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Team Sports and Autism: A Not-Impossible Dream?

One of the most poignant moments in George’s early childhood happened when he was four. It was a late summer’s day, about four months after he had been diagnosed with autism, and I was picking him up from daycare. On nice days the daycare staff took the children out to the playground at the end of the day, and parents would pick them up from there. This was one of those days.

I stood at the fence enclosing the playground, and for a few minutes I watched the kids at play. Five or six children, all around George’s age, lined up for an impromptu little race. Ready, set… GO! And off they went, for just a few yards. George stood by himself under a tree, watching these events shyly.

A sense of sadness tugged at my heartstrings. Although he was surrounded by children, he looked so utterly alone in that moment. The other kids weren’t excluding him, he just didn’t know how to join in.

Because this was so soon after George’s diagnosis, I was still mourning the loss of what I had thought family life would mean. That vision had included childhood birthday parties and Little League baseball teams. And seeing my kid standing there alone, not looking as if he would ever participate in anything – well, it hurt.

As George has navigated his way through nine years of life, I have been heartened to see how well other kids have responded to him. He has this aura about him – this sweet pureness – that seems to attract other children. While many nasty comments have been thrown his way by adults, I have never seen a child being mean to him.

Not once.

I am too realistic – or perhaps too jaded – to believe that this will continue. I have spoken to parents of teenagers with autism, and I have heard speeches given by adults with autism. And with very few exceptions, there is one common thread running through everything I have heard: high school is hell for people with autism. That is when the bullying starts, when kids with special needs get picked on and subjected to humiliation.

If that is the case, though, how do you explain this very cool thing that happened last summer when I was out for a leisurely walk with my family? The boys down the road – 15 or 16 years old – were shooting hoops in their driveway. As we walked by, the ball rolled into the street, and George picked it up. Like a true basketball player, he bounced the ball off his knee, and then threw it towards the hoop. He missed by a mile.

And with no hesitation whatsoever, these teenage kids – you know, the ones who are supposed to be mean to special needs kids – lowered the hoop so that George to join in.

Parents of kids with autism are very fond of talking about how society discriminates against their kids, and to an extent, this is warranted. George and I have both been on the receiving end of stares, rude comments, assumptions and accusations. But these have come from adults.

Maybe a segment of society is starting to get it right, though. There will always be high school bullies, but maybe the upcoming generation is growing up to be more intuitive to the needs of individuals with special needs.

Someone posted this delightful video on Facebook this week. Sit through the annoying ad at the beginning, and then grab a Kleenex and take a look. This is the kind of thing that gives me hope for my child’s future.

High school basketball player passes ball to mentally challenged player on the opposite team

(Photo credit: StuSeeger. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

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Butterfly

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 5 – Ekphrasis Post: Go to flickr.com/explore and write a post inspired by the image. Can you link it to your health focus?

When my son was first diagnosed with autism, we enrolled him in a local daycare centre on the advice of his speech therapist. He needed the social aspect of it, she said. He needed the group lunchtimes, the circle times, and all of the other elements of being part of a group of children. We were nervous about letting our sensitive, vulnerable son out of our immediate orbit, particularly since the daycare had never had a child with autism before.

To their eternal credit and our eternal gratitude, the daycare welcomed George with open arms. The director of the centre arranged for all of her staff to be trained in how to work with special needs kids, and George was very happy there.

During the summer months, the kids would be taken to play outside at the end of the day while they were waiting for their parents to pick them up. I would get off the bus from work, pick up my boy, and walk home with him. One day, I picked up his backpack from the darkened daycare classroom as usual, and went out to the playground. I always tried to arrive undetected so I could watch George at play for a few minutes. In typical autistic fashion, he always did his own thing. He played among the other kids, but not with them.

On this particular day, I got to the playground just in time to see a few of the other kids preparing to have a race from one tree to another. George stood apart from the kids, watching them shyly. When the daycare teacher said, “GO!” the kids scampered away from the start line while George stood by on his own.

My heart constricted with unbearable sadness. The whole thing seemed to underscore the isolation of autism, and I felt a sense of unjustness that my child was standing there on his own. With his lanky frame and long legs, he is a natural runner. He might have won that impromptu little race.

Damn autism, I thought. I knew these other kids well enough to know that prior to lining up for the race, they would have tried to encourage George to participate. But being locked in his own world, he would not have known how to. Outwardly, he seemed perfectly happy, but I couldn’t help wondering about that. What was going through his mind as he watched those other kids at play together? Did he feel any sense of isolation? Did he wish he knew how to join in?

I started thinking about sports teams and group activities. Was George ever going to be able to be part of a soccer team or a high school band? Would he travel in a pack of teenage friends or would he sit by himself in the high school cafeteria? Would he be excluded from birthday parties? Or would some group of well-meaning kids include him in their group and look out for him?

How was my child, with his autism and his social communication deficits, going to survive in a social world?

This is a concern that is with me more or less all the time, despite assurances from his teacher that he is starting to tentatively reach out socially at school, that he is getting better and better at participating in social activities, and that he is, in fact, an extremely well-liked member of the student body.

A few days ago I saw something that made my heart soar. Me and my husband were out for a walk with the kids, and we saw the teenage boys down the road shooting hoops in their driveway. Before we could stop him, George ran up to the boys and held out his hands for the ball. The boys good-naturedly obliged, and like a true natural basketball player, George bounced the ball on his knee and then threw it towards the hoop as if he did this every day.

The hoop was too high for George to have any success, and the boys offered to lower it for him. We told them not to worry and we went on our way, but not before the boys had invited George to play basketball with them any time he wanted.

When things like this happen, my vision of the future shifts, as if I’m looking at my son’s life through a kaleidoscope. I start to see possibilities that were previously hidden to me, possibilities that simply may not have been there before George grew and developed into them. Instead of seeing the kid who stood on his own while everyone else had a race, I now see the boy who, just for a few moments, joined other boys in a basketball game.

If I had, just a year ago, seen the picture that inspired this post, I would have thought, “George is probably never going to do that. He’s probably never going to romp around with friends or be invited to take part in impromptu soccer games.”

Now I look at that picture and realize that I am seeing the emergence of George as a social being. Maybe he’ll always be shy, and it is very likely that he will always need to be surrounded by people who will look out for him.

But his personality, his character, the very essence of who he is – that is emerging bright and beautiful, like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon.