I’ve been reading books, but haven’t spent the extra time to write about them here. I was in Half Price Books (they are only in 16 states) the other day, and was walking by a display, and saw this book. It must have been my intuition on seeing the picture, of a boy sitting on a horse, being held by dad, and it touched me. I picked it up, and couldn’t put it down, so The Horse Boy came home with me.
I enjoyed reading about a family’s struggle knowing that their son was not developing typically. It documents their journey to find help and relief for their son. It was very informative and interesting from a family’s perspective, and improves my ability to do my job.
The author had one of the best explanations of tantrums/meltdowns that I have read, on a basic level. Here is a quote from pg. 19 “Through our cyberspace trawling we did discover the likely cause of these strange, overwhelming tantrums – that they were probably neurological in origin; his nervous system was almost certainly overactive. Autistic brains, it turns out, have a much greater number of nerve cells than “neuro-typical” brains. The result can be extreme sensory overload. A breath of wind on Rowan’s cheek could feel like fire from a flame-thrower. The fluorescent lights of a supermarket or daycare facility could look like lights being strobed at one million times a second. His clothes or bedcovers could suddenly, if the wrong neurological switch was thrown, feel like lead weights or burning napalm. Not that this helped to console him when the firestorms went raging through his brain and body.”
I would definitely recommend this book!
Just FYI... there is a lot of time spent on the family's travel to Mongolia and meeting with shaman's... which isn't a type of therapy I would recommend for a child with Autism.
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