當我知道我的孩子患有自閉症時

Dez

分享。。。。

自 閉 兒 的 教 育

在一般兒童發育成長過程中，「很自然」就學會的語言溝通、人際情感的交流和社會互動行為，對患自閉症的人來說卻是那們困難甚至遙不可及。它們尤其是在人際關係方面、語言溝通和遊戲方面有特殊的質的障礙地方。

像在人際關係方面，他們不理人、不看人、叫他他也不理，他們眼睛不看人、迴避和人的視線接觸，有少數比較有經驗而且敏感的媽媽就會發現，小嬰兒餵奶的時候總是不看人，對他笑也沒反應，睡保吃飽以後也自得其樂地看天花板，或是自己挽弄自己的手，也不需人家抱，如果你走近他他也沒反應，不會像一般小嬰兒會手舞足蹈的想要人抱，一般小嬰兒六、七個月大開始會認人、怕生，不喜歡離開媽媽，看到生人會哭，但絕大部分的自閉兒在這個年齡看到陌生人也不會認生，沒有一般嬰兒在分離時表現出的哭鬧和依依不捨。

尤其對一個還不會說話的小孩來說，他可能會用手去指，或眼睛去看去表達他想要的東西，但是自閉兒不會這麼做。自閉症在了解他人的口語、肢體語言，或以語言、手勢、表情來表達意思等方面，都有程度不同的困難。

自閉症兒童有很嚴重的語言和溝通障礙，語言的發展和兒童認知能力有很密切的關係，一般而言，兒童在學會使用語言表達之前，他們已經具有相當好的理解能力，但是學齡前的自閉症兒童，他們大多對父母親所說的話、所表現的行為無法了解，而不像正常的兒童有學習、模仿的意義在裡面，大約有50%的自閉症兒童沒有溝通性的語言，如果有的話，通常也只是反覆性、沒有意義的動作而已，就像鸚鵡式的簡單仿說，常表現出你我顛倒的代名詞反轉或是答非所問的特徵。即使有些人發音十分準確，但大部分咬字都有困難，音調單調，語調也缺乏節奏變化，總體來說，他們語言的困難不在文法，而是在實際應用的困難。

自閉症的兒童在玩耍方面，也有很特殊的地方，譬如他們不和人玩，自己玩自己的，而且在玩法上也和別人玩法不同，關心的重點也不同，譬如說一般小孩子玩車，喜歡推著車跑或學車子發出嘟嘟的聲音，自閉症的孩子可能把車子倒過來，玩他的輪子，或把它放在地上推，卻只注意地上車輪的轉動，或把車子排成一排等等。他們沒有想像力，沒辦法和人玩「假裝」的遊戲，像「扮家家酒」假裝這個娃娃是爸爸，假裝我們到了公園去玩，他們沒有辦法玩這種具有假想的或創造的、規則時常改變的遊戲。

自閉症的孩子還有一些屬於「固定」儀式的行為是很容易觀察的。像只吃固定的食物、坐固定的地方吃東西、睡固定的地方、蓋固定的被子、到某個固定的時間看固定的節目、固定穿某一家廠牌的內衣、坐車坐固定的位子、出門走一定的路線，而在語言、思考溝通上也有固定的現象，譬如有固定的問題，要父母用固定的方式回答。甚至考試的時候也將腦子裡一直在想的固定想法寫在考卷上，而拒絕回答考卷上本來他會的問題。這種特殊的固定行為，也是自閉症患者很特殊的現象。

自閉症的人需要特殊的訓練和教育，雖然他們的身體正常健康，可是由於自閉障礙，大部份沒有辦法在社會上工作。自閉症至今仍無根治的方法，現在最有效的辦法，就是勤能補拙積極進行早期療育。

有效的早期療育有幾個因素：第一個是：愈早開始治療愈好。因為自閉症不理人，他很沒有動機自己去學習，所以你早期教他，他空白的時間愈短。還有愈早開始教，可以避免出現一些怪異行為。如果你不教，他自己會找出一些奇奇怪怪的方法，就會產生一些怪異的動作或行為。第二個因素是密集，就是好好的教他。密集的每天教他，不要間斷，他就會進步。第三個是：教的方法要一致，要持續。合於這三原則的，大概都會進步。當然如果能夠加上有學理依據的，進步會更好。

