Book Review: Parenting Your Asperger Child: Individualized Solutions for Teaching Your Child Practical Skills, by Alan Sohn

I don't recommend it, in spite of the fact that it provides a useful service by dividing Asperger's Syndrome into a handful of subtypes, and uses the subtypes to provide insight into the behavior of children with Aspergers and effective ways to motivate them.

While it would seem to be a good idea in theory to modify childrens' undesirable behaviors through "natural consequences " e.g., you can keep throwing the tantrum and miss your scheduled checkers game, or you can get with the program and get to go have the checkers game", and sometimes this can be to good effect; some of the theraputic examples in this book seem to be entirely too rigid in the demanding of compliance at the cost of regard for "special needs", such as the sensory issues that many of these children have (while in the same breath, the assumption is that children with Asperger's have "special needs" at home and at school that justify a raft of bureaucratized interventions, including but not limited to therapists like the kind who wrote this book!), or for that matter developing a "sense of self". The latter can be difficult to do if one is affected by alexithymia, a difficulty in recognizing and processing emotions in oneself and others (listed as one of the symptoms of Asperger's in many other descriptions of Asperger's Syndrome, but strangely not in the list of Asperger's Syndrome symptoms in the back of the book!)

A concrete example of this in the book is of a little girl who was given the choice of attending chorus or staying back in the classroom and reading. The therapist convinced her that although she preferred to stay back and read, attending chorus wouldn't be the end of the world. Being a basically cooperative child, she continued attending chorus even though she ended up telling the therapist she still didn't learn to like it any better.

Why this effort to force compliance in an _elective_ activity instead of drawing a distinction between activities held to be _elective_ and those considered _mandatory_? Or having the therapist or parent give the girl a socially-acceptable method of opting out: she could say "no, thank you, chorus practice is too loud for me". Or perhaps giving her an alternate rationale for attending chorus practice, such as "all your friends go" or "your favorite teacher is leading it" if the following situations are the case.

The only explanation I can give is that this therapist and many parents who will undoubtedly take his case studies as an example are on an unsavory power trip.