects of their lives without involving me in it. They negotiated who got to play new videogames FIRST and settled on one of them got to go first and the second played a larger block of uninterrupted time his first time and they both liked that arrangement because they wanted different things.
Their father sometimes took videogames away as punishment. I took videogames away as problem solving.
If they fought over a game, I took the game and locked it up and lectured them they were doing it wrong. Games are supposed to be FUN and fighting about a stupid game is dumb.
They could get it back when they a had a solution to their fight. They soon learned to resolve their conflicts without a fight so the game didn't get taken away.
I have difficult children. They get along well most of the time in spite of still likely qualifying for a long list of social impairments and other impairments.
Because their mom had this crazy idea that social skills are mostly LEARNED behavior and can be actively TAUGHT.
It's one of the reasons they think I'm an awesome mom.
You're opinion doesn't matter to me. If you think I'm nuts, spend your time someplace other than my blog. Please and thank you.