By Chantal Sicile-Kira; 268 pages. Subtitle: A Parent's Guide to the Cognitive, Social, Physical, and Transition Needs of Teenagers with Autism Spectrum Disorders
If there's ever a time in a child's life when parents need a guidebook, it's adolescence. Even for neurotypical kids, the teen years are a maze of emotions and changes and challenges, but when your teen is on the autism spectrum, the degree of difficulty is boosted considerably. Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum offers a friendly, non-alarmist look at the extra issues teens with ASD bring to this challenging life phase.
- Good information, clearly given
- Appropriate for children with special needs outside the spectrum, too
- "Food for Thought" items bring interesting perspectives to the text
- Useful book and Web site recommendations scattered throughout
- Written by a parent, for parents
- A gathering of all the resources, by topic or chapter, at the end of the book would have been useful
- Information on therapies and treatments seems like leftover material from another book
- Doesn't go into a lot of depth on issues, only serves as a starting point for thought and planning
- Foreword by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Autism Spectrum Disorders and How They Affect Adolescents
- Chapter 2: Family Life - The Teenager At Home
- Chapter 3: What Every Teenager Needs to Know About Puberty and Hygiene, Grooming and Dressing, and Sexuality
- Chapter 4: The Middle and High School Years
- Chapter 5: Transition Planning - Preparing for Life After High School
- Chapter 6: Therapies, Treatments, and Strategies to Help Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum
- Closing Comments
- Bibliography
They say you can tell a person by the company he or she keeps, and maybe the same is true of books: A text that quotes other books that you like is probably one you're going to like, too. That holds true for me with Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum, which quotes liberally from two of my favorite authors on the spectrum -- Temple Grandin, author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic and Talking in Pictures, among others, and Luke Jackson, teen author of Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence. Actually, Jackson's book may be the perfect companion piece to this parent's guide -- I loved its kid's-eye view on surviving Asperger's and adolescence, but felt it was a little limited by the fact that teens, no matter what they think, don't actually know everything. Sicile-Kira's book adds a parent's voice, and the picture is complete.
As the wave of children diagnosed with autism over the past decade or so pass from cute toddlers to pimply teens, there will undoubtedly be more books like this one. Parents who once wrote about their child's transition from normal toddler to lost boy, or from beloved odd duck to child with scary-sounding diagnosis, will start writing about new transitions, to high school and college and life. What's nice about Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum is that much of it applies just as well to adolescents with other special needs. I found lots of good food for thought to apply to my daughter with learning disabilities, and my son with FASD. And maybe a little selfishly, I wished that the lengthy section about treatments for ASD, maybe the least teen-centric part of the book, had been ditched to make more room for information about things like setting your child up in his or her own little business. Maybe the transition to entrepreneur is the next book down the line.
