The June Blues: End of School Year Routine = Challenging Time for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders

My 11-year-old son is having an extra tough time these days. Now that school has wrapped up until September, the daily routine that has provided structure to his days for the past 10 months is no longer in place. He’s in a no-kids-land between the familiar and the unknown.

Here's the glitch: 

Summer routines are never as solid or as predictable as school year routines. The structure and the rules of summer tend to change from day to day, if not from hour to hour. That's what makes summer an idyllic time of year for most of us and treacherous territory for those who cling to routines like a life jacket.

His pacing is sending my anxiety level higher and higher. I try suggesting some activities that would normally score highly with him:

Play with your remote-control truck.

Use the shop-vac to vacuum the dirt out of my car.

Read these Charlie Brown comic books that belong to your Dad.

Make something out of all those pieces of scrap lumber you scavenged from school.

I'm doing this more for me than him. I want him to settle into something so I can settle into something. While he's restless, I'm restless.

He’s not ready to stop grieving yet. He's clinging to the memory of something that has already been lost (his comfortable-as-his-own-skin school year routine), but that he's not ready to let go of quite yet.

He walks through his daily routine for me as we drive across town on his second school-less morning.

“I get to school, sit on the bench, take off my outdoor shoes, put on my indoor shoes, take out my agenda, hang up my book bag, walk down the ramp, into the kitchen, turn left, through the doors, drop off my agenda, fill up my glass, and do my HANDLE.”

The end of school year transition that was such a non-issue for my other three kids -- kids who do not have Asperger’s syndrome -- is a very big deal for my youngest child. It's also become a very big deal for me. I spend a lot of time watching him and quietly noting what’s happening in his world, trying to puzzle how what, if anything, I can do to guide him towards those carefree days of which childhood summers are supposed to be made.

* * *

Note: Since September, our family has been participating in the Relationship Development Intervention (RDI) program developed by clinical psychologist Stephen Gutstein, PhD, for families with a child on the autism spectrum. Our 11 year old son has also been participating in HANDLE since he started at his new school last September. We’re seeing a lot of positive changes in our son. I’ll be talking a bit more about these programs and our family’s experiences in future columns. For now, I just wanted to introduce you to the acronyms so you would be familiar with them when start to use them more regularly.

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.

Looking for Dr. Good Dentist: Meeting the Needs of the Modern Family Through Technology

Technology can make or break your relationship with your customers. It’s a lesson some businesses understand intuitively while others simply choose to ignore.

Take my dentist, for example. She uses a telephone auto-dialer system to remind patients of upcoming appointments. It’s a great idea in principle -- but the system she has chosen doesn't work well in real life.

Instead of making one telephone call to let patients know that members of the same family have appointments at the same time, the auto-dialer system calls your phone number (or leaves messages on your voice mail), back to back, repeating the same lengthy message for each patient. It’s inefficient and extremely annoying.

And that's not the worst of it, unfortunately.

The phone message on her telephone system informs patients that they have to provide the office with 48 hours’ notice if they wish to reschedule an appointment. Unfortunately, patients are also informed that they are not allowed to leave messages on the voice mail system: they must call back during business hours, when a staff member will be available.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were other ways of making contact with the office: if patients could communicate via email, Facebook, or Twitter; or log on to a secure area of the dentist’s website to cancel and rebook appointments. (If we can book our own airline tickets online, why can’t we schedule our own dental appointments?)

A dentist open to engaging in two-way communications with patients could enhance relationships while keeping patient information up to date. Patients could verify personal and billing information (thereby reducing the number of health insurance claims that get rejected), indicate their interest in receiving dental health info-bulletins, and sign up for online or face-to-face dental education events (for example, a session on dental care and the child with special needs). The dental practice, in turn, could share information about its patient care philosophies (which, hopefully, would be reasonably in synch with this really progressive child, youth, and family health patient care code of conduct from the UK).

At this point, I fear I’m dreaming of dentists who haven’t even entered the realm of fiction. (When was the last time you watched a TV show or a feature-film about a happy or well-adjusted dentist?) But I’d love to be proven wrong.

