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The Language
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Elizabeth Thomas
AppleTree Staff Writer

actut • (248) 646-0535

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W

e have to move the
car, Mikey," I said to
my autistic son as I
pulled out my keys and went to
open the door.
I started to
climb in when I
noticed Mikey
hadn't gotten
into the passen-
ger side as
usual. He loves
to take rides.
Then I saw he
Elizabeth Thomas
was standing in
AppleTree
front of the car.
Staff
Writer
His two hands

flush against the
hood, he was pushing. In a flash,
I saw that Mikey had taken what I
said literally, as autistic children
do. He was literally trying to
move the car for me.
"I mean, we have to drive the
car to another place," I said,
laughing. "Thank you so much for
trying to move it, though." I got
into the car and vowed to remem-
ber to watch my language from
, now on.
We usually don't think twice
before using metaphors or hyper-
bole in everyday speech. "I'll just
die if that happens," we might say
. about a relatively trivial event. But
if our autistic children heard us,
they would think we were actually
going to die. As you can imagine,

their misunderstanding of the flexi-
bility of language creates so much
stress for them.
One mother of an autistic child
hung her son's school clothes up
on his door and instructed him to
come downstairs with everything
on. And so he did. He had every-
thing on, including the clothes
hanger inside his shirt.
Any idioms or metaphors you
use can go straight over the heads
of autistic children, alarming them
in the process. When you tell an
autistic child that if he eats one
more potato chip he'll turn into
one (as we adults sometimes like
to tease children), he'll think this is
actually going to happen.

Autistic children
often take
what we say
iterally.

To put yourself in the shoes of an
autistic child trying to understand
the world, imagine suddenly
being transported to a foreign
country. You couldn't understand
the language or even read street
signs. That's the way the world
feels to autistic children a lot of
the time.
I've fought hard for Mikey over
the
past year to get him into spe-
Elizabeth Thomas is a native of
cial programs. But the biggest
Mississippi who now lives in Hamp-
fight I'm going to have is letting
shire, England, with her husband
him go and learn to fight for him-
and two children, Katie and Mikey.
i self some, too.

❑

