h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks for this honest account.

Wait for part two

I recognise some things here in my son. He is experiencing a mixture of ADHD / high functioning autism / Aspergers in varying degrees.

It is very hard to get him to do anything if he doesn't see any merits.
It is also very hard to stop him doing things that are not appreciated. He can talk for hours on end about a computer game he does not actually play but watches YouTube blogs about. He does not care if anyone is actually listening, just as long as he can share it with the world in general. He taught himself a bar from a song on the piano and wants to just continue playing that, all the time.

Vocally he has bouts of reverse stutter, repeating the last syllable in mid-sentence while he is preprocessing the rest of the sentence, plus the start of the following sentence. It is virtually impossible to break into this flow because he does not stop to breathe between the two sentences.

He is operating at different age levels, with a quite wide bandwidth, sometimes acting like a three year old, sometimes ahead of the actual 13 years he is.

From work ethic point of view he tries to do the absolute minimum required effort and then a bit less if he thinks he can get away with it (but that could just be adolescence).


Luckily, he can usually cope with changes of plan, contrary to one of his classical autistic friends, who needs at least a days heads up of what is going to happen.

I think that his twin sister has been a blessing for his social development at primary school.

Thank you, Caiman, for that description - it helps me understand my acquaintances better!

Does his twin sister have none of these issues at all?

No autism spectrum issues as far as we know, probably something with attention deficit (ADD) though. Homework takes ages for no apparent reason.

My sympathies. I've known quite a few kids with that problem.

Then there's fierce concentration... My greatnephew, same age, got a mini-trebuchet kit on Christmas morning. By the time we showed up that afternoon, he had it up and running and was threatening all the windows in the farmhouse.

His dad told him to put it away...his dad, who as a kid dismantled clocks, appliances, computers, whatever had parts...I call it 'incipient engineering syndrome'.

We may have one of those too.

Our youngest (5) got tired of waiting to build his age 7+ lego set together with me, so he did it on his own.

Can't wait for slowpoke grownups.

Indeed. He doesn't care when I try to apply some crash course maths in order to save a brother or sister from appalling grades the next day.

Ah, siblings.