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Posts tagged as: Autism

The Friendship Penny

Whoopsy, it’s been seven months since my last diary extract but, as usual, it feels like an eyeblink. All this time Eva’s school has been making a fantastic effort, with 20 hours a week one-to-one support, a social group to teach her the basics of interaction, strategies to help her engage other children at playtime, and always plenty of lines for her to say in stage [...]

Ladies & Gentlemen…Mrs Devery-Kavanagh!

Eva, like most kids, is endlessly inventive. There’s rarely a moment when she isn’t drawing, or painting, or building, or generating a new world around her in which she speaks Tamil, or Thai, or her own unique language featuring words like ‘Tobrando’ and ‘Tobisher’. She wraps herself in a leopardskin slanket and claims she’s a muslim woman. She writes her first [...]

A Dad’s Autism Diary: Cause & Effect

Eva will be five on Wednesday! Five! So to celebrate, here are some pictures from a steam railway we visited last month. Eva loved it, and it took me right back to my first job down the local pit back in ’89, when I would smell the steam from the mine’s tank engine as I walked up the lane every morning. Bliss. Within [...]

A Dad’s Autism Diary: To Be or Not to Be ‘Normal’

Sorry it’s been six months since I updated this diary. Immediately post-diagnosis there seemed so much to assimilate and explain, and, although a lot’s happened in the intervening period, I’ve been tackling it on a day-to-day basis that hasn’t left me a lot of time for major reflection. I wanted this diary to have a fairly rigorous level of analysis, self-awareness, and self-criticism, but [...]

Escape from Amsterdam: ‘Curing’ Autism.

I guess I should be surprised that my diary’s made it this far without confronting the issue of treatment, because there seem to be two types of parent working with the Spectrum: those who accept the diagnosis as a lifelong fait accompli and who solely rely on behavioural techniques, and those who seek a solution through alternative therapies. The first type believe their children [...]

The No.1 Autism Detective Agency

When Eva kicks off, particularly in public, right now I find it hard not to respond as a ‘typical’ parent to a ‘typical’ kid throwing a paddy. I huff n’ puff n’ cajole n’ fume and don’t try hard enough to look beyond her behaviour, which often isn’t a question of pure ‘naughtiness’. Like any kid with ASD, she’s making up for [...]

Hopeless Daddy Elicits Empathy!

For the first time this weekend Eva saw me cry, because I thought her little brother Tomas had died while I was busy chivvying her all the way home from the park. Of course, by ‘chivvying’ I actually mean grabbing her scooter and pulling her along while she wept bitterly and cried ‘help! help!’ to passers-by as if [...]

Hello, and welcome to my Autism diary…

Eva is 4 years old and has more spark in her big toe than my wife & I can summon between us. She’s just started school, having been in full time nursery from 9 months, and it’s been 5 months since she was diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD.) I’m writing this for all those daddies (and mummies) dealing [...]

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