Dez

分享。。。。

Genius locus
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition
There is strong evidence for a link between genius and autism. In the first of three articles about the brain this week, we ask how that link works, and whether “neurotypicals” can benefit from the knowledge
Ronald Grant Archive
THAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as “Rain Man”, illustrated above.
A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the “autistic spectrum”, as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.
So what is the link? And can an understanding of it be used to release flashes of genius in those whose brains are, in the delightfully condescending term used by researchers in the area, “neurotypical”? Those were the questions addressed by papers (one of them Dr Howlin’s) published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The society, Britain’s premier scientific club and the oldest scientific body in the world, produces such transactions from time to time, to allow investigators in particular fields to chew over the state of the art. The latest edition is the outcome of a conference held jointly with the British Academy (a similar, though younger, organisation for the humanities and social sciences) last September.
A spectrum of belief
A standard diagnosis of autism requires three things to be present in an individual. Two of these three, impairments in social interaction and in communication with other people, are the results of autists lacking empathy or, in technical jargon, a “theory of mind”. In other words they cannot, as even fairly young neurotypicals can, put themselves in the position of another being and ask themselves what that other is thinking. The third criterion, however, is that a person has what are known as restrictive and repetitive behaviours and interests, or RRBI, in the jargon.
Until recently, the feeling among many researchers was that the first two features were crucial to someone becoming a savant. The idea was that mental resources which would have been used for interaction and communication could be redeployed to develop expertise in some arbitrary task. Now, though, that consensus is shifting. Several of the volume’s authors argue that it is the third feature, RRBI, that permits people to become savants.
Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
Many, but not all. Dr Happé has drawn on a study of almost 13,000 individual twins to show that childhood talent in fields such as music and art is often associated with RRBIs, even in those who are not diagnosed as classically autistic. She speculates that the abilities of savants in areas that neurotypicals tend to find pointless or boring may result from an ability to see differences where a neurotypical would see only similarities. As she puts it, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”
Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.
Insight, too, is given by autists themselves. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She also writes about her experience of being autistic. As she describes in the volume, one of the differences she perceives between her experience and that of most neurotypicals is that she thinks in images. She says her mind is like an internet search engine that searches for photographs. To form concepts, she sorts these pictures into categories. She does not, however, claim that all autistic people think like this. To the contrary, she describes two other sorts: pattern thinkers who excel at maths and music, and verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing, but lack visual skills. The latter might not qualify as autistic under a traditional diagnosis, but slip into the broader autistic spectrum.
The question of how the autistic brain differs physically from that of neurotypicals was addressed by Manuel Casanova of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. Dr Casanova has spent many years dissecting both. His conclusion is that the main difference is in the structure of the small columns of nerve cells that are packed together to form the cerebral cortex. The cortical columns of those on the autistic spectrum are narrower than those of neurotypicals, and their cells are organised differently.
The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).

Dez

繼續.......

Rain and sunshine
Given such anatomical differences, then, what hope is there for the neurotypical who would like to be a savant? Some, possibly. There are examples of people suddenly developing extraordinary skills in painting and music in adult life as a result of brain damage caused by accidents or strokes. That, perhaps, is too high a price to pay. But Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney has been able to induce what looks like a temporary version of this phenomenon using magnetism.
Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Applying a magnetic field to part of the brain disrupts the electrical activity of the nerve cells for a few seconds. Applying such a field repeatedly can have effects that last for an hour or so. The technique has been approved for the treatment of depression, and is being tested against several other conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and migraines. Dr Snyder, however, has found that stimulating an area called the left anterior temporal lobe improves people’s ability to draw things like animals and faces from memory. It helps them, too, with other tasks savants do famously well—proofreading, for example, and estimating the number of objects in a large group, such as a pile of match sticks. It also reduces “false” memories (savants tend to remember things literally, rather than constructing a mnemonic narrative and remembering that).
There are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.
The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.
The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.
Savant syndrome, then, is a case where the politically correct euphemism “differently abled” has real meaning. The conclusion that should be drawn, perhaps, is not that neurotypicals should attempt to ape savants, but that savants—even those who are not geniuses—should be welcomed for what they are, and found a more honored place in society.

粉丝

搂主！昨晚我看了你写的发觉到我的儿子有1些这种症状呢！
我开始在担心~因为他就如你说的，把车子倒反然后玩车轮！
打针都不哭那种。脾气也超级臭的！在6-7个月的时候任何人抱他都没问题！
请问要去哪做你说的TEST??

Dez

原帖由 粉丝 于 19-6-2009 09:39 AM 发表
搂主！昨晚我看了你写的发觉到我的儿子有1些这种症状呢！
我开始在担心~因为他就如你说的，把车子倒反然后玩车轮！
打针都不哭那种。脾气也超级臭的！在6-7个月的时候任何人抱他都没问题！
请问要去哪做你说的TES ...

