“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.
To me it definitely manifested earlier than seven; he had meltdowns about things not going the way he thought they might. And then the way he handled the Pokemon craze. The only person who probably couldn’t see his complete social illiteracy is him. Of course he never mentioned it. He thought he was the perfect man, and everyone else, the WORLD, was the problem.
It became too late to do anything to prevent a potential disaster probably around age 18.
We need to find a way to get these boys (maybe some girls too) CONNECTED to their greater world by puberty and through it. Disaffected, disconnected kids with asperger’s or a poor childhood or any mental illness have become a huge risk to society.
I don’t have all the answers but the focus on weapons is laughable. WE NEED TO PREVENT MORE CRAZY SHOOTERS.