Raising Cubby by John Elder Robison Read Free Book Online

she did patty-cake. He just didn’t do it himself. It was as if he enjoyed watching rather than participating.
    I wondered if he was like me in that regard. When I was little, I watched the other kids play and never joined in. There wereall sorts of reasons: I didn’t know how, or I wasn’t invited, or I tried and failed. Whatever the explanation, I spent my toddlerhood alone, watching the other kids play from the sidelines. Now I worried that Cubby might be headed in the same direction.
    He wasn’t sad or troubled. We could see him smiling and bouncing. He just didn’t take an active role and play along. What did that mean? We didn’t have any other babies to compare him to. My own social skills were not very good, and it simply did not occur to me to look outside my own family for answers. I pondered the situation without reaching any definite conclusion. So did his mom.
    “Maybe he needs glasses, like us,” said Little Bear. She thought he might be nearsighted because we were, and when things passed before him he didn’t respond. I didn’t agree, because there were times he’d see something go by and grab it right away, and I knew vision troubles didn’t come and go.
    My secret fear was that his behavior meant that his brain did not have enough computing power. Maybe he was seeing fine but not figuring out what he should do next. Could a game like that exceed a baby’s cognitive powers? Was a baby smarter than a puppy? Dogs didn’t play patty-cake, not even smart poodles. I considered ways to evaluate his intelligence, but in the end I made no progress because I knew of no standards for baby brainpower.
    I thought back to my own childhood and how important being smart was to me. When I recalled the things people said about me, most were negative. I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that. Because of my Asperger’s, my social skills were almost nonexistent. When you can’t read the unspoken messages in other people’s faces and bodies, how can you know how to respond? We know a lot more about autism today, but back then grown-ups just assumed I was poorly behaved. The one complimentary thing they said was, “You’re a really smart little boy.” The idea that Cubby might not share my best and most important attribute was very scary.
    What is smart in a baby?
I continued to wonder.
How do you
recognize it?
I watched him play with the toys we gave him. When left to his own devices, he was very inquisitive. He figured out how to stack rings from large to small and small to large. He knew how to make cubes, lines, and even buildings from his blocks, and he knew all the different colors. We gave him wooden puzzles with pieces that had to be placed into a tray in a certain way to make a pattern. He figured them out all by himself. If I tried to do them with him, he often took the toys away from me so he could do them on his own.
    Cubby was a very opinionated tyke. When I got down on the floor and played with him, it quickly became clear that he had definite ideas about how his blocks and rings should be arranged and which pieces went where. He was too young to voice those opinions in words, but if I deviated from his play plan, he would make his displeasure known by howling loudly. In fact, he had no trouble expressing his wishes even before he could talk. I couldn’t always tell exactly what he wanted, because he didn’t utter words that made sense. However, there was no mistaking when my response made him happy or annoyed; words were not needed to send those signals. He did that with great emphasis and at high volume.
    All those things told me his brain was working somewhat normally, though he wasn’t much of a team player. I wasn’t a team player either as a kid, so I didn’t make too much of that.
    He kept getting bigger and figuring out more puzzles, but he never mastered patty-cake. Actually,
mastered
is the wrong word. He never even tried. That particular game just passed him by. Even after months of