Fascinating article on whether  "neurodiverse" kids need curing--or a culture of their own? Juliette Guilbert explores new developments in living with autism, ADHD, Asperger's and other conditions.

I have a friend whose son has been labeled as autistic by the Belgian school system on the testimony of a single teacher although he was tested in her home country by a group of experts and found to have several conditions, foremost delayed speech, but not autism.  I can only imagine her outrage. Her boy started school three months ago and had never been in a creche and hates/d school just like Kaia still does. Kaia's teacher, on the other hand, understands that non-creched children take longer to come out of their shell.  She said the one other child she has beside Kaia who'd never been to a creche took three months to relax. She wouldn't write up Kaia's antisocial behavior as autism. Wish my friend had gotten her guy into St. Lambertus with Juf Bea. The twit of a teacher her son has now has prematurely given up on him.

There's no question he has a speech delay--just a few words at 3 is a delay--but this little guy is in no way autistic. His parents speak different languages, one Serbian, one Croatian, and they converse in English, and the rest of his world speaks Dutch. When I first met him, in a park, he began talking animatedly, with broad gestures. I assumed it was a language I didn't know. His mother told me it was nonsense. I had no idea because what came across was his desire to communicate, not an autistic trait. The last time I saw him, he was having a fine time at his birthday party, listening to people to talk and sing to him, waiting for the appropriate times to blow out the candles. What struck me about him most was how he seemed to mingle with everyone at the party, coming by and interacting nonverbally. I really enjoyed how he and another boy slung their arms across each other's shoulders and then fell backwards onto a chair and watched tv. Silent, sure, but interacting.  If only that idiot teacher he has could have seen him then.

I hope someone competent revisits his official diagnosis. Non-verbal doesn't mean autistic. My friend's experts had a variety of exercises and suggestions and without the school's corroboration, few, if any, will be supported. She'll have to do it all herself.
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From the above article, this was a striking factoid : 
     In 2007, Laurent Mottron, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, led a group of American and Canadian researchers who gave autistic and normal children two of the most common IQ tests: the Wechsler scales, which is heavily language-based, and Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which asks subjects to complete complex visual patterns in a wholly nonverbal format. The non-autistic kids had similar scores on both tests. But while no autistic child scored in the “high intelligence” range of Wechsler, one-third did on Raven’s. Similarly, one-third of autistics scored in the mentally retarded range on Wechsler, but only one in twenty did on Raven’s. The researchers were able to reproduce the results with a group of autistic and normal adults. The implications are startling: At least some autistic people previously considered intellectually deficient may, in fact, be in the normal or even gifted range when it comes to abilities such as memory and abstract reasoning. One autistic subject who was deemed mentally retarded by the Wechsler scored in the 94 th percentile on Raven’s.