About this blog.

My son was diagnosed with PDD-NOS at 24 months. I created this blog to bring meaning to the often-confusing label. Sometimes I have answers. Other times, just more questions.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

One Person Book Club Revived

Once upon a time, I was new to the world of autism. I was very calm and deliberate back then. (Not.) Anyway, I charted my reading adventures under the tag One Person Book Club.

Here, I will list some of the other books I have read, but don't particularly recommend, along with a relatively new title I recommend highly.

First, the books I've kicked over the past few years that I can't recommend without qualification:

Quirky Kids - A decent basic reference for parents, but for me, normatively, it was too focused on remediation.

Smart Moves, The Dominance Factor, Brain Gym - These are OT-themed books. The skeptic in me can't recommend them without qualification - not evidence based enough. ("It worked for Johnny! That's all we know.") But they are interesting, and if lateralization and the mind/body connection are areas of interest for you, you might enjoy these books.

And now for a book just published in May of this year that's a must-read for parents, particularly if your child is hyperlexic: Autism and Talent. Where so much of the research and so many of the parent resources are focused on deficits and remediation, this book focuses on talent, and in doing so, sheds light on the nature of autism itself.

The introduction is available for free online here. The book includes contributions from Simon Baron-Cohen and his research team, Temple Grandin, Laurent Mottron et al, whose research team includes netizen Michelle Dawson, and Allan Snyder (whose research the Eide Neurolearning Blog discussed here).

And to be clear, I recommend this book both from an intellectual perspective (interesting read!) and from a personal, parenting perspective. This book gave me a glimpse under the hood, and I'm not referring to talent (because to do so with a 4 year old is a little silly). I'm referring to the bias to local processing and the differences in sensory discrimination and processing. The entire book is evidence-based theorizing by some of the world's most respected researchers, but it's written in non-technical speak, so the every-mom or every-dad can understand. It also includes information (and, I think, messages) specifically directed towards us parents, as to how to develop talents. (Hint: regarding talent as maladaptive is not encouraging to the subject!)