Thursday, April 22, 2010

I Want to Write a Book

Most of the time Kevin's autism doesn't get in the way of life. That's just the way life is. On the other hand, if he were "normal," he'd be a loud teenage boy, driving, with a girlfriend and I don't know how I'd cope. You moms with teenage boys do great with your kids, and I'm sure if I had that kid all along, I'd be right there with you. But, I have this life with this Kevin, and it's just different. I'm doing a terrible job in explaining what I mean. It's kinda like two families living in identical houses, but one has the mirror-image floor plan. You adapt to your floor plan, and are thrown for a loop when you suddenly have to navigate the other house with your eyes closed.

Anyway, Kevin's been doing great lately. His spontaneous speech is fuller with more descriptions. He's even starting to get the idea of "why & because." The area of speech he still has trouble with is personal and possessive pronouns.

Kevin has problems with the concepts of me, my, mine, I, you, your, and yours. He understands these as concrete adjectives, just like "blue car" means the car is always blue. He doesn't get they change meaning based on who is speaking so "my room" means the master bedroom is mine when I'm speaking and his room is "my room" when he is speaking. In his mind, "my room" is always the master bedroom.

I end up talking in third person a lot: "This is Mommy's, that is Kevin's." It gets the point across, sometimes, but it's still frustrating, because once something has been dubbed with the "my" or "your" adjective, that's the way it will always be.

So, I have this idea for a picture book that would help autistics with these concepts. It'll have lots of pictures of people with thought bubbles identifying things. For example, a kid would be holding a toy and the bubble will have "This is my toy." The next picture would have the same kid with the same toy and another kid would have a bubble that said, "That is your toy." And so forth and so on, very repetitive, me, my, you, your, our, their, etc.

It might be too late to change his understanding of possession, it might already be ingrained, but I still think a picture book might help.


 

2 comments:

Mom said...

Write it. Sounds like an excellent idea.

Doralong said...

That is bloody brilliant, you really really should pursue this. Truly.