Maybe there is a Dr. Good Dentist out there somewhere. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have such a dentist:  someone who is a great dentist, technologically savvy, and personable and patient-friendly to boot. Anyone know such a dentist?

Daycare Issue is Your Issue, Too, Toronto Moms and Dads - Part III of III

The parents who showed up at councillor Bill Saundercook’s office on two separate occasions this week to protest the one-year moratorium on day nurseries on High Park Avenue have a message for parents across the city.

This is your issue, too.

“This City decision sets a dangerous precedent for all of Toronto and anyone who needs daycare, or might need daycare in the future, should be angry about the decision,” says High Park constituent and parent Lindsay Viets.

“[What] makes this more than a neighbourhood issue is that council will be unifying all the varying by-laws from when Toronto was five different municipalities and applying them to the entire city,” adds Rebecca Keenan, another High Park resident and parent.

“The old, downtown city has always been more open to a blend of residential and commercial developments. Day nurseries, for example, did not need to go through the same hoops as other businesses, and could open on residential streets. The suburban municipalities, though, enforced by-laws that maintained a greater divide between residential and commercial properties and there is a push to have those suburban by-laws govern the entire city.”

Both Viets and Keenan were shocked by the ease with which City Councillor Bill Saundercook was able to carry forth a complaint from a handful of disgrunted High Park Avenue residents -- and that he chose to do so without consulting other area constituents.

Viets explains: “Saundercook was approached by a handful of homeowners complaining about a new daycare going in on High Park Ave. Saundercook took their complaints to City Hall and pushed through (at the end of the council meeting, on a day when 22 councillors were absent, no less) a decision to impose a one year ban on new [day nurseries] in the High Park area. He did not consult with any of his constituents beyond the original few complainers. I am astounded that a councillor can be so out of touch with his constituency. Ward 13 has one of the highest birthrates in Canada, and accessing daycares spaces is a huge issue for the many many young families in the ward.

Keenan is equally frustrated. In a post published to her blog, PlaygroundConfidential, she reported that she "could barely believe it" when she learned about the moratorium:

A vocal minority of extremely affluent home owners on High Park Avenue...were able to persuade Saundercook that their right to a quiet neighbourhood should come before the vast majority of constituents’ access to child care.

Viets feels that the homeowners complaints of daycare-related traffic and noise were overblown.

“The street in question is a grand, wide avenue, the widest and busiest in the neighbourhood. It has a parking lane on either side of the street (an unheard of luxury around here) and nearly every house on the street has a driveway, so residents are not even using the street parking. Additionally, many parents will be dropping their kids off en route to the nearby subway station, and will be walking, biking or taking the bus to the daycare. The noise issue is even more irrelevant. This is a busy street with a bus going by every 20 minutes, and the daycare would only be open during business hours. I doubt that the noise would interfere with anyone's enjoyment of their property.”

Now that the moratorium has passed, Viets, Keenan, and other junction parents are urging parents across the city to take up the issue before they find themselves faced with similar bans in their own backyards.

“Families do not have the time, typically, to keep abreast of these political details, but it is important that our representatives know our need and wishes,” Keenan stresses. “If parents want to affect political change they need to speak up. Write to your councillor to complain about a need for daycare, for example, or stroller access, or better playgrounds.”

Viets agrees. In fact, she has drafted a letter that parents can send as is to Councillor Bill Saundercook, Mayor David Miller, and their own Councillor -- or that they can adapt as they see fit).

One last thing. Don’t underestimate the power of blogs and Facebook and Twitter in coordinating your local political actions. You want to get maximum impact from the time you have to invest in creating a better world for your kids. Perhaps this snippet from PlaygroundConfidential will convince you that the hand that pushes the publish button and the stroller can change the world, starting in your own backyard.

I read the article and thought, alright, let me twitter that. At 3pm I noticed that neighbourhood blogger and organizer extradonaire, Irina Yu of Junction Parents, was teaming up with Alison of the High Park & Roncesvalles Mom’s meetup group to stage an impromptu stroller march protest outside Saundercook’s office at 4pm. Well, you know I twittered that. More than once. I then set about scrambling to get my children ready to go while spreading the word on Facebook, too, and learning that the Toronto Star would be reporting on and sending a photographer to our protest.

