Leda Natkin Nelis

What happens to the siblings of special needs children? My thirteen-year-old daughter has been looking on with envy as I spend my odd hours crafting and polishing parenting columns focused on her brother -- his quirks, his talents, his challenges. This week, let me shift my attention to her, the...

Riddle: What do an Asperger's Syndrome child and a Gauloise cigarette have in common?

Having a teenage son without a filter is a unique experience. I often feel as if I have been airlifted straight into my son's anterior cingulate cortex, the brain's centre for sexual arousal....

I was a school gate pariah.

The school gates are an oft discussed hotspot, the epicenter of parental rivalry and maternal bravado. Needless to say, my experiences at the school gate of our pre-prep in leafy Hampstead were dreadful. Although my son, when he started full time school at age...

Chances are, no one ever sat you down as a child and gave you a Powerpoint presentation on how to put on a sock. Most likely, you simply grabbed a sock intuitively at some point during your late toddler years, first mouthing it to savor its pithy taste, then managing...

My fifteen year old Asperger's Syndrome son has an astonishing audiographic and photographic memory. He's able, after watching a film only two or three times, to recite the dialogue verbatim. We discovered this years ago, when our then-nine year old announced one evening before bedtime that he had learned the...

Davos by day and Davos by night are different worlds, but the two complement each other perfectly. The kinetic pace of WEF's daytime sessions and faux-casual huddled conversations scattered among the bars and stairwells of the Congress Centre offset the other Davos. This second Davos, the underbelly, emerges only after...