Techniques for negotiation with people on the autism spectrum
Negotiation is a big part of parenting any child, but the toolkit varies.We’ve used “Three Steps to Yes” (persuasion for geeks), Kazdin’s extinction/reinforcement, Greenes Explosive Child (above all) and more for working with #1. It’s made him a skilled negotiator, which isn’t a bad skill to have. For #3, so far, standard parenting tools suffice.#2 is different — he’s classic Asperger [1]. He needs a different set of negotiating techniques — such as the set outlined in a recent NYT essay on Hostage Hoiidays. Another addition to the toolkit - I particularly liked the obviously-fake-but-genuinely-effortful ...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - November 22, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: ADHD adolescence Asperger ' autism behavioral therapy Explosive Child persuasion Source Type: blogs
Special needs interscholastic mountain bike racing
NICA, the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, has been expanding into Minnesota. This year #1’s high school participated in the mountain biking program, and he joined the team. He started riding with them this past summer.Special needs and mountain biking are not an obvious combination, but despite his autism-spectrum cognitive disability #1 has been a pretty good recreational athlete. He’s played mainstream rec baseball, hockey, and soccer, learned swimming (mean butterfly), XC skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, road biking [1] and more. High school wrestling didn’t go too well, but I thought that one wa...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - October 26, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence athletics autism exercise support Source Type: blogs
Dropcam - Training for home alone
I bought a Dropcam Pro - $200 at Amazon. It’s the market leader in home monitoring, I’ve been considering it for a few months. Not for home security reasons (though that’s nice), but because some special needs teens have been known to get into trouble when home alone.The idea is we can turn on the camera in the living room, and listen to yells throughout the house. There’s two way audio, do we can holler too. The audio is non-duplex with a few second delay, so it doesn’t work for a conversation.Installation was very simple, you can use a Mac, Windows, or Android/iOS device to manage setup. I didn’t sign up fo...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - October 18, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence support technology Source Type: blogs
Spectrum connections - social club for teens and young adults (MSP) on the autism spectrum
Spectrum Connections Meetup group for social outings among teens and young adults. We haven’t tried it but we’ll see if #1 or #2 are interested.#1 would be very interested if girls were involved. Unfortunately autism disorders have an official gender ration of 4:1 or 5:1. In the disability setting the ratio feels more like 8:1.For #1 this ratio might be the worst thing about his cognitive disabilities. Along with not being able to go to university of course. (Source: Be the Best You can Be)
Source: Be the Best You can Be - September 12, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence adult autism community recreation Source Type: blogs
Delusional aversion in special needs: maladaptive learning?
As #1 moves to adulthood he shows many cognitive improvements — including better planning abilities. Improvements in some areas inevitably expose disabilities in other areas; we must then choose which to work on and which to wait on.One of those newly defined disabilities is something we have started to call “delusional aversion”. For example - a sudden, inexplicable and emotionally intense aversion to a mountain biking site. If you didn’t know him better you’d think some terrible and unspeakable secret trauma had occurred there. That does not seem to be the case — though we can’t rule out some minor issue li...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - August 17, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence adult behavioral therapy brain and mind cognition cognitive impairment Source Type: blogs
You never know ...
One of our family's big achievements in our early years with special needs and autism was teaching both boys, #2 with classic autism (now "Aspergers") and #1 with more complex disabilities, to swim.This took years of persistence and patience, fueled by Emily's hatred of preventable drowning. Try and fail. Try and fail. Pool one and two. Teacher five and six. Again and again. Money spent and lost - more than many could afford. Private and group. Family practice.After years of this they could swim enough. After that it was improvement. #1, if he were motivated, could be competitive in butterfly -- a stroke I can't do. (I'm a...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - August 15, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: Asperger ' exercise sport Source Type: blogs
Configuring location sharing on an iPhone at minimal cost
For some special needs children location sharing is critical — but the last time I surveyed options they were all costly and troublesome.For us location tracking hasn’t been that critical, but #1 is now bicycling around the Twin Cities. He’s a good cyclist (so far), but location sharing is becoming more important.He carries an iPhone 4s (inherited from me) so we went with that option. We switched from H2O wireless ($40/year, but no data) to a SIM from ptel - America’s cheapest iPhone data solution for low data use. We did the tedious configuration needed to restrict cellular data use to only low bandwidth high val...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - August 8, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence technology Source Type: blogs
Smart home, DropCam, and special needs
Google, the surveillance company, recently acquired Nest which has now acquired DropCam.As a currently independent adult I have a deep suspicion of where Google is taking us. As the parent of soon-to-be-adult children with special needs, however, Google subsidized surveillance technology is good news. I think (hope) that surveillance and communications technology will allow our adult children to function more effectively in an extremely challenging environment.In a few months, once the acquisition has settled a bit, I’ll evaluate a DropCam product.(I’d had hopes that Apple would do some good things in this space, but ...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - June 29, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence adult support technology Source Type: blogs
