Mom Helps Autistic Son Discover Joy of Writing

Find out how a determined mom helped her book-loving son with autism learn to write. My son, Antariksh, is on the autism spectrum and was diagnosed with spastic cerebral palsy at the age of four. He is one of my twins. After birth all his milestones were late—in fact, very late, since the children were born two months prematurely. I had gotten my twins into the habit of reading even before they were born. I used to read them books, mostly popular science books, when they were in my womb. Antariksh took an immense liking to reading since he was about two-and-a-half years old. He quickly learned the alphabet and before I even realised it, he was reading ten-letter words by the age of three-and-a-half. But he couldn’t talk till then. He started talking after his third birthday. Then, once he started talking on a subject, he was unrelenting. Encyclopedias were his best friends. I still remember him reading a picture encyclopedia at 2:30am when he was just three years old. Around this time his gait, walking, and running were already showing signs of oddity and malformation. So our appointments with pediatricians, neurologists, and therapists began in full earnest. He just loved books; in fact, he would just “gobble them up”. A day never went by when I didn’t buy new books for him. Almost two years into kindergarten, he would come back from school with his notebooks filled with the alphabet and I thought everything was fine; after all, he was just such an avid reader. But one day, I realised that he couldn’t write anything; he could only scribble in a haphazard way. His fingers would not even move on their own to make any legible impression on paper. His teacher told me she used to hold his hand while writing, but she completely failed to notice he could not write anything on his own. All the children in his class, including his twin brother, could write. It came as a shock to me…a boy who was a precocious reader, who spoke so wonderfully, could not write. […]

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