Encouraging kids to ride - a how to request

[risuenaVT]

Do you have any sources on that? I ask because my BFF is convinced that I am at least mildly neurodivergent, she suspects ADHD, and she does have enough personal and professional knowledge in the field that I would not be surprised if she’s right. But also until recently, I have been functional enough.

But if you have any sources about autistic girls hyperfocusing on horses, I will 100% send that to her and she will be delighted to read it, even though ADHD and autism are very different (though sometimes occur together).

And honestly, again, I wouldn’t be surprised.

[Scribbler]

With the expansion of “neuroatypical” wider and wider I sometimes wonder what “typical” or normal has left.

Being able to focus, being unable to focus, having grand overwhelming interests, absorbing information, getting lost in creativity and imagination, day dreaming? What’s a normal person, someone that doesn’t get into things deeply and spends all their time micromanaging social life? Or is that social anxiety? Sounds really boring.

[Pico_Banana]

@Scribbler

With the expansion of “neuroatypical” wider and wider I sometimes wonder what “typical” or normal has left.

I have been thinking the same . . . also, I find as I’ve gotten older and have spent way more time online than I did as a kid/young adult because it just wasn’t such a thing then, I find my attention span is way less these days than it used to be. I can barely watch TV without also scrolling on my ipad. How much does “nurture” play into this as opposed to “nature?”

[OverandOnward]

It is interesting how much fundamental life-skill toys and games kids did, pre-internet/mobile-device, just to fill time.

I see a major lack of manual dexterity in today’s young people – cannot buckle a buckle, or manage the clip on a halter or gate chain, or manage string. “Hold this, like this” is something they struggle with. No awareness of where all of their fingers are and what all of their fingers are doing.

Pre-internet/device, many children’s toys were fiddly. Dolls to dress, things to assemble, weaving potholders, matching this peg to that hole, etc. The experience of touch. Not that kids, especially younger ones, don’t have some of that today. But it isn’t full immersion in touch experience for many childhood years, they way it was for previous generations.

The lack is making them much less ready for horse life, when they start lessons. But, on the other hand, those are valuable experiences that horses are bringing into their lives.

[FjordBCRF]

@Scribbler

With the expansion of “neuroatypical” wider and wider I sometimes wonder what “typical” or normal has left.

Being able to focus, being unable to focus, having grand overwhelming interests, absorbing information, getting lost in creativity and imagination, day dreaming? What’s a normal person, someone that doesn’t get into things deeply and spends all their time micromanaging social life? Or is that social anxiety? Sounds really boring.

I often wonder this myself. I am positive that my ex husband was ADHD, guy I dated before him was ADHD as well. DH seems far more NT to me than other people I have spent years of my life with. The biggest difference that I notice between him and my NDness, is that he seems very steady. He is able to take things in stride.

For me, I feel like my brain is constantly fighting itself with the AuDHD, my thoughts are scattered and trying to do the simplest stuff like pick meals, make a grocery list, THEN go shop for it all AND THEN cook…feels like a heroic effort more often than not. Pretty much everything outside of the barn will get the back burner if is doesn’t NEED to be done. It’s like it’s a mental block or something. I have openly never wanted kids. Learning my chronic and autoimmune issues make me super high risk; I think my spidey sense was well ahead of the game. But I cannot fathom how people have a kid or multiple kids. I would be burnt out immediately never to recover again.

Our brains are wired differently, period. It was obvious to my nurse mom in the 80’s I was on the spectrum by the time I was just a couple years old. I don’t think it’s that rare or unique, and it presents differently in every person. I don’t know if it was mentioned upthread, but there is a saying that, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person”. Plopping kids in front of screens isn’t causing autism; screen time is a whole different can of worms whether your’e ND OR NT.

@OverandOnward - interesting observation with the dexterity kids have today. I have noticed this at the therapy barn I volunteer at too.

[Scribbler]

That’s really interesting about motor skills. I’d say for my generation (kids in the 1960s) there was a bit of stratification in what you learned, but each segment had something.

Girls could be more sedentary, but generally there was a trade off so that the more their parents kept them a bit housebound, the more the girls learned fine motor skills connected to traditional home making, often by playing with dolls and fiddly miniature stuff. Sewing and cooking. There’s an aspect of traditional home making that actually requires decisiveness, planning, and being a bit of a bossy boots with babies and toddlers (and your dolls and toys and pets).

Boys got more exposure to team sports and mechanical or carpentry play, which also requires motor skills. And if you were a weird introvert kid you might be drawing pictures, writing make believe stories, painting models, building models, collecting stamps etc.

Of course there was much pearl clutching generally about the amount of TV kids had access to.

