I must admit, I'm not surprised by it, but it brings on a lot of mixed emotions.
We had a meeting with DS7's school--principal, teacher, and counselors--and they referred us to a couple of doctors (medical and psych) to get a handle on where we are. As he gets older, his social problems are more and more problem--evidently because younger kids don't necessarily play with each other and interact like older kids do, and he sticks out more now. He is getting in trouble for bullying, which is nearly amusing considering that he's a little, scrawny thing who gets picked on a lot. But he has a mouth on him, and quite the vocabulary, and no inhibitions about saying things that other kids find threatening. He's the weird kid, of course, and when the other kids won't play with him, or won't play his way, or make fun of him, he lashes out and then gets in trouble. So apparently now he fits everything in the Asperger's description. The school is really quite good about it all, working on all kinds of things that they hope will help him to learn the social stuff and at the same time accelerating him to 3rd grade math and starting him on some new computer program they have called Success Maker which is for both low and high end kids, to try to keep him from tuning out in boredom. And we have an appointment with one of the doctors next week to see what he thinks.
As I say, I'm not surprised--I've spent years denying it, but when he was two years old and wandering around in circles counting to himself, I said, "oh lord, my kid is rainman." Then I fought the preschool tooth and nail to keep them from labeling him when he was 4. I said, "why is it that everybody thinks there has to be something wrong with him, can't he just be a really smart kid?" I guess not.
On the one hand, I can't stand that there is something wrong with him, and on the other hand I believe that if they had gone around diagnosing Asperger's when I was a kid, I'd have been labeled with it too. So I guess I know where he gets it. Can I consider it "wrong" if I have it, too? I don't know what to think. I want to defend my child like a mama tiger, but I want to get him help too.
Sorry, babbling.
