My ASD Child

My son has a new diagnosis of Asperger's.  I saw your informative video on tantrums vs meltdowns recently and it really helped me understand what was going on with my 5 year old a couple weeks ago when he had a meltdown in Target over a toy he had decided he was not leaving the store without. I refused to buy it (was $50) so the meltdown began and rocked on in the store back and forth for about an hour. This child is so strong already. I could not physically remove him from the store. (Kicking and hitting me). Of course, I was at the store alone with him. I persevered though. He wore himself down enough to finally cooperate. I also see very specific instructions regarding meltdowns on the website, which I will soon memorize. My other big problem is he is very defiant at times and totally refuses to potty train. Is this typical of Asperger's children?  Can you recommend an approach. I have tried taking pullups away, making  him sit on the potty, the reward system is a joke to hi

"Why does our child (with high functioning autism) have such difficulty understanding the feelings of others? He can be terribly cruel at times, which really hurts his younger brothers' feelings. Yet he seems to have all the compassion in the world for our 2 dogs." You're referring to a social-skills deficit here. There are various theories as to why children with Asperger’s (AS) and High-Functioning Autism (HFA) have impaired social skills. Some researchers suggest that poor social skills may be caused by: weakness or absence of the social gaze response sensory distractions, which prevent the child from concentrating on social issues memory dysfunction (e.g., deficits in memory for faces and common social scenes), which prevent the child from remembering other people or events failure to develop a “theory of mind,” which prevents the child from understanding what other people are thinking or feeling failure of affective processing The relationship betw

"We have a recently diagnosed child on the autism spectrum. Is it common for these children to be overly-sensitive in some areas - and severely under-sensitive in others? For example, our daughter absolutely refuses to be hugged by anyone (other than myself on occasion), yet we discovered she had fractured a bone in her wrist - but she didn't show any discomfort whatsoever." Children with ASD or High-Functioning Autism often fluctuate between hyper-sensitivity (i.e., being overly sensitive) and hypo-sensitivity (i.e., a lack of sensitivity) to unexpected stimuli in the environment. For example, at one moment a touch or noise may make the child jump or scream, while at another moment she may not respond when parents call her name – or she may act as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. For neurotypical children (i.e., those without a spectrum disorder), unexpected stimuli is relatively predictable and anticipated. For example, they expect a loud noise when seeing