"Reaching an Autistic Teenager"

Melissa Fay Greene writes:
"[T]he theoretical underpinning of these schools relies on his argument that human intelligence itself is constructed out of the warm back-and-forth signaling between child and parent, beginning at birth. Jean Piaget located a child’s investigation of causality in the material world, for example, with experiments like pulling a string attached to a bell, but Greenspan and his colleague Serena Wieder see these insights occurring in the emotional realm, when a baby learns that his or her smile brings the parent’s smile. Brain development is not a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.

What does this have to do with autism? A child born at risk of an A.S.D. has cognitive and sensitivity issues that inhibit engagement. Pleasures enjoyed by a typical baby can upset him: a mother’s face seems too close, so the infant cranes away; the father’s tickles may produce fear reflexes rather than laughter. Meanwhile the sunlight is burning his eyes, the diaper scrapes his skin and the baby begins avoiding interaction with people at the cost of normal brain development.

I begin to picture the brain metaphorically as a tangled ball of Christmas lights. When you plug it in, there are strands that light up perfectly and there are dark zones where a single burned-out bulb has caused a line to go out. If the bulb for Exchanging-Smiles-With-Mother doesn’t light up, then Empathy won’t be kindled farther along the strand, or Playfulness, or Theory of Mind (the insight that other people have different thoughts from yours). The electrical current won’t reach the social-skill set, the communication skills, creativity, humor or abstract thinking.

According to the D.I.R. perspective, emotion is the power source that lights up the neural switchboard. D.I.R./Floortime’s goal is to connect autistic students with other people as a way of fueling their cognitive potential and giving them access to their own feelings, desires and insights. The latest findings in the field of neuroplasticity support D.I.R.’s faith in the capacity of the human brain to recoup and to compensate for injury and illness. “Early intervention is optimal,” Dr. Greenspan told me, “but it’s never too late. The areas of the brain that regulate emotions, that sequence ideas and actions and that influence abstract thinking keep growing into a person’s 50s and 60s.”

While my son really has most of his *Christmas lights* blinking, his Aspergers does impact his life and relationships; as his mother, I want him to keep himself, exactly as he is, but continue to develop ways of being with friends. His dear friends, especially Billy, are invaluable. Chess club is important too, since ...


He is currently fixated on Harry Potter Wizard's chess. He plays it, thinks it, dreams it, talks it all day long. He has even developed a nifty parlor trick - he can "play" chess along with the Wizard chess scene in "Sorceror's Stone" down to every move and every utterance. I love that he asks me, day after day, if I want to watch him set up the pieces exactly as they are in Harry Potter's game. We talk about the moves - whether Ron moves four or five spaces - and the intentions of the pieces - "Is the knight scared or happy to be killed? - as though we haven't already had the conversation.

For Halloween, he is going to be a Wizard's chess pawn. (Previously I thought he was just going to be a regular chess piece.) The costume is doable, but he proposed going trick-or-treating in a hunched position, just like the piece: "Maybe you could pull me on my roller blades, Mom." Working on that...