Struggling To Connect Fatherhood With My Asperger's Child, chapter 5.

Finally, communication.

My name is Mike. I'm an older dad of a son who is now 22 and on the spectrum. And he just graduated from college. We knew something was off very, very early. We did not get an official diagnosis. But we were told that he had developmental disorders from six months old.

When we took him to get assistance, the school system at the time provided services for those up to three and said they could provide us with better services if we leave him without a specific diagnosis. That way, we have the flexibility to give him exactly what he needs. If he was assigned a diagnosis, then we would be limited to the services that fall under that particular rubric. Therefore, we left him undiagnosed and without an official diagnosis until he was roughly seven.

We knew we were going to move from Rhode Island to Louisiana. And with the changes in school systems, we wanted to be sure that we got everything we needed for an IEP before we left. So we took him to a psychologist independent from the school system who gave an official diagnosis, which we carried with us to Louisiana

I think playing it that way worked out best for both him and us. It gave us the most freedom of choice in terms of selecting services and accommodations. Since then, he has done extremely well. We were told that if we had done it a little differently, the outcome may have been very different.

On a personal level, when I started to understand that there were some developmental differences, it was an unhappy time for me. I was hoping for a son that I could play ball with, the typical dad kind of stuff. I was a fairly active person at the time. And I was looking for a son who would enjoy going to play ball, any kind of ball, or at least hoping that we could ride bikes together.

But he wasn't like that. He was more turned in. And he was turned more towards his mom than I might have been happy about. So I was frustrated. And I didn't know how to deal with it. It was hard for me.

There was a turning point, however. I can't remember exactly when it occurred. He was probably in middle school. I read two novels. One of them was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. And the other was Marcelo in the Real World.

The two of those novels provided insights into the way I was managing my relationship with my son that hadn't occurred to me. For example, there is a scene in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time where the police are questioning the protagonist, who is on the spectrum. He doesn't know how to answer the question because he can't sort out the issue that the question is asking.

Was the question about where he was five minutes ago, yesterday, where his head was at the time of the incident, or many other kinds of interpretations of a general question? They asked him another question in which he also needed to figure out what they actually meant. And it occurred to me that my communication with my son involved an awful lot of questions because he was not forthcoming with information.

In order to figure out what he had done during the day, I had to continually interrogate him. And it was frustrating that he couldn't give the answers. I realized that he often couldn't answer me because I didn't ask my questions well enough. As soon as I understood that he wasn't not talking to me, but was rather trying to figure out what it was I was actually asking, I could change the way I questioned him.

Instead of asking, what did you do today, I could ask, did you do anything today in particular that you thought was interesting. That made a difference. All of a sudden, we had communication. It wasn't as free flowing as I might have liked. But at least the frustration was gone. I could see him pause, which let me know that I asked the question badly. So I'd try again.

He has a number of friends who are also on the spectrum. They might come over and when I would ask them a question, I could see I was doing the same thing to them. I would stop, reconsider the way I was asking, and start again. And then we would have our conversation.

Those two books made a huge difference. They provided the original impetus for me to start looking at my behaviors and realizing how I could change rather than mourning the relationship I had lost. Now, that's not to say that I understand my kid, although I think that most parents will say that. However, I'm not as frustrated as I had been, and we have a healthy relationship now.

Finding common ground.

When he was in eighth or ninth grade, I was still having a hard time looking for things that we could do together. He liked video games. I really don't have much interest in video games. I find them totally unappealing with rare exception. And the games that he particularly likes, I find unbelievably tedious.

He's not an outdoor person, so we couldn't go outside. And he's not physically robust, so I can't get him to help me with the yard work. I was looking for things that we can do together. I remembered that for his birthday in the third grade, we had a bunch of kids over and we made birdhouses. And we had the best time.

There were about six or eight kids and their parents. I thought that maybe I could get him to come to the shop with me, something that I really enjoy. It's right there. And it's not even physical. Even for just a little while, that would be fun.

But I couldn't get him to do it. So instead, we made a party out of it. We invited a bunch of his friends, maybe three or four kids also on the spectrum, and their dads. And we were out there in the shop making stuff. A maker's club was born. And it's still going on.

After he graduated from high school, I kept it going for the other kids and their dads, and occasionally a mom or two. We would just make anything we wanted to. It wasn't until my wife came out to the shop after the third or fourth meeting and mentioned to me that we had created something really special.

