My Autism Insights

Here’s what I find ironic:

Parents of autistic kids will spend a great deal of time teaching their kids social skills for a variety of situations.  For example, when we take the kids to a restaurant, there’s always some discussion of the restaurant rules: using inside voices, staying in our seats, using utensils…It’s a good bit of work, but we do this because we want our children to be able to function in a less-than-tolerant society.

Why then can we go to a restaurant and see a group - 2 adult women and 4 children under the age of 10 - where the children wandering around the restaurant for the majority of the time they were there?  They weren’t being exactly obnoxious, it just seems like life has thrown us yet another double standard.  They didn’t get any funny looks (that I noticed) for wandering around tables where people were eating…standing in chairs…climbing on the fireplace…

And yet my child is the one labeled with the “problems.”

“Does that seem right to you?” ~Jubal Early, Firefly.

Last night, I heard about Colin Detwiler, an autistic boy who wandered away from his summer camp and ended up walking along the highway.  It apparently took the camp thirty minutes to call the authorities.  I may have nightmares for a few days, and I’m sure his mom will have them for months.

This is one reason why I have been reluctant to entertain the thought of putting Gus in a regular camp.  We’ve been lucky that he gets summer services so far through his school.  It’s a ‘camp’ environment, but with individuals trained to work with autistic children.  I always make a point to warn anyone who works with Gus about his past history of wandering.

His first school lost him one day.  He had roamed into another class and it took the teachers about twenty minutes to locate him in the building.  They didn’t tell me until a couple of weeks later.  That was a very short school year for him.

I’m going to the school next week, and I think I will have another chat about Gus with the staff, once more, just to play it safe.

Now that Keith Kennedy has been found after he went missing for a week (I learned of this over at AutismVox), I feel a little better about our annual camping trip.  We’re going to a familiar place, which has it’s pros and cons of course.  The good part is that Gus is very comfortable there and won’t necessarily feel the need to see and do everything at once.  The down side is that Gus is very comfortable there and sometimes gets the idea that he can go where he wants, when he wants, without letting anyone but the chipmunks under the cabin know about it.

We take the precaution of having an ID bracelet, but if we can’t find him, that doesn’t help us much.  I considered getting one of those kiddie lojacks, but haven’t found one that will work for us yet. 

When Gus was about three, we went on one of our usual camping trips and I tried the Mommy I’m Here Locator.  If he was getting too far, I would press a button, it would beep and he would come back.  It worked for a short while, but it increasingly started to annoy him to the point where he would do a sort of jig before returning to me.  Toward the end of the weekend, he went out into the middle of a field of grass taller than he was (how he escaped a single tick is still a mystery), took the little teddy bear off his show and left it in the middle of the field.  Teddy was never seen again.  So much for that. 

There was anotehr one called Angel Alert or some such thing, but it never worked at all.  In other words, I could barely turn it on.

I thought about the Ion Kids locator, but I’m very skeptical.  So in the meantime, we just make sure that Gus is never left unattended, and someone shadows him at all times.

If anyone knows of a better locator device or an affordable GPS (the Wherifone may be an option when he’s a little older), I’d love to hear about it.  Now that I’m not working weekends anymore, I see a bunch of camping trips in our near future!