Category: Parenting

Book review: Children with High-Functioning Autism

Posted on by Suki

I have recently come upon two books that I think are important books for those of us with “quirky” kids to read. This is the first of my reviews—the second will be about The Explosive Child, which I’m still digesting! If the topics of these books speak at all to your child’s quirkiness, I highly recommend them.

Children with High-Functioning Autism
Claire Hughes-Lynch

Book coverIn general, I don’t expect that books on autism will give me much insight into my parenting challenges. I regularly speak to parents with kids who have profound disabilities and feel like I’m whining about the comparatively small problems we face. I’m in awe of parents who face all the difficulties of raising children who may never be able to live independently.

I was intrigued by the title of this book, however, because I often have conversations with parents who have chosen not to pursue diagnosis for one reason or another. These conversations drift into the subject of how various of our kids, spouses, and even ourselves could probably be placed on the high end of the autism spectrum. Lots of the kids who fit into the scope of this book aren’t diagnosed, for a variety of reasons. But the parents of those kids will find interesting and thought-provoking information in its pages.

Hughes-Lynch is neither a medical professional nor simply a parent. She was a teacher in special education and gifted education before her children were diagnosed. This gives her a particular point of view that I think is novel: she writes both as a parent, frantic for information and insight, and as a professional who is now seeing her profession from the other side.

There are large sections of these books that won’t apply to many families directly, such as navigating the public school IEP and 504 plan system. But on the whole I found the author’s approach a novel and helpful one. She dissects the job of parenting a quirky child – in her case, one diagnosed autistic but also gifted, another diagnosed PDD-NOS – and separates out the various issues that parents will face. But on top of that, she follows up with knowledge and insights gained from her professional life. The result is a very balanced book, with both the mother’s passion and willingness to try everything, as well as the professional’s insistence on standards and data.

It’s a welcome book that recognises the difficulty of calling a high-functioning child “autistic”.

Hughes-Lynch writes:

“Despite the warning signs of autism, there often are signs of significant strengths that can signal high-functioning autism. “Experts” can watch children and say, “Nope, I don’t see autism” because the child is making eye contact, or is listening to you, or is engaging in imaginative play, or is talking—behaviors that often are not found in children with more traditional autism. These are the challenges that families face: there is “something,” but what? Giftedness? Autism? Anxiety? Asperger’s syndrome? These children often defy easy classification and are ultimately amalgams of many different, overlapping issues.”

Her insights about how autistic kids’ reactions are different from the norm offer parents a way to classify their children’s behaviors and weigh them against other high-functioning children’s behaviors:

“When autism has hijacked their reactions, children appear unable to control anything, and when they are momentarily in charge of their autism, they can be “too good.” There often is very little middle ground.”

The book is a goldmine about everything from support to therapy, with lots of pointers to research and other books. The one drawback of the book is that she cites lots of research that has become dated, given how quickly autism research is moving. So readers should check data that she cites before believing that they are still current.

Otherwise, I think book helps out in a couple of grey areas: Not for parents of profoundly autistic kids, it focuses on the unique concerns of children who may even be gifted learners and are more likely to be able to “graduate” from their autism into an independent adult life. Also, this is neither the story of a parent’s journey through autism nor a book written by a clinician – it spans both genres in a helpful and insightful way.

 

Book Review: Raising Creative Kids

Posted on by Suki

Raising Creative Kids
by Susan Daniels and Daniel Peters

Susan Daniels and Dan Peters of Summit Center are well-known in the world of gifted psychology. Daniels is co-editor of the wonderful compilation of essays, Living With Intensity, which tackled the joys and pitfalls of raising, educating, and being intense, gifted people.

In this new book, Daniels and Peters move over slightly to feature thoughts on parenting, educating, and nurturing creative kids, a group with a large overlap into the world of intensity. The authors show that understanding and raising highly creative children can be just as much a challenge as raising intense children.

Raising Creative Kids opens by making sure the readers are “on the same page” regarding what creativity is and who has it. The answer, of course, is that everyone can have it, but that our society, especially in our numbers-obsessed schools, works hard to squelch creativity in the name of order and quantifiable learning. Daniels and Peters argue that in this time it is especially important to recognize creativity, whether it expresses itself as award-winning visual art or, perhaps more often, as incessant talking at inappropriate times, inability to focus on rote learning, lack of organizational and scheduling skills, and other hallmarks of the creative soul.

