All My Readers,

As a Chicken Soup co-author I’m always looking for your stories to share with everyone else.  Not too long ago I did a “call out” to my members asking for heartwarming stories and was overwhelmed with over 2500 submissions.  I know you will enjoy hearing from others so I am going to be sharing them with you on a weekly basis.  Here is the eleventh one from Dr. Steven Richfield!

Tips for Coaching Kids with Aspergers Syndrome
(By Dr. Steven Richfield)

A parent writes: Our 11 year old son is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning Autism. He is bright and inquisitive, but has great difficulty picking up on social cues and understanding many aspects of friendship. We struggle to coach him in these areas but our explanations often don’t make sense to him. What are your suggestions?

Aspergers Syndrome presents children with a variety of social and emotional stumbling blocks. Due to difficulties understanding implied meaning, humour, and other inferential reasoning skills, children are often confused by the rapidly changing landscape of social interaction. Their tendency toward quick and literal interpretation of words can produce significant problems with establishing and maintaining friendships. Preoccupations with narrow, solitary interests can impede their capacity to converse on the range of topics that typically interest peers.

Parents of children with Aspergers Syndrome often help them make sense of their social world, but success can be fleeting and isolated to certain circumstances.  Here are some coaching tips that may increase the success rate:

Think of the social world as a variety of “relationship road maps” that your child needs to perceive accurately and use talking tools to be able to follow. On various pieces of paper, draw “roads” of how conversations flow depending upon environmental cues. Cues include who your child is with, where it takes place, what the other child says and the degree of familiarity your child has with a peer. For instance, if your son bumps into an acquaintance at a movie theatre, depict how the initial greeting may lead to a short period of questioning about the movie, and finally to a closing remark about the next time he might see the peer again. Be sure to emphasize that what is said is just as important as perceiving the available cues in order to keep comments on target and within the boundaries of the environment.      

Refer to boundaries as the lines that keep people within the relationship road they are supposed to be on. Boundaries are a critical piece of the social puzzle but are often ignored by children with Aspergers Syndrome since they are subtle and hard to distinguish. Make boundaries visual by depicting the kinds of statements and behaviours that are appropriate to the particular “road” (write them within the road) and examples of responses that are not (write them outside of the road). Explain how behaving within the boundaries protect the feelings of others and tells people that we are aware of what is going on around us. Depict how boundaries are more narrow when first meeting people but gradually widen as they become more familiar. Likewise, display how boundaries are narrow or wide depending upon the people present, situation and other circumstances.

Offer ways of understanding humour or typical childhood banter that uses available environmental cues.  Children with Aspergers Syndrome can easily get caught in the throes of strong emotional reactions to common antagonistic statements made by peers. The intention of such comments may be to entertain bystanders, self-inflate, or trigger over-reactions by the child in question. Yet, no matter the intention, if your child reacts with verbal or physical aggression, they are going to pay severe penalties. This makes it especially critical to coach anticipation skills that normalize typical peer baiting. Draw another relationship road that depicts some of the standard comments that kids say to each other in various circumstances. Add a thinking bubble that contains a self-instruction to help you child keep their cool.

Dr. Steven Richfield is a child psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, PA.  He has developed a child-friendly self-control/social skills building program called Parent Coaching Cards.  His new book, The Parent Coach: A New Approach To Parenting In Today’s Society  is available through Sopris West (sopriswest.com or 1-800-547-6747) He can be contacted at www.parentcoachcards.com or 610-238-4450

Sincerely,
Karen Simmons

Can Food Sabotage Your Child’s Progress?

by Dr. Daniel Dantini, MD

In the mid 1980s, I conducted a study on food sensitivities and their effects on ADD/ADHD symptoms. After testing the patient for delayed food sensitivities, the study consisted of two phases:

The Avoidance Phase, in which the offending foods are avoided for six weeks.
The Challenge Phase, in which the excluded foods are slowly added back into the diet. The reason for the challenge phase is to prove that the foods identified by the test are actually causing specific symptoms.

Included in this particular study, was an autistic child around 2 years old.  During the avoidance phase when the harmful foods were removed from this child’s diet, ALL of the autistic symptoms disappeared.
With such dramatic results, the parents withdrew the child from the study before the challenge phase. They not only feared that challenging the foods back into the child’s diet would cause the symptoms to return, but that they would not be able to reverse them again.

This was the first autistic child I had ever encountered.  I consulted my dad who had been a General Practitioner for 50 years, and he had never seen a single case.  As an otolaryngologist, I didn’t see many cases of autism.

However, just before I moved from Pittsburgh to Florida, I saw the son of a nurse at the hospital who had just been diagnosed with Autism. After I tested him for delayed food sensitivities, I instructed his mother to have him avoid the harmful foods.  16 years later, he and his mother stopped by my office.   He had continued the protocol and was preparing for college.  As far as I could tell, he was normal. The only unusual remnant of his autism was that he couldn’t lie.

In Florida, I started seeing more and more patients on the Autistic Spectrum.  I have been watching results in my own practice and getting feedback from DAN doctors and others who regularly treat Autism.  What I have found is that, in delayed food sensitivity, immune complex plays a vital role in the progression of autism.  And the younger the child we treat, the better the results.

Certainly there are genetic predispositions that affect the population, but since it was rare before the 1980s, there is obviously something else, which is drastically contributing to, if not causing the huge increase in cases.

Allergic load and an over-stimulated immune system seem to me to be major culprits.  Allergic load is the amount of allergens the body can successfully tolerate.  When we’re exposed to more than we can handle, the immune system reacts badly.  In the case of autism, the brain is affected during its development.  By decreasing the allergic load, the immune system is better able to handle any other onslaughts it may encounter.  Since food is such a large portion of the potential allergic load, it makes sense to test children early for both immediate AND delayed food sensitivities and eliminate the foods to which they react. This increases the chance that the brain can develop normally.

Autism Tomorrow is Finally Here!

At long last, Autism Tomorrow: The Complete Guide To Help Your Child Thrive In The Real World book is
finally here!

We’ve been working on it for two years and every time we thought we were finished, we found exciting new material we just HAD to include.

Though April is Autism Awareness Month, we thought our children’s future deserved an entire month by itself so we’re dedicating May to Autism Tomorrow.

We know that Autism Tomorrow is a book you need today, as you design your child’s future, so we’ve created the AutismTomorrow.com blog with new content every day, and updated author information so you can comment and add your questions for any author.

You will learn about estate planning, independent living, nutrition, fitness, employment, safety, sexuality, puberty, dating, bullying, reading, social skills, communication and more…

You can find out more about Autism Tomorrow at www.AutismTomorrow.com

P.S. Be sure to go vote May as Autism Tomorrow month and sign the petition