Autism is one word that has been used and abused in more ways than one. It is just one of the words used to label children and people. Other words include ADHD, LD (learning disability), and retard (for mental retardation).
I admit, we tend to abuse the A word in my family specifically if Julian starts acting different when he is upset or embarrassed. Compliment him when he is singing and he will throw a fit like crying or hitting. Ask him complicated questions and he will blink his eyes rapidly like a cpu downloading or searching for stored information. Play his favorite car in his pc game and he will be upset and talk about it endlessly. He loves numbers, calendars and calculators. He loves facts and his favorite read right now is Time 2008 Almanac for Kids. When he does some of the things I have mentioned above, we call him “na-o-otistic” or exhibiting autism. Which of course is just a joke among us family members.
But then, we could be misinterpreted as making fun of this disorder. We don’t. We discuss these issues in the family and it is probably one of our favorite topics aside from car racing-related pc games, anime, music, movies and life-related topics. My children are all exposed to children with developmental problems.
Trixie is in a university’s elementary department where she has classmates with autism, Down’s syndrome and ADHD. She has been with these classmates since she was five and now she is twelve. I can say she has learned to live with them and their differences though it was a different story when she was younger.
Some of Julian and Tania’s playmates are from the center that I go to. They play with these children every time we go there. One of Julian’s favorite playmate is a boy with Down’s Syndrome. At this time since they are still young, they do not discriminate. Yet.
But they have questions like
- why is a certain student older than them cannot answer simple questions.
- why is it when they talk to them the answers are different.
- Why do they cry and have tantrums?
- Why are they being taught to color, write and cut?
- Why can’t some of them talk like they do?
- Why can’t they sit properly?
- Why don’t they look when spoken to?
Tania said it candidly when she asked me: “Nay, bakit lahat ng bata dito sa (name of center) ay makulit?” (Mom, why are all the kids here in (name of center) are not behaved?) My children are no better than these children in the center. In fact the children who go to the center are even better speakers (those who are really verbal) than my two younger children. Some of the children who go to the center can write, color and cut even better than my two younger children.
The issue really is how we as parents address these curiosity of our children about how others behave and not through labeling.
What I do is explain to my children why the other children need to go to the center and to me. I try to explain simply why they are exhibiting such behaviors and how to deal with this.
- Sometimes my children have a hard time understanding especially when they have been hit accidentally or otherwise. Like when Tania was pushed by a child who was triple her size and she bumped her head on my basket of supplies.
- Sometimes it is hard to make my children understand when the toys they are playing with are grabbed from them.
- Sometimes it is hard to make my children understand when they see how the children “break rules” even if these were not really intended which are precisely one of the issues being addressed by me. It has to be explained to them that that behavior is not to be tolerated: breaking the rules.
Let’s face it. Everywhere we go, there would always be a diverse group of people that we are going to meet.
Each and everyone of them having their own kind of idiosyncrasies and whether we like it or not, we have to live with these.
What is important is being able to adapt and accept and understand.
After all, we ourselves may be viewed by others as different and we certainly wouldn’t want to be labeled too.