Much of the book centers on defining creativity and offers suggestions on nurturing it. But in the last three chapters, the authors get to the heart of the question: how to parent creative kids, how to teach them organizational skills, and how to prepare them for a successful life in the 21st century.

This part of the book focuses on solving the problems that arise from the “dark side” of the creative personality. Creative kids may be difficult to parent, given that their tendency is to explore rather than follow rules. They often have trouble at school because the creative mind can sometimes coincide with slower development of executive function—the part of the brain that governs decision-making and prioritization. And being highly creative doesn’t necessarily lead to being able to develop that creativity into what the authors call “Big C” creativity—moving from unfocused creativity to focused, purposeful creativity.

This book succeeds in digesting a lot of information from studies and technical journals into a clear, helpful guide for parenting creative kids. Daniels and Peters offer advice on nurturing vs. permissive parenting, teaching organizational skills, and encouraging children to keep developing their creativity in a world that often seems to promote following rules and getting the “right” answer over all else.

Recycling reality

Posted on by Suki

Last week I went on a fieldtrip with our homeschool group that was a real eye opener. I’d always been told that taking your kids on a fieldtrip to the dump is a great experience, and now I know why.

To set the stage, I should describe our family’s relationship to garbage: We are, I would guess, on the more vigilant side when it comes to recycling. We recycle everything that we can, and try to keep up with what our garbage collection facility will take. We are careful to dispose of potentially hazardous waste, like batteries and used electronics, in the best manner. When we go shopping for food, I point out to the kids when something they want to buy is overpackaged in a wasteful way.

I would say, however, that I’m a bigger fan of reusing and using renewable resources than recycling. Although some recycling makes a lot of sense, we could make even bigger changes that would have a much more beneficial effect on the world. In our family, we buy a lot of what we eat in bulk using reusable containers. We started using reusable grocery bags years ago, before our local bag laws were even being debated. It took a little bit of forced reprogramming, because I kept forgetting the bags that I was keeping in the car, but at this point, grabbing bags on the way into a store is so second-nature I don’t even think about it. I even buy clothing and hardware with reusable bags.

But despite the preceding two paragraphs, I’ve always known that my family could do better. I have never entertained the idea of living completely waste-free as some friends of mine are attempting, but I have watched our habits and considered what we how we could improve what we’re doing.

Our kids lined up in front of a few day's worth of aluminum cans used by residents of the City of Santa Cruz (and this is outside of tourist season).
Our kids lined up in front of a few day’s worth of aluminum cans used by residents of the City of Santa Cruz (and this is outside of tourist season).

Here’s where a trip to the dump—or rather, as they call it, “the recovery facility”—came in.

Workers at the dump no longer see their job as hiding away society’s garbage. Our guide was first in line to show us that. We met in a nice, clean building surrounded by pleasant gardens which included a demonstration composter. She showed the kids various types of “garbage” and explained whether they could be reused, recycled, or just thrown away. Her big displays were a huge pile of the ubiquitous single-use plastic shopping bag, a bin of different recyclable and non-recyclable containers, and an aluminum water canteen.

Our kids are generally a tough crowd when it comes to teaching this stuff—they already knew what everything was and some even debated why one type of item was recyclable in their district when it wasn’t in another. So the real learning came in when we donned our hard hats and orange vests and trouped into the recycling facility.

Many things could have hit me as impressive, but here are the big things I learned:

First of all, when you throw stuff in your recycling bin, it doesn’t just go off into machines and magically turn into a new bottle, some toilet paper, or playground matting. Actual individual people get their [gloved] hands on a lot all of it. Our recycling starts by getting dumped by the truck into a huge pile, then it gets pushed by a person driving a frontloader, machine-sorted with magnets, jigglers, and blowers, and then finds its way back to humans again for the final sort. I was very conscious as I watched these hard-working people sorting our crap of whether my actions were making this job any harder. And I had to admit that they were.

We commit various recycling faux pas:

I will admit that I don’t always check whether our garbage collection service actually takes some of the things I throw in the recycling. I know that everyone in my family has been guilty of the “it’s better to put it in if you think they might be able to use it” mentality. Well, no, it’s not better to put it in. The people working at the facility have two major jobs: One is making sure that the machines did their job, grabbing various items out of the stream that should have been sorted before. The other is to separate out the things that machines have no concept of: garbage that has made its way into the recycling stream. So first of all, I have made a pledge to myself to check when we have a question about whether our facility can handle something. (And often, if your facility can’t use it you can drop it by a facility like Grey Bears sometime when you’re passing by and they can take it.)

