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Adults with Asperger's Disorder - Blog Entry

22 Oct 2007 09:45 AM

Our son, now 20 was always different from our other 4 children. He is very intelligent and as a child his creativity resulted in giant messes that Mom seemed forever to be one step behind in preventing. He did a lot of grunting at an age the other kids had talked and took great joy in aggrevating his siblings to the point that he alienated himself from them - a habit that continued into the school years. When his actions resulted in some sort of mishap or altercation the reaction was predictable - total denial. Social skills are horrible but he loves talking with the elderly and younger kids. When with young adults his age he is tolerated but not really accepted. His scholastic habits were horrible - papers were always lost, crumpled or stashed somewhere. Homework assignments may be done - but rarely turned in. Each semester there was at least one F, then the next it would be in a different subject. By 3rd grade we discovered he had an auditory processing disability. The reason we hadn't know before is because he had taught himself to lip-read. His compensation carried through all testing we had done on him during the school years - the point disparity was never great enough to warrant any IEP except for his speech. His grammar is horrible to this day - but with the tutor he could do perfect enunciation and sentence structure. Today hygiene is still non-existent - he hides his clothes that he has "accidents" in until the smell of his room reaches others and he is forced to wash clothes filled with urine or feces. During his senior HS year he worked part time and opened a savings and checking account - and promptly ran $600 of overdrafts. At age 18 he got a credit card and racked up $4000+ in debt - without a real job to pay for it. Last summer he had an appartment/room while he worked at a fast food retaurant - he was responsible for 1/2 the rent - but never paid it. Today he lies at home, goes into any food we may have stored and takes what he wants, hides it under things in his room, lies about any income he receives, most likely has another checking account opened up - but he pays none of his bills. Scholastically he is doing OK at a local technical college. A year ago we (all of the family) completed a survey of Asperger traits and independently checked off almost every aspect as applicable to this child. I was able to get him to agree to see an Asperge/Autism physician who stated there was nothing wrong - no AS.... If we put him out of the house he will be homeless in a short time - there don't appear to be any "group homes" for him to go to and we're at the end of our rope!!!!!!!!!!