You Can’t Call Yourself a Family-Friendly City if You Treat Childcare as a Non-Issue - Part II of III

It’s one of those dirty little secrets that comes out in conversations between parents: how a society that pretends to be child-friendly is often anything but.

Shadow a family with young children for a day and you’ll get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Someone rolls their eyes (or groans audibly) as they take their seats on a bus or (heaven help them) a plane with a baby or toddler in tow.

A nursing mother is subtly (or not so subtly) redirected to a less conspicuous spot in a restaurant or other public space so the sight of her feeding her baby won’t offend other patrons. You know, the kind of patrons who hate to see a baby eat.

All too often, society treats children as inconveniences (as opposed to members of the next generation that we have a collective interest in nurturing along) and their parents as the perpetrators of some crime against society, for bringing these unpredictable, noisy, uncivilized beings out into public.

And yet, when it’s time to feel pride in our country or our city, we're awfully quick to highlight its family-friendly characteristics. Never mind the fact that the data generated by objective third parties paints a very different picture than the one we may be carrying around in our heads. It’s much easier to feel a misplaced sense of pride than to accept the fact that Canada today isn’t the Canada it once was.

What happened this week in Toronto made it painfully clear how far out of touch some politicians have allowed themselves to become with the needs of real families in this city - and how willing they are to put the needs of a vocal few ahead of the rest of their constituents. That's a lesson parents in this city can choose to heed - or ignore at their peril.

But back to the politicians - and the lack of political vision they exhibited this week.

Being a child-friendly society, circa 2009, means making access to quality, affordable daycare a priority. As any employed parent who has faced a childcare crisis can tell you, childcare is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When your childcare arrangement falls apart, your family and work lives cease to function until your childcare crisis is resolved. The crisis doesn’t just affect the family (in terms of massive stress, work-life conflict, and potentially lost wages). If affects the employer (who has to deal with reduced productivity, because an employee is off the job), results in unhappy customers (if that reduced productivity leads to unmet promises or reduced levels of service), and stressed out coworkers (who have to pick up the slack for the coworker whose childcare arrangement has fallen apart).

To put it simply, childcare isn’t a family problem. It’s everybody’s problem. That attitude should be reflected when childcare policy is being set at the national, provincial, and local level, don't you think?

And the Stroller Moms Marched Again - Part I of III

All parents have their limits. And when they’re pushed past your limits, they’re compelled to take action, whether the person who requires a reality check is a kid or a politician.

The folks at Toronto City Hall lost sight of that simple fact this week (and it really is a very simple fact, once you’ve committed it to memory: you can only push a parent so far).

You don’t have to be a genius to figure our that messing with daycare means that your going to end up with a lot of highly-energized stroller-pushing moms (and one dad) in your face (parents who organized their meet-ups via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, by the way: this generation of parents knows how to put technology to good use).

With a chronic shortage of quality, affordable daycare in this city (and across the country) parents have no choice but to take to the streets to protest City Hall’s decision to declare a one-year moratorium on the creation day nurseries on a three-block stretch of High Park Avenue.

Toronto parent Lindsay Viets feels that parents across the city need to send a clear message to City Hall: this kind of action won’t be tolerated by the parents anywhere within the City of Toronto: that an attack on daycare anywhere in the city will be considered an attack on daycare everywhere in this city.

“This City decision sets a dangerous precedent for all of Toronto; and anyone who needs daycare, or might need daycare in the future, should be angry about the decision.”

Until it finds itself dealing with a surplus of childcare spaces, The City of Toronto doesn’t have the luxury of calling a moratorium on day nurseries. To do otherwise is to put NIMBY-ism before sound social policy. And what politician wants that kind of decision on his or her voting record, come election day?

Earth to out-of-touch politicians: Babies and toddlers might not be old enough to vote, but their moms and dads certainly are. You might want to make a note of that in bright red crayon.

Creative Inspiration for Moms and Little Ones

Veronika Roux-Vlachova believes that all mothers are creative by nature, but that some moms can benefit from a little behind-the-scenes support for their artistic desires.

