DH and I both appear to have ASD of some sort. I was diagnosed (after a fashion), he was not. I tend to think that even with ASD in the mix training/exposure are pretty powerful forces.
We've both learned a lot of that stuff. It's *not* impossible. But that maybe is an unwritten factor in my question of ballance. If it really is that hard to learn to fry an egg, there probably is some effect other than "you's too smart."
But in some ways I'm not sure how much that part matters. At some point one has to start making decisions about intensity of focus, and about what skills one will work to develop. With a disabling ASD, that comes up earlier and decisions are probably harder overall, but even without any spectrummy tendencies, at some point you have to decide between an evening course on auto maintainence, or one on Sanscrit, because you won't ever have time for everything you want/need to do.
And at very young ages, it's mainly the parent making the decisions & I think there are more of them than one thinks about. DS learned to make coffee because in the early morning he really wanted me, and I really needed a moment of peace & a trip to the loo. So DH and he started making coffee every morning, explicitly for "mama" -- which gave DS a really strong attachment to learning a life skill.
Maybe a clearer example: Shortly after DS got interested in directions and started giving them to people, an Aunt got him one of those trike-stroller thingies, where the adult pushes, and the kid pedals and steers. If we'd stuck with DS just telling people directions in the form "left, right, down, door" it would have tended towards a purely intellectual/memory based skill & not a very socially appropriate version, either. With the trike, he's putting the same interest into learning the neighborhood, how to actually steer with handlebars, what happens when you back into your pregnant mama's tummy (d@#$ handle is at uterus level, and about the size of a 3mo pregnant one at that), and so on. He's also gotten a few tries with a steering wheel and a tiller to round it all out. And he's learning to include street names and such in his directions, which is helpful
The trike has also been giving him the experience of being in control. The only option I have if he's steering into the street is to prevent him from continuing forward. He has to decide to turn the wheel, which means he's really starting to learn this thing about traffic in a way he was NOT with just walking holding my hand. He has to listen to my directions to get what he wants, which is to keep getting more chances to steer.
Anyway, same _interest_, different, more physical application/outlet and the kind of _skills_ gained change. I guess this kinda thing could be called channelling... is it?
Anyway, I think this kind of early "channeling" might be more important than people sometimes think of in terms of life-skills development.
We also read a LOT of books with social skills messages. I have to say I've picked them consiously becasue, although we've been told there is absolutely no way DS is on the spectrum, I'm not _completely_ convinced.
Man, I already cut over half of what I wrote. Thanks for making it through all this
-Mich
