Homeschooling the Child with Asperger Syndrome: Real Help for Parents Anywhere and on Any Budget

My wife and I are just starting the adventure of homeschooling our 13 yr old Asperger son. This book really made us feel more confident about our choice and helped narrow down our curriculum decisions. This is a handbook that will be by my side throughout this process!

My older son was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. As a result, I've been taking a crash course on the subject, trying to read and learn all I can. All the books I have read have been helpful in their own way, but most were written by professionals in the academic/psychological world and had a negative view of homeschooling. They advocated professional therapists for every area of difficulty while offering relatively little in advice on how to make modifications at home. As someone who has already been homeschooling for two years, I was searching for something to help me continue on that road while making needed accommodations. I was so thrilled to find this book. Lise Pyles is a homeschooling mom who has walked the road (as well as having had her child in school). She offers practical suggestions while deferring to experts where necessary. For those not currently homeschooling, she offers the reasons to consider homeschooling. For those already in the trenches, she offers continuing support. While this book certainly does not offer all the answers, it does give one confidence that homeschooling is a very real and desirable option for children with Aspergers. As Pyles states, "In the end, homeschooling is not a panacea, but it's an option worth considering, and it just could be one of the best decisions you will ever make for your special child."

The author, Lise Pyles, and I have known each other most of our lives. We were best friends in elementary school and lived just across the street from each other. Interestingly, we both had children diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, which kind of makes me wonder about whether environmental factors might contribute to the rise of this condition, since we both drank the same water growing up. Lise and I lost touch throughout much of our adult lives, but when we reconnected some years ago, she was a wonderful source of support to me while I was homeschooling my daughter. (My kid is the one in the book who loved mules, when all the other little girls were into horses.) Every time I would email Lise, wondering whether I was doing the right thing or if I was on the right track, Lise would write back with positive observations that I had not been able to make myself. That's because I was in the thick of it--the everyday challenges of homeschooling made it hard for me to step back and make observations about the overall progress that was happening. What I loved about Lise's book when it was later published is that it was just like the actual conversations we'd had, by email and in person, about homeschooling an Aspy. She is a practical, down-to-earth person who can wisely see how Asperger kids are able to flourish when they're taught at home, without the distractions, transitions, and other challenges that occur at school. I'm happy to report that after about five years of homeschooling, my daughter was able to handle the social challenges of attending a private alternative school. The years when we home schooled prepared her for going out into the larger world. In her school, where they practice democratic decision-making and where students initiate their own learning experiences, my daughter has continued to grow socially. As with many Asperger kids, we never had to worry about my daughter's academic abilities, but we did wonder if she would be able to stand being in a room full of other people, and now she can do that and fully participate in school meetings. She has important jobs at school and at home, and we don't really worry about whether she'll be able to function as a working adult in a few years. Lise's earlier book, "Hitchhiking Through Asperger Syndrome," also helped prepare me for the possibility that some years it may be better to home school my daughter and other times it may be better for her to be in a school setting. That's what I like about Lise's practical approach and advice. She advocates that you stay in tune with your child's needs and continue to evaluate how to get those needs met. I think this is a realistic approach, because there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to educate your child.

It is hard to believe Lise Pyles packed so much into such a thin little book. She expertly balances the personalized POV of a mother who homeschooled her Asperger-affected son for several years with the POV of a self-taught expert on raising kids with Asperger's. The book itself has a very conversational and personal style, sympathetic to the parent's concerns without ever being patronizing. The book is not comprehensive about any one particular topic, but gives practical and diverse starting-off points for many issues facing AS-affected homeschooling families, including tackling the mindset of teaching the "whole child" instead of just academics, how to choreograph tailored social opportunities for all ages and gauge their successes, childhoood depression vs. AS kids' real need for decompression and heaps of alone-time, how to keep a proper perspective and avoid burnout, how to model social skills in everyday situations, the concept of "learning styles" through the lens of Asperger's and how AS kids employ them in slightly different ways, lists of practical life-skills and social skills at various age and developmental levels, special issues to consider when homeschooling an AS child, lists of web sites that help with teaching face recognition/ idiom use/ communication/ "sensory diets," brief curriculum reviews, and many other subjects. Again, it is amazing that so much information was successfully packed into such a slim volume. The author achieves this by employing the frequent use of well-organized and well-conceived bullet point lists, and the nearly dozen appendixes are a wealth of AS-specific information not just for American homeschoolers but for families in Australia, the UK and Canada as well. Aside from the concise and robustly practical nature of the information in this book, what I found most helpful is the positive and upbeat point of view of Pyles herself. In every chapter, she includes real-life success stories, including her own as well as that of 40 other AS-affected homeschooling families. But the real boon of these is that she gradually redefines what "success" really means - not the best grades or the most awards or anything like that, but that even things that look like "failures" on the outset can be viewed as successes with just a slight attitude shift. For example: A trip to the museum that ends in a meltdown after an hour. The meltdown might be perceived as a failure at first, but the fact that a sensory-sensitive child survived an hour at a noisy, confusing museum is a success. Nuggets like this are peppered throughout the book. I suppose she is "modeling" what it looks like to turn lemons into lemonade. =) This book has changed my entire perspective on raising and educating an Asperger-affected child entirely at home, 100% for the better and with great heaps of optimism. I am now going to order her other books, and hope that she knows how much her work has helped people.

I work with a child who has Aspergers and found this book to be invaluable. Lisa Pyles has put together a very informative collection of information, tips, and strategies that will likely be helpful to anyone who is working or living with an Aspergers child. Strategies involving utilizing and capitalizing on the child's particular area of interests were particularly helpful to me. I look forward to future texts by this author as I plow through the joys and challenges of knowing my Aspergers student, I can use all the help I can get!