Autistic children go to school

In fact, children with autism will encounter very big problems after going to school. The most important ones are slow reaction and inability to communicate and socialize with people normally. This will cause many children with autism to be isolated, which will cause a great psychological blow to them. At this time, parents should be patient in comforting them and not ignore them in normal times.

1. Theory of Mind Baron-Cohen et al. (1995) proposed that autistic people lack understanding of their own and others' mental states, and therefore have social communication disorders such as being unable to recognize other people's facial expressions, or having difficulty conveying emotions (but being able to understand love and simple emotions), being unable to express gestures, being unable to understand that others have different messages, being unable to distinguish between reality and appearance, being unable to imagine or deceive, and being unable to process new and old information in a conversation.

2. Affect theory Hobson (1989, 1990, 1993) explains that autistic people have inherent emotional defects because they cannot accept or respond to the emotional expressions of others, and therefore do not have the necessary social experience in infancy to develop the cognitive ability of social understanding. This explains the joint attention and imitation defects of autistic people, but cannot explain symptoms such as fragmentary talents, visual advantages and echolalia. However, this statement echoes Kenna's claim.

3. Executive function Ozonoff (1992) believed that autism may be caused by damage to the prefrontal lobe function, resulting in symptoms such as stubborn and stereotyped common behaviors, limited interest expression, clumsy action imitation, egocentric social interaction, lack of emotional response, and high-level abstract cognitive defects.

4. Weak central coherence Sperber and Wilson (1986) argued that people with autism are unable to transform external environmental stimuli into meaningful information and then connect the new and old information because of their information processing ability. Therefore, they show fragmentary talents such as being good at arranging and combining building blocks or having excellent mechanical memory.

From the above hypotheses, it can be seen that no matter which hypothesis is adhered to, it is still impossible to fully explain all the symptoms of autism.

1 to 2 years old is the best age to judge

Although the youngest autistic patient is only 3 months old, it is not easy to tell whether a baby a few months old has autistic tendencies. Generally, parents can only notice abnormal behavior of their baby after the baby is one year old. Therefore, the best age to judge is 1 to 2 years old. If your child cannot speak at the age of 2, you should immediately undergo an autism test after excluding diseases of the ears and vocal organs.

For children diagnosed with autism over the age of 5, the impact of autism is greater. Among the thousands of autistic patients treated at the Zhang Jiqing Mental Rehabilitation Center, there are even patients in their 20s who cannot use the simplest tools in life and yell when they encounter something unpleasant, not to mention going out to work and having a normal relationship.

Autism diagnosis by parents: Look at the eyes

It is very difficult to communicate with children with autism, as they often answer questions irrelevantly or talk to themselves. Director Duan pointed out that in fact, when judging autism, looking at the eyes is more important than listening to the person speak.

If a child suffers from autism, he or she will rarely make eye contact with others and will only care about things that interest him or her. But this interest is usually very strange. For example, before and after going out, a complete set of rituals must be performed, otherwise there will be a big noise. When they want something, they won’t look their parents in the eye and say it out loud. Instead, they will treat the thing like an inanimate object and just get what they want.