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Somebody has to have a long attention span...seriously!

There is a boy in my daughter's class with a "special ed" designation. He loves to hug but is only supposed to hang on until the count of 3. I saw him do this to my daughter and the teacher counted and after 3 he didn't let go and the teacher gave him his warning. He didn't let go. My daughter then hugged him harder and said, very politely but firmly, to the teacher (with her dagger eyes) "he can stop the hug when he is ready to stop the hug". Though technically she defied the teacher, if her classmate needed to "feel the love" (school can be a lonely place) and my daughter didn't mind why not? He wasn't hurting her.

In the past my daughter would have stuck up for him in some growly way, but she's not giving up her defense of what she thinks is right, she's just learning to do it with more grace and self-control. (phew)

My DS with Asperger's is a fantastic traveler as well. I have often thought that if we could just move to a new city every week, he'd do better.

This does not keep him from having trouble with other kinds of transitions, however. Being pulled away from something he's in the middle of is very hard for him. Or a disruption in the plan of the school day-- sometimes he handles it, sometimes it disappoints him too far and he is upset by it.

DeeDee

I second this.

Wouldn't travel generally be considered challenging for people with autism or Asperger's, though? A quick Google on Asperger's +travelling reveals tons of "survival tips."

I have a hugger who has trouble knowing where the line is. It's hard for me to get her to understand the difference between who she can and can't hug, when someone I have explained as not falling into the appropriate category decides to offer her a hug. All of my work is undone, and while they obviously meant no ill will, it's extremely frustrating for me.

It's lovely of your daughter to let him hug her as long as he wants to, but he'll wonder why the next person he hugs doesn't want to do the same.

My DD (who is not AS-ish at all) is a kid I'd describe as slow to warm to new situations, which often comes out as "has trouble with transitions." "Has low tolerance for expectations mismatch" is likely the real issue.

She is the best travel companion ever, and is totally unfazed by the vagaries of airline travel. I think it's that she makes no attempt to guess what the travel experience will be like, so has few expectations to be mismatched.

"I'm not sure you and I will be sitting next to each other on the plane" does not faze her. Grandpa (an authorized pickup person) picking her up from school when she thought it would be me created a tantrum of such proportions that the school declined to release her to him, and kept both of them in the office until they could get me on the phone.

Okay, maybe we all need to go on a trip together! This is actually a trait I really love in DD. She also is pretty much always willing to go anywhere and try anything, at any time. Her new thing is to want to try something she's never eaten before whenever we eat out. (At just-8, she now seems to be turning into the foodie I always suspected she had potential to be.)

There is no one feature or symptom that rules Asperger's in or out. Lots of people with autism have trouble traveling (those with sensory issues sometimes find noisy transit to be a problem) but many don't.

My DS is not even borderline-- he is unmistakably, definitely a person with AS. But he is truly happy being on an airplane to somewhere new, and a long delay in a smelly, noisy airport does not faze him. Go figure. Maybe because we took him places a lot as a baby?

DeeDee

I think the whole issue of transitions while traveling vs transitions in the classroom setting is comparing apples to oranges - I have three different kids with three different personalities and they are all over the board on transitioning, but traveling even when we've had to wait for hours due to cancelled flights etc has never been a transition issue... because we're usually going someplace fun, plus it's different and it's not school.

I agree with the posters above who mention that although a teacher isn't allowed to (or qualified to) make a diagnosis, there is good reason to pay attention to what the teacher has said is going on with your child - the teacher is spending a good deal of your child's day with them, and seeing them in an environment that you aren't (usually) seeing them function in as well as seeing many many other children function in the same type of situation. It's possible that the behaviors the teacher is seeing are due to gifted quirkiness but otoh the teacher may be seeing something else entirely.

Our ds' 2nd grade teacher tried over and over again to tell us she felt she was seeing signs of ADHD in our ds (or possibly IQ low enough he wasn't able to handle the classwork). We *knew* our ds was extremely high IQ both from living with him and from previous testing, so we immediately put off her concerns to a combination of teacher not liking him, classwork being too boring, visual-spatial thinking, and gifted quirky behaviors. Eventually we found out we were really, really, really wrong - ds has a relatively severe disability which was impacting him at school, and like Dee Dee, we wish we'd been open to what the teacher said the minute she first mentioned something - ds' previous teachers had also noticed signs of it and simply let him slide by because they realized he was very very smart. DS is *fine* and a-ok, but it would have been tremendously helpful to him (and to us) to have known earlier in his academic days that he was struggling and that we could have put accommodations and tutoring in place to help him out.

Chances are, with most kids, it's just gifted quirkiness - but there's still a chance that the teacher is seeing something beyond that. Looking into the possibility of something else isn't going to cause any problems and will at least give you data to take back to this or any other teachers who are tempted to suggest something is up in the future; overlooking something when there are signs is something you may later regret.

Best wishes,

polarbear

It really depends on the circumstances of the travel and the sensory and transition needs of the particular person with Apserger's or autism.

One of the possible symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome is "rigid adherence to non-functional routines". If a person with Asperger's is used to a very predictable daily schedule, and travel disrupts this (which it almost inevitably would), then I can see it being a huge issue. We never had a terribly regimented schedule, so this never became a significant problem for us. My son does hate it when someone changes plans or a schedule without telling him in advance, though.

Most of our travel has been done by car, and involves trips that end up at state or national parks, museums, and other types of places that he enjoys anyway. As far as my son is concerned, the trip itself is a great opportunity to either read for long periods, catch up on sleep, or ask questions and converse at length with us (while we are a captive audience) about all the new things he's noticing out the window, while still being in a controlled, familiar environment (our car) loaded down with pillows (a favorite sensory activity). He really enjoys going new places as long as he has someone else with him to help him navigate, and as long as the new places aren't disorientingly loud or too flashy/bright, and don't have smells that are too unpleasant to him. (He's considered becoming a perfumer at times just so that he has a fighting chance to get pleasant smells out into the environment). I think he'd hate air travel these days, with its long lines, crowds, loudspeakers, close contact with unpleasantly-scented people, and TSA checkpoints. Theme parks and other chaotic places are not favorites unless we choose dates carefully to minimize really oppressive crowds.

Kids who had greater sensory sensitivities and more rigid adherence to routines, or who had low receptive language, so that successfully preparing them for an upcoming trip would be difficult, would almost certainly be far more challenging to travel with.