Understand Aspergers syndrome
Most children enjoy having friends, love to meet people and enjoy social life, but it is significant to note that children with Aspergers sydrome find social life to be the greatest source of stress and tension that pushes many into disorders like anxiety and depression. A popular study found that the prevelance of Aspergers syndrome in the country of United States Of America alone is estimated to about 71500 people out of a population of about 215 millions. This neurological disorder could reflect as abnormalities in relating socially or social skills, communication by the use of language, repetitive and persevering behavioral styles, and limited interests, but great intensity in them.
Prominent characteristics of Aspergers in children
Social interactions prove to be difficult or sometimes impossible for such children, with many finding it very difficult to establish fruitful relationships with their peers. This could sometimes hinder their spontaneous enjoyment of certain interests. Such children prefer to live on their own terms and may be more preoccupied with things that interest them only. Being greatly stressed and vulnerable emotionally, these children may wish to establish friendships and fruitful relationships when they start going to school they may find it very difficult and may also feel that they are not fitting up to their peers. This could cause a great sense of frustration and depression in some children.
Children afflicted with Aspergers syndrome may have difficulties in understanding fully verbal and non verbal cues that could include facial expressions, body language, eye contact, taking turns while conversing, perspective taking and in matching their interactions to conversational and cues expressed non-verbally Next these children have difficulties in understanding and empathizing with others, with his/her rigidity of thought making it difficult for Aspergers children to engage in play that is imaginative. It is also true that these children may want to control the play situation according to their own thinking.
The next characteristic namely impairment of language skills is significant, with these children being downright practical preferring to use language only for expressing facts, information. They fail to realize its use to express feelings, emotions, and thoughts. It would also be seen that these children may have abnormalities regarding the melody, pitch, rhythm, stress and pitch of speech, with great difficult experienced in initiating conversation, processing verbal information, maintaining and ending topics of discussion and taking turns while conversing. It is also significant to note that they have difficulties in deeply understanding the language, solving problems and analyzing and understanding information.
One of the most significant characteristic of Aspergers in children is their rigidity, obsessions and very narrow range of interest. These interests have always dominated and this would make such children very different and abnormal as compared to other children. They may miss on childhood fun and have interests in complicated matters like math, science, reading, space travel, history, machines or machinery, dinosaurs, maps, extraterrestrials and meteorology.
Motor clumsiness, another significant characteristic of Aspergers in children makes it very difficult for such children to not only carry on tasks like writing, playing with balls and riding bike and other vehicles, but also in planning out how to do these tasks. It is a significant characteristic to find that these children also have difficulties in perceiving sensations and they could under-react or over-react to sensations like smell, sight, touch, taste and sight.
Last but most important it is unfair to overlook the positive characteristics of Aspergers children. They include attention to details with focus and diligence, their ability to find solutions in the midst of confusion, their honesty, independent and unique way of thinking at all issues, the use of logic over emotions in solving problems, and being internally motivated to achieve. Truly their 3 dimensional visual thinking has helped many Aspergers to come out very useful and creative solutions