I participate in an asperger syndrome discussion board. There are many questions from 'normal' mothers about how to manage their AS children. The two most common questions are:
My five year old son never does what he ought to. I've tried every punishment I can think of, but he just accepts the punishment and does what he wants anyway. How can I get him to do what he ought to do?
My fifteen year old son spends all his time on the computer. He is still on it when I wake up in the morning, not having done his homework or slept. How can I stop him?
Now I am by no means an expert on child psychology, but having lived for nearly 60 years with AS myself, and for nearly 20 years with an AS son, perhaps I can shed some light on the issue.
The issue of discipline often becomes acute when the child enters school. The teacher complains that she has thirty children to control, and twenty-nine do what they are told, so your child is obviously defective and immoral for not doing so. The traditional answer to this problem was to keep beating the child more and more severely until he did what he was told. Eventually the child either died of his injuries, or learned to behave in such a way as to minimize future beatings: problem solved. This approach is no longer approved of, but sometimes there are faint but frightening echoes of the old ways in the way schools treat children with 'problems'. Schoolchildren who commit suicide (sometimes taking others with them, as at Columbine) can often be regarded as dying from injuries received from school policies. How many of them had AS symptoms?
Punishment is sometimes justified. If your child runs into the middle of a busy street without looking, it makes some sense to slap his hand, as a small symbol of the pain that might have been inflicted on him had he been less lucky. But this is a situation where you understand why he had the impulse to run into the street, and where failure to deter him from repeating the action may have tragic consequences. Even here, there is a substantial cost to the punishment. First, the pain the child suffers is inherently undesirable. Second, the child's trust in you, and in the world in general, is weakened. Punishing a child when you do not understand why he behaved as he did is even more costly. He may be doing his best, and being punished for doing your best is terribly demoralizing.
Punishment should be evaluated in the same way a medical treatment is evaluated. The treatment may have some unwanted side effects, but may also achieve a highly desired result. The term 'therapeutic index' is used roughly to describe the ratio between the expected good and the expected harm. AS changes radically the likely response of a child to a punishment, and should therefore be considered carefully before any punishment scheme is adopted.
'Normal' parents often ask themselves why their AS child does not obey the teacher. It helps to turn the question around: why do the other children obey the teacher? Ordinary children understand that the teacher has great power to make their lives happy or unhappy, and have developed some skills in understanding what behavior on their part will prompt the desired response from the teacher. The essence of AS is that your child does not have this understanding. Her attempts to demonstrate her authority may have passed right over his head, leaving him clueless that pleasing her is more important than pleasing the other twenty-nine children. Even when it occurs to him to try to please her, he may not know how. She may also misunderstand him. When he fails to make eye contact, she may think he is lying. "I've been a teacher for forty years and have eleven advanced degrees in early childhood behavior. I think I can tell by now when a five-year-old is lying!!"
Parents would agree that they wish to treat their children better than the criminal justice system treats defendants, and may be puzzled that I even raise the comparison. But lawyers have, over the years, developed concepts of how people should be treated that make a lot of sense. One of them is not guilty by reason of mental defect. Punishing someone for doing something they cannot help is simply unreasonable, as well as counter-productive. He has to be taught how to figure out what to do (make eye contact, find the authority figure, put the expected expression on your face) in a non-threatening environment.
Rewarding someone for doing well is obviously better than punishing them for doing badly. The problem is that we tend to give our children everything they could possibly want, so rewarding them is difficult. The fifteen-year-old is a better example of this.
You bought your child a computer, and an internet connection, because 'everyone' told you it was very educational. Now he spends all his time on it, either playing violent video games, or using it to chat with unknown strangers who may be pedophiles for all you know. Scary! Attempts to limit his access to the computer result in tantrums or worse.
The first thing to do is to decide what the real problems are. Pedophiles are really scary, but rare: if you can afford to spend energy worrying about them, you are lucky. Many parents have far more immediate concerns. Is the computer the center of a real problem? If the computer was broken, what would your child do? If the answer is that he would watch raindrops running down the windowpane, then the computer is a symptom, not a problem. But if he gets home from school at 3pm, gets on to the computer immediately, and is still on it at 7pm when you get home, saying "gee, mom, I thought I'd only been on for a few minutes" then the computer is really part of the problem.
You were right to buy the computer. Before he learned how to use it, he would not have considered it worth making an effort for. Now it has given you your first piece of real leverage over your child. You can use this leverage without giving the appearance of punishment (or at least minimizing it) by buying a new computer, with all the new features the old one lacks and your child desperately wants.
This new computer should be carefully described as YOUR computer, not his. You need it to keep in touch with your family, balance your checkbook, or whatever. He is not allowed to touch it, but can still use his (old) computer as before.
Sooner or later (and probably sooner) he will buy a new computer game that will not run on his computer but would run fine on yours. Now you have leverage. As a special treat, he can use your computer just this once as soon as he finishes his homework. Note that this is entirely different from the old system of punishing him for not doing his homework by taking away his computer☺ It still needs policing, but it should create far less damage. Remember to ask grandparents and others not to buy him a new computer of his own.
All these rewards and punishments are, at best, stopgaps. What you want for any child is that he finds enough joy in the things he does that he does them for intrinsic reasons alone. For ordinary children, this is an ideal, but rewards and punishments can be made to work as a substitute. For the AS child, this is the only way it is ever going to work anyway, so you have nothing to lose by going for the gold.
There is no real reason for your child to find a computer game more interesting than calculus. The joy in both is the sense of mastery of a challenging environment. Sadly, the manufacturers of the computer game are highly motivated to find successful ways to sell their product to your child, while the schools are trapped in the mindset that it is not their job to make their subjects interesting.
I suspect that it will one day be much easier and more pleasant to learn calculus, not because the existing educational establishment has changed, but because a computer game company has found a way to base a fascinating game on the principles of calculus. Who would have thought that children could be effectively and pleasantly taught about the principles of municipal government budgeting before Sim City came along?