Autistic "swingers" should consider inline skating
I touched on inline skating in a previous post about exercise for the autistic teen, but after a recent skate with #2 I think it deserves a post of its own. To explain why, I’m going to start with a novel way to divide up the “autism” world.There are lots of ways to name and classify variant minds, and most of them are headed for the trash heap. In that context I think we’re free to name our own. So today I’m going to divide the world of non-adaptive [1] variant minds into swingers and unswingers.Swingers are the autism-spectrum teens and adults who love to swing. They are the teens who tear apart the Rainbow...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - June 21, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adolescence adult Asperger ' athletics autism sport Source Type: blogs
Changing landscape of adult special needs: Housing in the Twin Cities
As our eldest heads towards his last year of High School we’ve been focusing on the housing and employment landscapes. Focus is hard, because both housing and employment options are changing quickly.I’ve been thinking through the bigger picture of what’s going on, which has something to do with demographic squeeze (aging boomers), slow economic growth (aka “secular stagnation”), the large role prisons play in American special needs housing [1], ethnicity and special needs services, Baumol’s Cost Disease, reaction to scandals like ’The Boys in the Bunkhouse’, the Minnesota Meto case, Staten Island’s horri...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - May 11, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: adult cognitive impairment disability law discrimination employment housing policy resources transition Twin Cities Source Type: blogs
Developmental disabilities and sheltered workshops: "free" to starve?
This April 2014 announcement portrays the end of supported employment for the cognitively impaired as a victory similar to the ADA’s benefit for the physically disabled … (excerpts and emphases mine):Rhode Island Settles Case on Jobs for the Disabled - NYTimes.comThe Justice Department on Tuesday announced a “landmark” agreement with the State of Rhode Island to free people with developmental disabilities from a decades-old system that kept them unjustly segregated in sheltered workshops and adult day programs, removed from the competitive workplace and the broader community.The settlement, which addresses the civi...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - April 20, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: disability law employment Source Type: blogs
Deception and autism
Somewhere I picked up the idea that autistic children didn’t lie very often. Long ago I realized my two kids on the spectrum had no trouble telling lies — though they weren’t always very good at them.Today I decided to check out the academic literature. This sounds right …Exploring the Ability to Deceive in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders - Springer (outrageously $$)We found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), like typically developing children, can and do tell antisocial lies (to conceal a transgression) and white lies (in politeness settings). However, children with ASD were less able than...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - April 5, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: autism Source Type: blogs
Autistic exercise: options for the distracted teen
#1 and #2 are both on the spectrum. They have some things in common - rigidity, solipsism, love for family — but they’re pretty different people. This is particularly true when it comes to exercise, the balm for all things from mood to brain development to physical health.#1 is a jock. Hockey, baseball, bicycling, mountain bicycling …. adaptive sports or mainstream sports — he likes motion and he’s pretty skilled. #2 is different, he likes screens, books and Lego. #2 is also dangerously distractible; while #1 is quite good on a road bike #2 terrifies me and passing drivers alike. Neither boy likes hot weather an...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - March 28, 2014 Category: Disability Tags: Asperger ' autism health Source Type: blogs
Special needs adolescence: Yes, Virginia, there is porn on Facebook. How to torch an account.
Young males have been known to view pornography on the Internet. Having a cognitive disability does not necessarily change this behavior. Some kinds of disability, however, mean that discretion can be weak, and boundaries between "acceptable" porn and "unacceptable" porn may not be observed.That's one reason to try to put some controls in place. Another is that Internet porn is often the equivalent of the sweet smelling sap of a Venus fly trap. It comes with malware, and it can be used to identify a vulnerable population for additional manipulation. A cognitively impaired young person makes a fine catch.So we have controls...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - January 21, 2014 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: adolescence cognitive impairment computer Source Type: blogs
Calibrating consequences: managing the iTunes purchases
I should have been more suspicious of the iTunes statements. There seemed to be a lot of them.Eventually I connected with my spouse, and we realized #1 was exploiting an iOS 7 iPhone configuration error. When he inherited my 4S the iTunes account was configured for delayed authentication (the default [1]). Every time we bought a song or video, he added on a few more. Last year's Stanley Cup series was the giveaway.When I collared him he pretended not to understand that his purchases cost us money. I respect that. If you have a cognitive disability, you might as well use it to wiggle out of problems. It didn't work though,...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - December 28, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: ADHD cognitive impairment crime Source Type: blogs
