Living with aspergers

My grandson’s autism is affecting us more and more. There is, to a nerd like me, a side to this that is very challenging: the intellectual side of it. How does he maintain all day at school so that the teachers laud him to the skies but when he gets in the car to go home, he loses it? What role does the acute hearing play and why do women’s voices drive him crazy literally but not men’s voices (OK, lots of room for jokes here but, seriously, I think it is an excellent example of how difficult it is to tease out the factors: is the pitch of women’s voices i.e. a neurological issue, or is it that women are mostly the ones who tell him what to do i.e. a social dynamic issue?)? As he gets older and bigger, the challenges change. He is handsome and charming and very bright, but that does not guarantee happiness.
His mother and father struggle with this. Tomorrow I go to visit the therapist who’s been working with him the longest. I look forward to giving my observations and am going to write them up now. BTW, I haven’t read anything on autism other than what my daughter has scavenged off the internet, some of which is very practical and useful. The reason I haven’t checked a book out of the library, my usual tendency, is I don’t trust them. Maybe this therapist, a psychologist, can turn me on to something good. There is so much hype around autism and I’ve seen it go from one case in my ten years in a psychiatric children & family clinic (and it was his mother who was my client) to a tenth of any school’s student population being so diagnosed (incl. Aspergers)

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