Venn Diagram

I often see these cases where the children exhibit some Asperger symptoms and some ADD symptoms yet do not meet the criteria for either! These children are the hardest to diagnose and are often misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. They are usually floating around in mainstream schools usually struggling socially. Their ability to understand social norms is very poor. It is as if they just landed with a spaceship from another planet but were not given the manual for our society. Parents are often in disbelief at how simple concepts such as not grabbing other peoples food, not standing  so close to people when you talk to them can be so difficult to somehow who is academically quite successful. sadly these children suffer a lot; they suffer for many reasons. Primarily, the education system as a whole forgot them . They are too smart academically to be seen as an issue and too mild to be seen as a problem. however their inability to understand concepts such as making and keeping friends makes their lives miserable. such children have insight that they are different. they will even verbally express that they are very good at spelling at maths but very poor at making friends. they try to make a "formula" like the ones they learned maths with but it usually fails them. I find that role play, drama and structured play dates work wonders with theses children. they often need to see how the other person is seeing them ... "put yourself in his shoes" is one of the hardest thing you can teach a person on the spectrum . however it does work. creating many real life situations and acting them out and swapping roles helps a lot. Puberty is often the time we see most of the melt downs as hormones also get in the way. When you are having a bad day you know you should control your negative urges and even perhaps stay away from people. however such children (the Venn children) are quite impulsive (due to ADD) and do not have the social awareness of what is  an appropriate way to behave in such situations. on the bright side not knowing a lot of the rules makes them keen to experiment and often geniuses in physics; for e.g. "the law of gravity" is not a given. the Venn child will not automatically know it but will figure it out by dropping things to the floor... over and over again. this appears to us to be stereotypical behavior while its actually a learning process.  I learned so much from these children. not just to think outside the box, but that their is actually no box!!! everything is possible and everything is how you perceive it.