I was able to model behavior for those dads by having us all work together. We didn't fight any more. We created a model of communication and cooperation that has changed the way the dads worked with their kids too. The other dads and kids used to fight with each other when we first started. Now, instead of saying, no, don't do that, they say, there's a better way. Can I show you?

It has worked out rather nicely in terms of activities and communication. My son still doesn't like the shop that much, but I can get him to come out and work with me. Every once in a while, he'll bring me something that's broken and ask if we can fix it. And he'll work with me for a while and see if we can't get it fixed. We finally found something to connect us.

My advice to dads who don't know how to connect with their kid would be to, first, listen to mom. The smartest thing I ever did was not fight my wife. She had a connection with my son already. It was clearly working.

I couldn't figure out how to make it work. But when she said, do something, even though I hated the idea of doing it, I did it anyway. Whatever it was, I followed her direction. She gave me a lead. And I did it to the best of my ability.

The second thing is to read, do a little research, and pay attention. Even though the two books that I read were novels, whoever wrote them did their homework. They knew what they were talking about. And it was helpful for me.

Around the time of high school graduation and leading up to it, people were asking, how is it that you've managed to make a kid on the spectrum successful, how do you work with him, how do you make it work. To them, I say, no matter what they do, just love them. When it gets really hard and really frustrating, the only reaction, the only right reaction, is to love them more. And then everything else will come out of that.

That's what I'm seeing with dads that show up at my makers' club. These kids are all really sweet. But they can be really challenging. But you can see that these dads that come to my garage are there because they really love their kids.

There is a lot of pressure from society to have a certain type of child and be a certain type of father. And that not only doesn't work for people on the spectrum, but it causes most of the issues. I have to keep reminding myself, my child cannot be the kid I want him to be. I have to accept the kid that I have and encourage him to be whatever it is that he can grow to be.

Jobs and the future.

One of my son's classmates from college was an intern at my work. And this young man was a brilliant, independent thinker that had clear goals for himself and a plan for achieving those goals. achieving He would come to me with deep, thoughtful questions regarding the nature of our work.

All of the kids I met at the school had some self-motivation. My son, not so much. He wants to do well, he wants to achieve, but thinking ahead is not part of his makeup. Recently he came home and told us that he had decided that he couldn't sit around all summer and that he needed to get a job. We were so proud.

It's his first job. And we were extremely proud of him for taking initiative, following through, agreeing, cooperating, and doing what needs to be done in order to get a job. We know that eventually this attitude will grow and mature in him and he will get the kind of job you expect and hope that your college graduate would move into. There's really no timeline as long as he's moving forward.

It just so happens that his current job is up the street from where I work. And his hours are close enough to my typical hours that I'm able to drop him off. And my wife would be able to pick him up. Bus service would take him hours to get the 3 or 4 miles from that place to our home.

Eventually, however, he'll have to learn how to drive. We tried it once when he was in high school. It was challenging for both of us, so we mutually agreed, without fighting over it, that it wasn't the right time. I don't know when it's going to happen, but we're both thinking that it might be time to take driving lessons because now there's a need and motivation.

And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But we're looking forward to the idea that it could happen. It may turn out that he decides that driving isn't really what he wants to do right now. Instead, he could learn to live on his own and move to an apartment that's within walking distance to a grocery store and what have you.

It couldn't happen in our town. But eventually, it could happen somewhere close. There's a fine line between supporting and enabling. We don't want to push him too far in either direction by kicking him out of the house versus letting him live here forever to play video games.

We keep him moving forward. For example, we talk about goals far in advance. From the time he was in first grade, we talked about how he was going to go to college or study something after high school.

We also started telling him that he needed to learn how to cook so he'd be able to feed himself when he's living on his own. We would take him to the grocery store with us and give him half of the shopping list, a cart, and tell him to bring back what he found. Even if he came back with the wrong brand or quantity, we wanted to encourage the success and not the failure.

As we kept this up, we started being more specific. Now, if we're in the grocery store and he's unsure of a brand or size, he'll just text us. We could be in a store for 30 minutes and there would be 40 texts between us. Even if what he brings back isn't what we were expecting, we value our relationship more than a brand of spaghetti.

With all we did, we went very slowly, looking forward all the time, moving in the direction that we wanted him to ultimately go. When it comes to parenting basics, I think for most of us dads, the top of the list is, listen to mom, be patient, and above all else, when it becomes really hard to love your child, that's the time you need to love them even more. And everything else will come out of that.