 “Motherhood definitely inspires art but often prevents us from experiencing due to time pressure and lack of planning. Once the first step towards art is made, mothers are inspired to see and to create more, creating a wonderful loop between motherhood and art, as one really feeds off the other."

An accountant turned business-development executive and entrepreneur, Roux-Vlachova has found a novel way to combine her passions for art and motherhood - and share those passions with other mothers who are eager to introduce art to their children’s lives, through her business, Art Strollers.

“After the birth of my first son, Carl-Edmund, I wanted to introduce art-related outings for our family, so we started going to the museum and the galleries a little more,” Roux-Vlachova explains. “Art surrounds us and introduces elements of history, culture and creativity. In addition to the creation process, there is an entire analytical thinking process when reacting to a work or when researching on an art movement. They are simply great activities for both parents and children."

“Then, while pregnant with my second son, Martin-Oliver, the idea to do gallery tours for mothers came one day while browsing some art works. A date was scheduled and the idea was to see if people were interested; over 40 mothers signed up for the first tour.”

Roux-Vlachova’s most recent program - Simply Babies! - provides mothers with the opportunity to obtain professional photographs of themselves creating art with their babies.

The setting is an art gallery. Ten mothers with children all engage in various artistic activities. Babies and toddlers draw, paint, sleep, run or crawl while photographer Andrew Taylor snaps away. The result: creative in the moment images of both mother and child....Workshops are scheduled monthly and limited to 10 participants.

Roux-Vlachova connected with Taylor through her work in the stock photography world and was very impressed by his knowledge and professionalism. “We came up with the idea of having mother and child engage in an art activity. It takes away from the pressure of posing for the camera and offers some fabulous moments to capture."

Art Strollers offers a variety of other child-friendly arts and cultural outings for mothers with young children. According to Roux-Vlachova, the majority of her clients come from a field outside the arts, but they are passionate about art and want to make art a regular part of their family’s lives. The benefits of doing so can be considerable.

“Looking at art with your children offers the possibilities for fabulous dialogues which can be as simple as shapes and colours or go more in depth in history. Toddlers often recognize objects in their day to day life in paintings and it offers a wonderful window of explanation as to how these objects were used in the past.”

To share art with your child is to carry on a creative dialogue about things that might otherwise defy expression. It's a conversation that can continue throughout your lifetime. What an amazing opportunity for both you and your child..

Do you make a point of creating art with your children and otherwise incorporating art and culture into their lives? If so, what are your favorite ways of doing so?

The Other Mothers

 I've spent a lot more time reading through the Canadian Maternity Experiences Survey data over the past few days. I'm eager to pick up where I left up where I left off blogging the survey data last weekend. I don't have time to do that tonight, but I wanted to make one quick comment. [Famous last words.]

I've already expressed concerns about some of the things that weren't asked in the survey -- and I'll be picking up on that theme again in my next survey-related post.

Tonight, when I was reading the survey data booklet for mothers -- Mothers' Voices -- I realized that a much more troubling omission has been made -- one the researchers themselves are quite forthright about. There are a number of mothers whose voices have not been heard at all:

"The survey did not include First Nations women living on reserve, women whose baby was stillborn, had died following birth or was not living with them, women who gave birth to more than one baby (twins, for example), and women living in institutions (such as prisons or psychiatric hospitals)."
- ("About the Maternity Experiences Survey," Mothers Voices).

Just picking three statistics from this list -- ones that can be sourced quite readily: the incidence of twins (12 per 1000 births, PHAC, 2004); the stillbirth rate (6.4 per 1000 births, Statistics Canada, 2006); and the aboriginal population rate (4.4 percent, of whom 20% live on reserve (Statistics Canada, 2001) -- it's apparent that the experiences of significant numbers of Canadian mothers were not reflected in this data: more than 3% of the population, just based on this partial count of a portion of the missing moms.

I find this troubling for two reasons:

First, many of the women whose voices are missing from this report are all-too-often marginalized or excluded from the mainstream pregnancy experience. Did that have to happen to them in a government-funded study as well? Consider, for example, the First Nations mother living on reserve; the mother who is pregnant with triplets (who may be subject to insensitive comments throughout what is already a high-risk and high-stress pregnancy); the mother whose baby is stillborn or who dies during labor (and who may wonder at times if having her baby die means that she's not really a mother); and so on.

