ASD Book

April is Autism awareness month. I have been reading several books on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) lately and thought I would write about some of these over the course of this month. Today I want to highlight the book Quirky, Yes, Hopeless, No: Practical Tips to Help Your Child with Asperger's Syndrome be more Socially Accepted by Cynthia La Brie Norall. I thought this book contained a lot of helpful information and was very readable.

This book is intended to be used as a handbook or resource manual, so you could just read it straight through, which is what I did, or you could pick and choose the topics you are most interested in reading about and read them in any order. There are 85 topics, arranged alphabetically. This makes it easy to find the topic of interest. Some of the topics are bullying, homework, losing gracefully, and looking like you're paying attention. For each topic, an explanation is given for why this might be an issue for a child with ASD and then some ideas are provided for how to address the issue.

Dr. Norall began a program called Friends' Club 10 years ago to help children and teens with Asperger's syndrome learn behaviors that would allow them to be more successful in social situations. She started with 3 groups, 2 for boys and 1 for girls. This program has now grown to include 21 groups and satellite programs in other states have also been started. Most of the suggestions given in the text for addressing the above topics come from her work with these groups. Many of the ideas are simple and would be easy to implement, especially in a small group setting. While this book is geared toward parents, it would also make a good resource for teachers and other professionals working with young people on the autism spectrum.