I didn’t read the whole thing. I stopped around age 12. But I was greatly affected by it as I read so many parallels with my son’s childhood that I felt compelled to share my thoughts.
When I heard that the Sandy hook shooter had been dx’ed with asperger’s, I didn’t even really care. He was so inhumanely sick that I didn’t care what diagnoses he had ever been given.
This one, because of the autobiography, affected me. I can see that autism WAS TRULY THE BASE OF HIS PROBLEMS. And I did not read much about the Sandy Hook killer, but I am willing to consider that his social disorder might have been an origin of causality in his rampage as well.
Because this Santa Barbara killer carefully described his life from his perspective, and because I know my son and know the discrepancies between his descriptions of his childhood and my own recollections, I see clearly how autism was the problem, not parental attention.
Could the parents have done things better, knowing how disaffected an unpopular, sensitive autistic child can become? Yes, but they didn’t realize it.
Should kids with autism be in regular high schools and middle schools? Probably not. It doesn’t do them or anyone any good. Unless they had their own safe classrooms, and both sets of kids were taught to be sensitive to the differences of the others.
“I didn’t read the whole thing. I stopped around age 12. But I was greatly affected by it as I read so many parallels with my son’s childhood that I felt compelled to share my thoughts.”
I don’t have your expertise; I’m not a parent to an autistic kid. So of course I may be wrong.
But he sounds happy and healthy up to age 7. He loved a school field trip, travel, his new bedroom in his new home in the US, dinosaurs, a couple of kids at his new school, Christmas, birthdays. In fact, he singles out his 7th birthday at his favorite restaurant as one of his happiest memories.
Shortly after that memorable 7th birthday, his parents divorced. He calls the sadness of that event “world changing.” Keep reading, and you see that after age 7 and his parents’ divorce, everything went downhill for him, culminating in his remarried father banishing him from the house.
Shouldn’t his Asberger’s have manifested before age 7? Or maybe it did and everyone missed it? What did you read between the lines that tipped you off?
If you read to the end of his screed, it’s clear he doesn’t think of himself as having Asberger’s — he never mentions it, and he’s pretty candid about everything else.