Secondly, by failing to include these mothers' stories, the entire body of data ends up being skewed -- and the opportunity to learn important lessons from these other mothers is lost. What could we have learned about offering more compassionate or holistic care to a mother who has been through stillbirth or infant death; or better meeting the needs of a mother who may have been let down by the health care, social service, and/or justice system in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

When do these other mothers get to have their say?

* * *   * * *   * * *

ON AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT NOTE: In case you haven't heard, BabyTime is at the International Centre this weekend. I'll be playing game show show host once or twice a day (see the schedule) and hanging out in the "Ask Ann" booth (like of like the booth that Lucy had, except that you don't have to pay 10 cents. I'll be there all three days (Fri., Sat., and Sun.: from 10 am to 6 pm each day), so drop by anytime if you plan to be at the show.

Momnesia is Here to Stay

I was supposed to be meeting a brand new friend for lunch yesterday.

Our get-together was going to be the high point of my week. I'd imagined us sitting together, laughing and solving all the world’s problems over sandwiches, salad, and a pot of coffee. It was a great fantasy while it lasted.

Then school was cancelled for my youngest child and my brain switched from general operating mode into maternal problem-solving mode. It became highly selective about the type of data it was willing to receive or retain (data related to “school” and “child” were flagged as top priority) as I went about rearranging my day.

I made plans to work from home so that I could help out another mom from the school who needed childcare for the day. (Besides, having her 11 year old entertain my 11 year old would keep both boys happy and entertained. It was going to be a win-win all around.) That mom dropped off her son, the boys started doing their thing, and I started troubleshooting an email glitch on my computer.

At that point, I discovered a more serious glitch -- a maternal brain processing error that is commonly known as momnesia. When it was deciding which types of information it needed to access to re-plan my day in a hurry, my brain had failed to search the data set “calendar,” choosing instead to search a less reliable data set known as "Ann's memory.”

This was not a good thing.

Shortly after noon, I glanced at the calendar on my computer and discovered that I should have been sitting in a café across town with my new friend.

Standing someone up on a first friend-date is not a proven strategy for making friends. It makes you look like someone who doesn't deserve to have any friends (let alone any more friends). Fortunately, my new friend was very understanding. She told me she doesn’t hold grudges (lucky for me). And she’s willing to rebook lunch. (My treat.) 

After I hung up the phone from the apology phone call, I reflected back upon my first episode of momnesia, almost 21 years earlier. The circumstances were eerily similar. I had forgotten another lunch date with a different friend. At the time, I chalked up the momnesia to sleep deprivation, hormones, and the miscellaneous fallout of being a new mom. I concluded the condition was temporary and that I'd soon be back to being my usual, efficient, well-organized self (someone who had created a database to track wedding invitation responses). (Michelle Henry, are you listening?)

Conclusion: wrong-o.

Two decades later, I think I have to accept that these occasional episodes of momnesia (a.k.a. parental amnesia) are part-and-parcel of being a parent; and that they are unlikely to disappear while I still have kids living under my roof. If my mom-of-four brain (a brain that has accumulated 68 mom-years of parenting experience and 45-years of life-on-this-planet experience) hasn't been magically cured of momnesia, it's unlikely to become 100% foolproof next week or even next year.

Think about it. If you're asking one human brain to keep track of multiple channels of ever-changing data, and to adjust for repeated data changes or complete data cancellations or overwrites), you’re going to have the odd performance issue.

Overloaded computers crash, maxed out parents forget things. We reboot; apologize (in the case of humans); upgrade our check, check, and double-check systems; and life goes on.

Parenting Predictions: The Top Three Parenting Trends for 2009

Here are my picks for the top three parenting trends for 2009.

The Year of the Parent Activist

2009 will be the year of the parent activist.

Now don't get me wrong. Parents have always been activists: the ones organizing playground fundraisers and food-drives at schools; advocating for their kids' within the educational, social service, and/or health care systems (a slightly crazy-making experience at the best of times); and showing up at city hall en masse to work for the betterment of their neighborhoods.