I asked our guide about cleaning out containers. I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether containers in the recycling bin should be clean or not. She said that they prefer that people rinse them, because they have problems with vermin that just love the last of our spaghetti sauce or yogurt. However, since most of us are using pure drinking water for everything from cooking to washing our cars, this is actually not a great use of water in areas prone to drought. People who have done the analysis say that it’s really best in places where water is scarce not to rinse them, since the final destination facility will be using grey water for that purpose. However, I do know that I can do a better job of striking a balance. My biggest fault is in not doing the dirty

UCSC students created beautiful and thought-provoking sculptures from things they found at the dump.
UCSC students created beautiful and thought-provoking sculptures from things they found at the dump.

work when I find a container in the back of the fridge half filled with moldy something-or-another. More often than I should admit to, I put the whole container, moldy stuff and all, into the recycling. But I am now going to remind myself that I’m making my problem someone else’s problem, and I’ll be scraping out those yucky containers.

Two small bad habits: I tend to screw metal jar tops back on because of the smell factor. But when the recycling facility gets a glass jar with a metal or plastic top, someone has to deal with that. And although I know that containers made of different materials should be broken apart, I don’t always do that. But if the recovery facility gets a paperboard container with an aluminum bottom glued on, it will probably have to go in the landfill.

As we walked up the road, past sculptures made by UCSC students (see photo) and to the top of the landfill, our guide told us a recycling success story. Twenty years ago, this landfill was given 50 years before it would be exhausted. Today, they still are predicting 50 years, all due to diverting recyclables from the landfill. Off in the distance, she pointed to the most successful part of the recycling effort: a mountain of yard waste slowly composting itself into the beautiful, rich soil that built our county’s huge agricultural business.

Two thumbs up for taking this fieldtrip with your kids. It’s important that we not push important issues like where our garbage goes aside. All of us share the responsibility of making our community healthy for now and for the future.

 

Homeschooling rhythms

Posted on by Suki

I was talking today with a couple of other homeschooling moms about how we keep everything together. They perceived that I was very organized (though I had to admit that by my own standards, I’m frustratingly disorganized!). So they were asking me how I do it. It sounded like a really good idea for a blog post… one of these days when I get organized enough to do it.

The thing I can talk about today is Being Busy. I’ve decided that needs capitals, in order to distinguish it from normal busy-ness.

Busy-ness is when you have a kid like my daughter. In some ways, she’s the perfect unschooler: She’s always engaged in something. These days she’s too often engaged with her computer, but aside from that, she’s incredibly productive. Today I sent her off to watch a video on Brainpop.com so I would feel like we’d done something academic, and she came back with a quiz on translating decimal numbers to binary numbers… for me. Yes, other people’s kids go to school so they can take quizzes. My daughter stays home so she can give me quizzes.

You might want me to explain this, but I’m sorry that I will have to disappoint you. Please read on.

The big problem with Being Busy in our house is that I have two very different children. My son thinks that Being Busy Enough is having one event outside of the house for, say, a couple of hours during the day. That’s enough to satisfy him and to remind him that home is where he’d rather be, working on his projects, playing piano (when we ask him to), and being outside (when we force him to).

My daughter, on the other hand, defines Being Busy another way. As in, you can never Be Too Busy. We started this school year with a pretty manageable schedule:

  • Homeschool program 2x per week
  • Piano lesson 1x per week
  • Horse riding lesson 1x per week
  • Spanish class 1x per week
  • Book club 1x per month

We were well within the possibility of sticking with my rule that homeschooling families need to have one day of the week completely at home. Then a friend asked if she wanted to start a gymnastics class with them. She’d ride her bike from her brother’s history class, so it wouldn’t be any extra driving. Well, OK:

  • Gymnastics class 1x per week

She was enjoying that, and I loved how mellow the biking and gymnastics made her on Monday nights.

