ly. Another child may study letters, numbers, or stare at a picture rather than play. Some children engage in verbal stereotypes, examples are singing a particular song or repeating a single joke again and again. Attempts to deviate from routines are often resisted strenuously and may lead to major temper tantrums (Rapin 1995).Inability to play creatively and preference for manipulating, lining up, or classifying toys is often striking (Mesibov and Shea 1996). The children may not recognize that dolls stand for people. Even high-functioning autistic children lack imagination. For example, while they may be taught to feed a doll and put it to sleep, their pretending is repetitive and does not progress to more elaborate schemes of normal children their age.Verbal autistic children may spend weeks and months on some narrow topic, such as dinosaurs or timetables, to the point where they know all there is to know about it and want to speak about it incessantly, unaware of the boredom of those around them. They may attend to subtle details and become meticulous classifiers and collectors of stones, bottle caps, or other trivial artifacts (Prizzant 1994). Rather than attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to curb this propensity, an intelligent vocational planner can turn it into an asset, guiding the autistic person into a vocation that stresses classification skills.With autism involving so many complex disabilities, it has been difficult for researchers to come to a conclusion about the precise cause of this developmental disorder is. Doctors, scientists and researchers have studied family genetics, damage to genes during prenatal development and they have also taken a closer look at disorders related to autism. Like any other major disability, a family that bears a child with autism is more likely to have a recurrence, but this has not been the majority case. Because of the lack of known cause in developing autism, treatment has be...