[pony_grandma]

whittle with a pocket knife… oh horrors. We learned to tie knots. Bait hooks. Clip playing cards on our bike spokes. Lace up our shoes! They don’t do that now. Tavern puzzles! Everyone had some. (Weaving pot holders… )

[Scribbler]

I also recall kids being fascinated with making stuff out of any novel material. My friend found colored electrical wire discarded by the utilities repairmen and we had a way of wrapping it around itself so it looked like a beaded ring. We dug out raw clay and made crumbly little figurines. Etc.

[OverandOnward]

@pony_grandma

(Weaving pot holders… )

Here ya go … it’s still out there, people should set their kids down in front of the tv with these kits (I mean in front of the streaming youtube since cable is dead) …

Everything provided in the kit – so we weren’t even scrambling up whatever can be found in the disorganized bags of mom’s and grandmom’s sewing stuff.

It’s harder than it looks to get all those yarns just where they should be, the way they should be. If you are a somewhat clumsy 9 yo. Plus if you pulled and pushed too hard on the weaving, some of the yarn would pop off the ends. Once that happened it was hard to get it tensioned right to stay in place.

Talk about fiddly. Endless amounts of time could be wasted getting it just right, to properly represent the artistic vision of the crafter.

Plus the girls took it hard if brothers were better at it. The brothers had tons of fiddly stuff with put-it-together model car kits, with painting, to hone their own dexterity.

The end product potholders were no use whatsoever as true potholders. Too thin and not a tight weave anyway. Ambitions to use them led to owey burns.

My mom and grandmothers kept us supplied with those potholder weave things for years. Only just now am I realizing why. At the time I just thought she needed a lot of potholders. These were hanging around the kitchen but not actually being used very much.

[poltroon]

@risuenaVT

Do you have any sources on that? I ask because my BFF is convinced that I am at least mildly neurodivergent, she suspects ADHD, and she does have enough personal and professional knowledge in the field that I would not be surprised if she’s right. But also until recently, I have been functional enough.

But if you have any sources about autistic girls hyperfocusing on horses, I will 100% send that to her and she will be delighted to read it, even though ADHD and autism are very different (though sometimes occur together).

And honestly, again, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Some reddit threads out there too if you google for them, but here are some starters:

https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/leader.FTR1.23042018.48
https://www.wpspublish.com/blog/autism-in-women-girls-special-interests
https://childmind.org/article/autistic-girls-overlooked-undiagnosed-autism/

Understanding the Gender Gap: Autistic Women and Girls - Autistic Women &...

https://magazine.catapult.co/people/stories/katie-rose-pryal-an-autistic-girls-guide-to-horses-diagnosis-hyperfixation

[poltroon]

@Scribbler

With the expansion of “neuroatypical” wider and wider I sometimes wonder what “typical” or normal has left.

Being able to focus, being unable to focus, having grand overwhelming interests, absorbing information, getting lost in creativity and imagination, day dreaming? What’s a normal person, someone that doesn’t get into things deeply and spends all their time micromanaging social life? Or is that social anxiety? Sounds really boring.

I think… maybe many of us think everyone is like ourselves and we don’t really know how different we are.

There are horse people who just like horses. And then there are those of us who obsessively read through a box of TB sales catalogs and studbooks and read the entire AHSA rulebook… for fun. Maybe we collected Breyers and thought about which bloodlines they best represented. We learned all the skeletal and internal parts of the horse. Etc.

[pony_grandma]

Kids don’t pursue knowledge since they have easy reference and don’t ever need to use recall or connect anything together, it’s done for them.

Why i said teaching them a chess mentality is an insight to why horses.

[Scribbler]

Well, I ended up an academic in a creative adjacent field that doesn’t really attract autism spectrum folks (unlike the hard sciences) and weeds out ADHD at the dissertation stage. Though we can be odd enough in other ways. Anyhow, I just always thought information was useful, the more the better, but you wanted to synthesize it into theories not just have it as mental lists. Anyhow I find people who just don’t know stuff and don’t care that they don’t know, puzzling and boring.

[EADoug]

My kid (6.5yrs) had no school today (Canada voting day!) I worked from home. His activities included:

• Lego
• flipping through illustrated Harry Potter’s
• going through a set of STEM books of kid activities
• playing in the yard unsupervised
• coming to barn with me and doing all the barn work
• entertaining himself in the arena with a hoof pick and a shedding comb while I rode.

His favourite part of the day? The pitchfork. Hands down.

[Annie10]

Definitely do check it out. My niece is able bodied but is autistic , although very higher functioning , and that environment was perfect. She sounds like at the time how your daughter is now, not able to ask questions and so forth It’s like they need processing time before they ask and by then things have moved on

[Annie10]

No one in my family rode either.