Then she found out that students in her homeschool program were eligible to join the band at the charter school next door. The band leader brought her instruments and let her try out a clarinet. It was love at first squeak. I have to admit, I’m a pushover for anything musical my kids want me to spend our money on. So, OK, the band meets 2x per week and about 1/4 of the time we wouldn’t be able to make it, but why not? Add:

  • Band practice 2x per week

Things hadn’t gotten ridiculous yet. In fact, she decided around the time that gymnastics started up that the Spanish class wasn’t for her, so we got to take one thing off our schedule. But could we relax? Of course not!

Enter softball, which she played and loved last year. Add:

  • Softball practice 2x per week
  • Softball games 1x per week

Sometimes, just for variety, there is only one practice but two games.

You may think that at this point she was just simply full up. Did I mention:

  • Assorted fieldtrips 1-3x per month

And then, enter IRIS. A new science education center opened way too far from our house, in a town I swore I would never drive to for classes. We went to the open house. “I so have to take a class here.”

  • Energy and the Environment 1x per week

All along, remember I have the Greek Chorus in the background, my son saying, “Really? We really have to be out 4 hours today? Can’t I just stay home?” Because of course some of the time, his activities piggy-backed on hers, and I wasn’t going to waste the gas to come all the way home…

Our homeschool rhythm is something like a building wave: At the beginning of the year there’s me and my son saying, “Let’s keep it simple this year. Let’s be home some of the time.” I schedule a reasonable number of activities outside the house. And then it starts to pile up. My girl can go go go all day long. In fact, she’s happier when she’s doing that. I end up not being able to turn down various great opportunities. And by the spring, we’re ready to crash.

I am very much looking forward to this summer, when my daughter is only doing horse camp, soccer camp, Camp USA, the homeschooling conference, and swimming.

Until she finds something else she just can’t live without.

Our Thorns and our Gifts

Posted on by Suki

We just read The Case of the Deadly Desperados for my daughter’s book club. In the book, the narrator, P.K., is a “half breed” child living in the Old West. After his foster parents are murdered, he is chased around Virginia City by the killers, who want a letter that he has in his possession.

Deadly DesperadosThe most interesting thing about the book was the author’s choice to endow the narrator with what his foster mother called his “Gift” and his “Thorn.” The reader learns from P.K. that his Thorn is that he cannot show or recognize emotions, and that his Gift is his extraordinary memory and ability to do math in his head. Though child readers didn’t really notice it, P.K. is clearly portrayed to be autistic in a time when autism wasn’t recognized.

P.K.’s physical journey in the book is his attempt to keep one step ahead of his pursuers. His emotional journey, however, is one in which he learns to understand both his Gift and his Thorn and how to use them to his advantage.

I was reminded of his Thorn today, when my Thorn (or perhaps, one of many!) reached out and pricked my daughter as she tried to follow directions to make a handmade book. First we had to take apart and restaple the pages that I had put together wrong. Then we had to do it again, because I was distracted and did it wrong in another way. Then, finally, we got it (sort of) right.

Then as she glued down the end papers to the boards that would serve as her hardcover, she said, “Wait. Don’t I have to put down the fabric first?”

Well, yes. That would be the way it’s supposed to be done. But somehow I always find myself reversed: Other people decide on a career to pursue and take the steps to get there. I take a bunch of wild and seemingly random steps, turn around, and find a career behind me. Other people follow recipes when they are cooking and then start to improvise. I have scores of favorite recipes that I have never actually made exactly according to the recipe—the very first time, I found a reason to change it. (Usually because I didn’t read it closely enough and was missing an ingredient!)

I love the message of Deadly Desperados, that we all have Gifts and Thorns, and that we can learn to recognize them and use that recognition to improve our lives. However, living backwards as I seem to do, I find that whenever I turn around to look at my Thorn and consider how it could be used to my advantage, it turns out to be behind me again.

It reminds me of a young poet I once knew who told me that she figured that if the Buddhists were right and there was reincarnation, every other human on the planet had done it scores of times before and knew how to get it right. But she knew she must be on her first life, because she was so bad at it!

It’s a question to ponder: How do we help our children identify their Gifts and Thorns, and how do we help them learn to use that information without being paralyzed by it? How can we both recognize that we can’t do everything and that we can do anything we want? How can we learn to accept our Thorns without labeling ourselves and giving in, and how can we learn to treasure our Gifts without thinking that our Gift allows us to stop trying harder to reach the next step? How can we turn around to see what is always behind us? How can we know when to stop and enjoy what is in front of us?

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