我是带星星儿去 PG GLENEAGLES 看儿童心理医生 (DR ZASMANI) 的， 粉丝 是那里人 ？

[ 本帖最后由 Dez 于 19-6-2009 01:37 PM 编辑 ]

粉丝

原帖由 Dez 于 19-6-2009 01:35 PM 发表


我是带星星儿去 PG GLENEAGLES 看儿童心理医生 (DR ZASMANI) 的， 粉丝 是那里人 ？

嗯！谢谢Dez哦~我会多加留意看看我儿子如何~
如果incase需要，我会去找心理医生。
我是住雪州的。

Dez

原帖由 粉丝 于 19-6-2009 02:16 PM 发表


嗯！谢谢Dez哦~我会多加留意看看我儿子如何~
如果incase需要，我会去找心理医生。
我是住雪州的。

放心吧。。。。
多留意孩子的 behaviour 先，不要那么快担心。。。

彤妈

我也有个自闭症女儿，目前三岁半了。有个论坛超棒！www.elimautism.org我每天都在那边学习

Dez

原帖由 彤妈 于 20-10-2009 03:00 PM 发表
我也有个自闭症女儿，目前三岁半了。有个论坛超棒！www.elimautism.org我每天都在那边学习

谢谢分享 info。。。。

我孩子刚开始 attend 一间 school for children wt special needs 叫 Prospect Rainbow，希望可以帮到他啦。。。。

nicolelam

回复 149# Dez

楼主，你好！看到你的儿子进步很多，也替你和你老婆开心，希望可以继续分享你孩子的进度。

Dez

我相信孩子是上天所賜的瑰寶，他們從天而來，做父母的只要奉上信心，結予最多的愛和最大的支持，像肥沃的土壤蘊育種子一般；土壤何須擔心種子的成長，因為那完美的藍圖已在種子裡面了。

我很喜歡《孩子來自天堂》（Children are from Heaven）這本書的一些看法，作者說道：「每個孩子都是獨一無二，帶著他們各自獨特的命運來到世上。父母最重要的角色是扮演認識、讚美及培育孩子體內已賦予的自然、獨特、唯一的種子，讓這種子成長。」書中還這麼說著：「孩子們各自擁有其天賦及必須面對的挑戰，這是我們無法改變的事。孩子不需要父母幫他們定型或讓他們更好，但他們需要父母的支持與關愛，以健全地成長。」

我的孩子比别人特殊，但并不是更坏、更失败。

世界上没有真正所谓完美的孩子，我的孩子只不过离完美更远一点。自闭症的孩子很纯洁，他们对世界的污染完全免疫，单纯从亲子关系来讲，他可以无条件地爱你。

Dez

星星儿刚看了 Dr See，再次说是轻微自闭，但 concentration 和 hearing 较差，需要 improve，还要 monitor 他的 diet，以后每个月再见她一次。

她还 advise 我老婆帮星星儿 apply 一种叫 OKU 的东西，有人听说过吗 ？

Dez

OKU = Orang Kurang Upaya

http://www.jkm.gov.my/jkm/index. ... emid=81&lang=en

Dez

OKU = Orang Kurang Upaya

http://www.jkm.gov.my/jkm/index. ... emid=81&lang=en

糖果

继续加油~~~~

nicolelam

Dez, 这两个礼拜的努力，我见到成果了，连我爸爸和邻居都说孩子有改变了，现在他开始模仿儿童节目跳舞了，语言也多了，可是听不懂的，哈哈！加油加油。

candy_lim78

谢谢LZ在这的分享，让我多了解关于自闭症的分析。
我的大儿子也有一些症状，让我很但心。八月份就3岁了，还不会叫爸爸妈妈。他想要的东西或食物，就拉你的手带你去。小儿子看到哥哥不讲话，也慢慢少出声了，学哥哥的动作。非常忧心。现在他在KL中央医院接受治疗。我打算给他进幼儿园，有谁可以介绍puchong区的幼儿园呢？

Dez

回复 157# candy_lim78

不好意思，我是 Penang-lang ， KL 就帮不到你了。。。

可以试试问问 贝贝宝宝3007 和 nicolelam

Dez

最近读了一本书，和大家分享下一些里面的内容，书名叫 Ten Things Every Child With Autism Wishes You Knew

Dez

Here are ten things every child with autism wishes you knew:

1. I am first and foremost a child. I have autism. I am not primarily "autistic." My autism is only one aspect of my total character. It does not define me as a person. Are you a person with thoughts, feelings and many talents, or are you just fat (overweight), myopic (wear glasses) or klutzy (uncoordinated, not good at sports)? Those may be things that I see first when I meet you, but they are not necessarily what you are all about.

As an adult, you have some control over how you define yourself. If you want to single out a single characteristic, you can make that known. As a child, I am still unfolding. Neither you nor I yet know what I may be capable of. Defining me by one characteristic runs the danger of setting up an expectation that may be too low. And if I get a sense that you don't think I "can do it," my natural response will be: Why try?