I would love to know how many parents of Highly gifted kids have had the possible label of aspergers suggested to them.....DS6 has had numerous assessments done by various people and EVERY single one of them says without a doubt - no, he does not have aspergers. Both his speech and OT have also said, no to aspergers. My gut after what seems like 10 zillion hours of reading research and articles tells me no to aspergers.
He does have OE issues with being over sensitive and dyspraxia and is highly gifted....we had a meeting today with an advocate who we found that was going to help us with tweaking my son's IEP (he gets speech and OT and we are trying to get gifted to put on with our private testing we did this summer)since we left homeschooling and will be trying the local public school. She was up front and said she really had limited experience with the gifted side of things and deals more with the special ed side of things with autistic/asperger children and understands his dyspraxia...but there honestly is no one else in our area and she is highly recommended....and her own child has aspergers. When I gave a break down of my little guy, more than once she said, he has aspergers....I tried to explain to her that there is a trend in education today where many gifted children are being misdiagnosed with aspergers and that I was steadfast that he does not have aspergers but she just couldn't move past it. When I told her that I thought asperger children have severe social interaction issues...she said, well your son seems to have issues with social interactions with kids his age....my response...well yes, duh...he wants to talk about the electromagnet he built at home that day on his circuit board while many other kids his age look at him like he has horns coming out of his head...BUT when he hangs out with his 9 year old best buddy they can sit and talk about different topics for hours and have a meaningful conversation back and forth. Or if he hangs out with the homeschool math games group, he sits and plays all the games and carries on a variety of conversations and has a blast because he can finally hang out with another kid who actually likes monopoly as much as he does....or he can share his excitement about designing and making his own monopoly game board and pieces and have the other kids in the group think that is totally cool. He just has very clearly shown that he wants to be able to talk and interact with people he can have a conversation with....it's not that he doesn't want to interact....he VERY much wants to be social and part of a group, he has just learned that when he does open up to some kids, he is usually met with them laughing at him or teasing him....but with the right group or person, he has NO issue whatsoever talking back and forth and sharing and having a meaningful conversation.
Then with the advocate, I pulled out a circle graph he had completed a few months ago where he measured the distance his foam airplane glider flew in the backyard and then graphed all the bits of information onto the circle graph just to show her one of his 10 million interests.....and she immediately said...aspergers. What?????? She then stated that asperger children have an uncanny ability to be extremely brilliant in 1 or 2 areas and know everything inside out about that topic. Well, I went on to explain that this was a last minute experiment that came to him while he was throwing his plane in the backyard and he said he wondered if throwing it harder or at different angles how it would affect how far it went. I then went on to explain that this kid collects rocks, loves computer programming, builds rockets, made his own family nature club where he gives tours and shares about the local flora/fauna at different nature sanctuaries, loves trains, maps, building legos, performing science experiments...I could go on for an hour. He is like a giant sponge he can't get enough about everything....so to me that is not a child with a concentrated interest in 1-2 topics.
He shows concern when an animal or person gets hurt...and he is concerned and worried when he hears on the news that a tsunami hit or an earthquake hit....or if I am not feeling well...he has to come make sure I get a kiss and a hug to make me feel better and tells me how sorry he is that I am not feeling well. He made up his own 5 chapter story about manatees the other day and in the story he invented his own machine that stopped boats from hitting manatees because "how could anyone hurt something so cute"...and then made a computer program where you drove a boat and everytime you missed hitting a manatee you earned points. Many times he gets so emotional and concerned that he honestly can't express it.
I found a wonderful article by Dr. Amend (who we had considered driving to for formal testing at one point) that made my point ten million times over and I am faxing a copy of it to the advocate tomorrow.
The thing that just makes me so upset is I wonder how many other gifted parents have had their child mislabeled aspergers all because a particular person or professional honestly does not know gifted characteristics.....the advocate just could not get off the fact that he was not aspergers and was not focusing her energy on how to meet his gifted needs and more so on how to meet his dyspraxia needs and label him with aspergers. She then ended the conversation with the fact that if he could be labeled aspergers then the whole world would open up to him and he would be able to get more of his needs met...all I could come up with was "how????"....his needs are that he needs to be in a setting that will allow him to accelerate to the levels he needs to meet his gifted needs and help with his dyspraxia needs....she then went on to ask if I was open to just going ahead labeling him aspergers so that we could get more accommodations for him..so that if we decided to leave at the end of the year, he would qualify for the McKay Scholarship where the county would pay for him to attend a private school of our choice(all children in florida with an IEP are eligible for this after a year of being enrolled in a public school)...with getting the asperger label he would get almost double the money. I REFUSE to label my child with a wrong diagnosis.
She stated that the school would also question aspergers right from the get go and that she asked if we could do the GADS assessment to totally rule this out.....so at the moment I said yes....I now dont know if that was a good thing or not...here we have all these other professional people saying, NO and now we have to go through more hoops....I am just frustrated and feel like why does everything have to be SO hard to get the needs of a very gifted child met!
