Last fall my 13-year-old son was referred to a clinical psychologist for a sexual risk evaluation because he was acting very sexual, no matter where we were. During the early stages of the eval is when this new doctor asked me if Shawn had ever been diagnosed with Asperger’s… which led to a full PDD eval. Since we have changed our way of dealing with behaviors and using a different perspective, the sexual “acting out” has almost completely stopped. No, he still does not understand boundaries and appropriate behaviors but we work on that daily at home. Shawn attends a social skills group we were lucky enough to find 15 minutes from our NY home in Warren PA. It gives him a safe place to mingle with kids like himself, and they go out into the community for fun activities with supervision. They will be starting up again this fall with more structure and possibly more frequent than monthly.

Without that initial referral for sexual risk, we still would not have this long-awaited, accurate diagnosis of Asperger’s. It is definitely the biggest piece of the puzzle to date and sheds new light onto questions we’ve been asking since age 2.

rondawhitford@yahoo.com