The Child You Didn't Dream Of

[Earlybird]

Newsweek Magazine in America has an article this week based on a just-released book called 'The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy'.

Article is here:

www.newsweek.com/2011/04/10/the-child-you-didn-t-dream-of.html

Link to the book on Amazon US is here:

www.amazon.com/Anti-Romantic-Child-Story-Unexpected-Joy/dp/0061690279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302903991&sr=1-1

Your thoughts?

Very well written, looks like it's been sensitively from another parents point of view. Never heard of hypermedia before though, had to google it!

very interesting, a lot I could relate to. I imagine though parents of children with different disabilities or different presentation of ASD or ASD traits might be less interested.

Very much resonates with me. However it wasn't Reading it was mathematics and science and historical facts.
Ds was just a wonder always wanting to know why something worked, working out his own theories or picking facts up and echoing them back.

But if you said happy birthday to him ( on his birthday), he would just repeat happy birthday back to you... And still does.

What I thought was indearing, quirky and bright, were all big red flags about a disorder ( ASD /AS) that I knew nothing about.

Yes he flapped when he was scared or excited and bounced about like a ping pong ball, but he was a boy and a toddler or young child and they all do that don't they?

Then it hit us like a brick, after aspergers or HFA being mentioned by the clinical psych after being sent there because my 8 year old was depressed.. How the hell does that happen?

How did we not know.. And then I read and then it dawned on us that infact everything we thought was plain wrong.. And everything we did from there on in was intervention.

" mummy is feeling sad/ happy/ tired.. My face doing this means that".

Our marriage barely survived but survive it did. Ds has made huge improvements, but i still wish just for a day, could he just be average so we could breathe for 2 minutes.

I could have written a lot of that about DD1. I'm quite sad now that somebody didn't recognise her hyperlexia for what it was and warn me. She could have been saved years of anguish in school if we'd recognised her AS earlier. That person who refused him access to their nursery did him a big favour in a very backhanded way.

I have a Hyperlexia PubMed research paper collection, only 9 research papers though, which is listed on my Invisible Disabilities research paper collections web page