Myth Number 1: Autistic Children Don't Make Eye Contact

My son has the most beautiful blue eyes.  They are enormous and he has impossibly long eyelashes. Every emotion he feels, I can see reflected in those brilliant orbs of his.  How do I know this?  He looks at me.  Into my eyes.

There are a lot of people, some even professionals, who will tell you that autistic children do not make eye contact.  This simply is not true.  Do they avoid eye contact?  Yes, often.  But more often than not, Logan will come up to me and look into my face, and try to communicate.  He will stare into my eyes while he is talking/jumping/yelling/whatever.  Does he make eye contact? Yes.  But it has to be on his terms, not mine.

Logan's attention span is about a three on a scale of one to ten.  It's very short, unless he's engaging himself in some make-believe game that he's made up or watching the Babies documentary (more on that later).  For this reason, it's very hard to hold his attention long enough to ask him a question or give him a set of directions.  Logan's therapist taught me a neat little trick to get over this particular obstacle.  "The eyes follow the hands," she said.  So when I want Logan to listen,  I take his hand and I put it on my cheek.  Then I speak to him.  And you know what?  It works!

Now, what about my other son, whose attention is also prone to wander?  I can stand there and talk to him, and watch as his eyes do a slow drift over to the tv or computer or the dogs wrestling on the floor.  I have tried this other trick with him before, and it works, too.  It also annoys him, but it's effective.  I cover up his eyes.  Then I tell him what I want him to hear.  Works like a charm.  Irritates the snot out of him.  But it gets the job done.

The other myth that I feel goes along with the eye contact is that autistic children are not affectionate.  Guess what?  Some of them are...extremely so!  I cannot count the number of times I've gotten a hug from Logan, or that he's held his face up to me for a kiss.  Sometimes he will crawl into my lap and pull my arms around him.  Sometimes he will say, "I want mommy to hold you."  (He gets his pronouns mixed up...you and me are interchangeable with him right now.)

But, if you annoy him, or he doesn't want to talk, he is just as likely to say, "I say bye-bye now."

And while Logan's communication issues have been a struggle for our family, I have to admit one thing.  The simple straightforwardness of his words, the way that he conveys what he wants to convey in as few words as possible, is sometime more preferable to me than trying to decipher the confusing actions and mixed signals in this very chaotic world we live in.  Logan, in his own way, is articulate in the simplicity of his language, and his actions, while sometimes hard to deal with, are unfeigned and true to what he is feeling at the moment.  If we could all be so honest, with ourselves and with each other, what a different world this would be.