Children with Autism: A First Contact of Sorts

Some of you have asked about the nickname that we use for our son. Truth be told, as the blog is open to the public, we didn't want to use his first name since it seems to be common practice not to (for somewhat obvious reasons). That said, I wanted to come up with something that was relevant to the situation.

We often tell people that Mowgli's only problem is that he was born to an American family living in a civilized society, and that if he had just been born to a family of native hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rain forest, that most of his behavior would seem entirely commonplace. His constant want for nudity, his roaming freely through the landscape in search of nothing in

particular, and his knack for experiencing his world through taste and smell wouldn't be a developmental disability,they would all be the social norm.

For those of you that took an Anthropology class in college, you probably remember this gentlemen from the documentary "First Contact". The film recounts the discovery of a flourishing native population in New Guinea in 1930, a part of the world that was thought to be entirely uninhabited, and the initial contact of white Australian prospectors with the native population. If you have never seen it, take some time out of your day and watch it - it is extremely fascinating. If you're interested in learning about children with autism, and how to best understand them, I would tell you that you can't possibly do so without first watching this movie. I'm no clinical psychologist, or social anthropologist, but when my son does something inexplicably frustrating, either in public or in private, I try to think of the guy in the photo above. It seems ridiculous to you and I that a person would adorn themselves with a biscuit box. That said, it was the only one of its kind at the prospector camp, so clearly, to the native gentleman in the picture, it had tremendous value - a one of a kind item.

Without generalizing about children with autism (which is dangerous, since every single child is uniquely different), I find that when I'm dealing with my son, or when I encounter the boys in his classroom, that every single experience is a sort of first contact. I can't understand why they would "adorn themselves with biscuit boxes" and they can't figure out why I don't get it. They see the world through a different lens, particularly children like Mowgli with sensory issues. Things are louder, brighter, smellier, scarier - like the volume on the world is turned too high.

Realistically, though many professionals have tried to develop ways for parents to "live like an autistic child" (playing music too loudly when you're trying to focus, as an example), we, like the white Australian prospectors, can only try to understand autistic children and do our best to meet them halfway between our understanding of society and theirs. We will never be able to see the world through their lens. Likewise, we need to further understand that autistic children will always have difficulty understanding our ways - despite our best efforts at social/emotional conditioning and discrete trial training (which are very important - please don't think that I'm being dismissive - in fact, I'll probably blog about how important they are at a later date), because they can only see the world through their lens. They don't have the pleasure of turning it on and off - it is how they currently and will always view their world.

People may think that the sometimes feral nature of our son makes him a nuisance in public places, but if you imagine how you would feel stuck in the jungle surrounded by native people who had their own strange social rule book that you were constantly violating because you didn't have access to it, who knew how to find their way around the jungle, who spoke their own language built on specific physical cues that you couldn't understand, who had special hearing that only collected what was important, rather than all the scary sounds of the jungle, then maybe you would understand what it is like to be Mowgli.