Is there a fourth norm then? Absolutely. From age two to age four, kids normally rebel against any pressure put on them to simple parrot other folks learning. The "terrible two's," remember? So what does this turn out to be if the baby never loses this focus? ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder. And yes, I know medically minded folks now call this condition, ADHD. However, it seems incredibly silly to diagnose a kid as having ADHD without HD. Which happens to be the most common kind.

What Could We Be Focusing On To Help These Folks? So what could we be doing to better help these folks? Well, in the case of Asperger's, we could be focusing our efforts on getting these folks to make "connecting" more important than "information."

Notice, I haven't simply said, teach them better social skills. In truth, teaching mouth readers to read eyes is a lot easier that you might imagine. In fact, given they believe you have something valid to say, folks with Asperger's are among the best folks of all to teach.

what else could we be doing? We could also stop telling them they have a disease. They do not. They have a style of relating to the world which was once normal for all of us but no longer is. Even for Dr. Iknowbest was once like this.

During this time, learning the meaning of everything was our special interest. Moreover, in babies aged one to two, this focus is absolutely normal.

In people with Asperger's, however, this tendency toward special interests impairs their very ability to see the beauty in people. and renders them unable to do much more than parrot real connections. Something which simply wrecks their confidence and something which most folks with Asperger's just hate doing.

What else could we be doing to help? For one thing, we could pay more attention to the way "focusing on information more than people" plays out in the very nature of peoples' language skills. In my work, I call this natural tendency, being "fussy" rather than "fuzzy."

For example, in one case, I taught the mom of a man with Asperger's why asking him to clean his room put him into a full blown panic attack. I explained to her that to her son, her requests for him to clean his room required he fully grasp the nature of cleaning rooms. Not just his room. All rooms. Moreover, that without this comprehensive level of understanding, he simply didn't know where to begin. Thus, his panic and resistance.

As I told this mother these things, I saw this man vigorously nodding his head in agreement. At which point, I turned to him and explained that when his mother said these things, she was merely asking him to "do something to make your room look a little better. Anything."

"Fuzzy" and "fussy." Two very different qualities. Especially when applied to language. The ability to help here would come from teaching both those with Asperger's, and those who do not have, it to speak to each other in the other's language. In effect, they both become bilingual, in that they both learn to speak "fussy" and they both learn to speak "fussy."

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