But we'll see that mom-and-dad activist activity ramp up like never before as the 60's-style citizen activist and political movement from south of the border catch fire up here as well.

Frankly, it can't come quickly enough -- at a time like this when economic change is fast-moving and ruthless and the environment is being seriously harmed; we need to reinvent our cities and suburbs; social justice issues are demanding attention; and one of our most valued sources of information is under siege -- again.

Who can afford the luxury of standing on the sidelines at a time like this?

As Dan Carter, a one-person activist movement based out of hard-hit Oshawa, likes to put it: the time is now. In other words, if you're waiting for the economy to improve to start working for change, forget about it. Bad times are the best times to work for change. (Watch for my profile of Dan in my next column.)

A Get-Real, Let's-Work-Together Parenting Style

Parents will continue to gravitate to what can best be described as a progressive parenting style.

This style has been emerging since the mid-1980s and now it has become a full-blown parenting movement that recognizes that all family members, especially children, deserve to be treated with respect; and that family life is immensely richer when relationships are based on love, not fear.

This style of parenting recognizes that there are real problems to be deal with in our society and in our families and that the only way to deal with these problems is by acknowledging that they exist (as opposed to playing ostrich).

This style of parenting is consultative rather than dictatorial (input from all family members is sought, where appropriate: the three year old doesn't get to choose her bedtime because she doesn't have the same understanding of child development as the grownups who've been given the privilege and responsibility of raising her); and parents welcome input from a variety of sources so that they can benefit from a variety of ideas and then decide what will work best for their families.

Celebrity Baby Bumplets

The celebrity baby bumps will dwindle into celebrity baby bumplets. Consider what this LA plastic surgeon had to say about the nouveaux conceived recently: "Women are just not gaining as much weight as they used to. Particularly in LA - you can't even tell they're pregnant." That will either increase the pressure on ordinary moms to look freakishly non-pregnant from conception through delivery day -- and to bounce back Hollywood-style. (That means with the help of a nutritionist, a personal trainer, and -- if necessary -- a post-baby "mommy makeover" plastic surgery package.) Or it may convince ordinary moms that celebrity pregnancy has finally gone to far. (Or not far enough on the weight gain front.)

Bulletin Board

I thought I'd introduce a new feature to the blog so that I can post some of those items I come across that don't quite warrant an entire blog post in-and-of themselves, but that are too intriguing to keep to myself. I'm calling this new feature Bulletin Board for obvious reasons. These are the types of items you might tear out and stick on your bulletin board if you came across them in real life.

Prevention of Youth Crime Can Start During Pregnancy
Researchers Julie Brousseau and Mireille Jetté of Prevention are attempting to deal with some of the root causes of youth crime by identifying risk factors that tend to carry over from generation to generation and taking steps to try to break the cycle of inter-generational problems, starting when a mother first becomes pregnant.

Oh, Do You Know the Muffin Gran?
Here's proof positive that you can pass down your entrepreneurial vision to your kids and your grandkids. The granddaughter of one of the co-authors of the 1980's cookbook megahit Muffin Mania mega has released a revised second edition of her grandmother's cookbook.

Autism Re-Defined
Two parents from Nova Scotia have written a tell-it-like-it-is account of how their lives play out day-to-day as they cope with the joys and challenges of their sons' autism. "Autism means ... having to absorb glaring and judgmental stares if there is a meltdown at the grocery store, or the mall, or the bus, or the sidewalk. And rather than people offering a helping hand, you hear... 'Why don’t you control your kid.' 'Why’s that boy screaming mommy?' 'What a bad parent.' It means making sure they are wearing a red T-shirt with the words Autism Summer Camp on the back and the front when we do go out, to try and avoid the condemnation." - From Life on Mars by Charlene and David Croft (an excerpt from their forthcoming book Little Rain Men).

Affluenza
Just in time for holiday shopping season -- a link to this PBS documentary about the root causes of overspending and what they mean for our society and the future of the planet. The fabulous retro footage of car ads, dream kitchens, and bored/unhappy shoppers make Affluenza a must watch before you hit the malls. (More.)  If the film leaves you looking for solutions, you may want to check out the viewers' guide which was created to accompany the sequel, Escape from Affluenza.