A girl with AS is quite rare, and aside from the statistics, it seems to me that Asperger's is usually a very "male" thing - social blindness and high logical intelligence are stereotypical "male" things.
Yes, there's a reason that Simon Baron-Cohen (not to be confused with various other Cohens) wrote a book on autism and AS under the title "Men, Woman and the Extreme Male Brain".
Does anyone here who has experience with AS have much of an idea about how social expectations about gender roles affect girls with AS, or are they aware of any issues and difficulties specific to girls?
In my experience, cliques are anathema to people with AS, and girls form socially stronger cliques than boys, so...
Double posting to add:
Wrong Planet - this may or may not help you, it's an Asperger's online community, seems to be reasonably big.
That's good.
My lil' half brother had AS. He had a real sh**ty time in him mainstream school - they just weren't cut out to deal with him (and it's not all that hard really) and sent him home for bad behaviour about twice a week.
So we sent *him to a small school some way away where they had more experience in dealing with AS and he did vastly better there. Make sure you choose a school that knows how to deal with AS properly and you'll make a world of difference.
Oh yeah, I should have mentioned this in my post. I figure I'll just add more as I go along and as Bucephalus asks more stuff.
Personally, I was pretty much a vigilante through most of primary school. Half the time, though, the teachers agreed that I was in the right and the person was being a liar and an idiot and deserved to get dragged by his legs out of the room. Then they wrung their hands that they had to abide by the rules and suspended me from the class trip to a rock farm or whatever.
Bucephalus, your daughter will probably get into fights and get marked for bad behavior and generally disobey whatever rules, written or unwritten, a school or kindergarten has that she rejects. You can try to find a smaller/better school as brennan suggests, but you should also prepare for this.
two things you gotta remember:
1. it's not a disease.
2. you can't "cure" her.
But for all that, there *are* deficiencies relative to the average that she should practice overcoming.
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Bucephalus - has your daughter begun speaking and/or reading yet? (If you want to switch to email and/or PM at this point, that's fine. For the record, I began reading a year early and speaking half a year late, and apparently it varies a great deal.) Reading is probably one of the safest ways for her to start learning about how "real people" work, if the books describe both what people are doing and what people are thinking, with the "safety valve" that she can always put the book away if she doesn't like it.
