Perfect World Cover

A Perfect World (A Father's Quest to Unriddle the Mysteries of Autism) by David Cohen

RANDOM HOUSE

David Cohen's remarkable book is both a journey and a story of home. After his three year-old son Eliot is diagnosed with autism, he travels the world to meet leading autism researchers, educators and clinicians. But the heart of the book is his moving meditation on family and what really makes a good life.

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‘Parenting’ Archive

Common sense is not common

The Herald on Sunday features an interview with Nigel Latta by Deborah Coddington, weirdly condensed into this brief about Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
In the full print story, Latta dishes out jumbo servings of his usual faux common-sense parenting advice, lurching into this bizarre statement:
“But I’ve been around the family area more than 20 years, long enough [...]

Posted in Asperger Syndrome, Autism, Bad practice, New Zealand, Parenting by Russell Brown on March 1st 2010, 6 responses

Marcus’ Story

 Our son Marcus was born after a long and arduous but seemingly straightforward delivery. Birth is traumatic at the best of times, but the following day was pretty traumatic too. Around midnight I received a call from my wife tearfully telling me that Marcus had been having seizures, and had been rushed into the Newborn [...]

Posted in Autism, New Zealand, Parenting, Stories, Uncategorized by Hilary Stace on February 4th 2010, 6 responses

Stories: Making Pizza with Lucia, by Giovanni Tiso

One Monday in mid-June of 1996 I took the train from Milan to Vicenza and found my way to the street address printed on the call-up card I had received just a few days earlier. A little surprised to discover that it was an ordinary looking residence, not the office or hospital building I expected, [...]

Posted in Asperger Syndrome, Autism, Parenting, Stories by Russell Brown on October 4th 2009, 9 responses

Education National Standards Amendment Act 2008 and implications for students with autism and their families

I was angered that a significant change to the Education Act was passed by Parliament through all its stages under urgency before Christmas. It increased fines for parents of students who were not attending school, and it made way for publicly notified standardised testing of primary school students (as in the No Child Left Behind policy of the United States). [...]

Officially avoiding the issue

The Herald on Sunday has a story about the death of Finn Higgins, noting that “an independent review of his situation shows that the mental health crisis team failed Higgins at every turn.”
Che Tibby is justifiably angry in response, and there are some useful comments under his blog post, including one from Finn’s mother, Diane [...]

Posted in Advocacy, Asperger Syndrome, Bad practice, New Zealand, Parenting by Russell Brown on November 25th 2008, 1 response

The New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline

The NZ Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline was launched at Parliament on World Autism Awareness Day, 2 April 2008. It is a world first in that it is a whole of life, whole of spectrum and whole of government approach to autism. It will be a living guideline so can be updated regularly and have gaps [...]

Stories: Alyson Bradley

The diversity of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Who does it affect?  Tt has no class or race barriers, it’s invisible and among us all. Except I am still often kept hidden. I am intellectually disadvantaged, have learning disorders and yes I am on the autism spectrum, you could say I have an invisible disability.At times in [...]

Posted in Advocacy, Asperger Syndrome, Parenting by Russell Brown on March 24th 2008, 3 responses

There Are Exceptions

Last Friday was a great day. An hour before we set off for the Big Day Out, the mail arrived. It contained our older boy’s first set of NCEA results. He achieved every Level 1 standard he sat, and picked up a couple of merits along the way.
For an Asperger Syndrome child we once thought [...]

Posted in Asperger Syndrome, Autism, New Zealand, Parenting, Schooling by Russell Brown on January 23rd 2008, 28 responses

Getting lost on a straightforward journey

You don’t want to go around diagnosing strangers, but it wasn’t hard to think of the A-word when the stories broke this weekend around the police searching the Whitianga home of 18 year-old Owen Walker. Solitary, sensitive, home-schooled after being bullied — and, of course, good with computers.
Now, his mother, Shell Moxham-Whyte, has confirmed to [...]

Posted in Asperger Syndrome, Parenting by Russell Brown on December 3rd 2007, 5 responses