The Siege: A Family's Journey Into the World of an Autistic Child

This book, the story of one family’s attempt to break through what seems to them to be their child’s utter indifference to them, is remarkable both for the mother’s story of her own efforts to engage her child and for her account of her attempts to get help from a community of professionals who seem as baffled as she is by her child’s behavior.Her progress with her daughter is very slow.. Elly ( the pseudonym for Jessica Park) makes progress at her own pace and she notices and responds to what interests her. She is very attentive to some details ( and has become a remarkable artist) but she is rarely attentive to people. I sometimes got impatient with the narrative but I think that was more indicative of my need for Elly to make more rapid and remarkable progress than it was of any flaw in the prose. Clara Claiborne Park raised Elly during the era when the supposed etiology of autism was “the refrigerator mother,” a parent who did not want her child and whose demeanor conveyed this to the developing infant. (See Bruno Bettleheim’s “Joey the Mechanical Boy” for the full explanation of this most damaging of theories). Her discomfort at being judged for unnamed flaws is poignantly expressed: “Comfortable, well-educated members of the upper middle class ordinarily escape the experience of depersonalization, of utter helplessness in institutional hands, of reduction to the status of children to whom situations are mediated, not explained. Like so much that hurts, the experience is deeply educational. . We know now in our skins that the most threatening of all attacks is the attack on the sense of personal worth, that the harshest of all deprivations is the deprivation of respect. We know now, I think, how the slum mother feels as the welfare worker comes round the corner. It takes, one would think, so little knowledge of psychology to put oneself in another person's place.” Attitudes toward autism and its etiology have changed dramatically, but this memoir, originally written in the 1960s is still well worth reading

The Seige is fairly dated now; autism study has come a long way since then. It is more a case study than a memoir, and sometimes the amount of details gets a bit much. But it is certainly a landmark, and well worth taking a look at. For what it's worth, the last few sentences of the book are the wisest comment on why we are here in this veil of tears that I have ever encountered.

No wonder some friend stole this one. A woman you'd like to have as a near neighbour, telling the story of the first eight years of the bringing-up of an autistic daughter, her youngest child. Of the slow realisation, between when she was about eight months old and when she was two, that there was something different and far wrong, something missing: not intelligence, not the usual senses: call it a willingness to let the senses in. Of the years of unrelenting struggle to get this child to latch onto the world around her, to interact with people, to speak: years of a siege - and there were three other children needing love as well, and people who helped and people who did NOT ... I just had to get another copy.

I first read this book as a college student thinking about working with children with communication disabilities, and it was one of the best chronicles on child language acquisition I'd ever read. It is beautifully and sensitively written, and chronicles the real struggles that even an upper class family with plenty of education has getting diagnoses and answers when a child is developing atypically. The child "Elly" (whose real name is Jessica Parks), has grown up to be a talented artist who works in the mailroom at Williams College.

While I have been trained to work with autistic children, I had never encountered such a thorough account of the first years of the life and uneven development of an autistic child. Clara Claiborne Park is an amazing observer, author, mother, and scientist in the way she analyzes the language problems and thinks of ways to work with them. This book should be read by any mother and father and professional dealing with an infant and preschooler who is not developing as 'normal'; those who have autistic children will recognize the behaviors and those who children are not autistic will be given a lot to observe and decide that that is not the direction of a non-autistic child. Either way, this book should be a helpful guide!

I enjoyed reading this book and received it in a timely manner. However, someone folded the front cover page or placed it in the package so hastily that it was bent backwards near the top of it (the front cover) when I received the item in the mail.

This is a telling and remarkable story of one family, especially of the mother, and the struggle to deal with an autistic child. This occurred prior to the more extensive knowledge about the condition. I commend this parent and her achievement and highly recommend reading the story for parents, teachers, and others who work with the autistic.

A must read for every parent of a child with autism! Superbly written with incredible insight only a devoted mother could offer. Don't be put off because it was written in the early 60's, this is a classic in the autism world!

Subtitled A family’s journey into the world of an autistic child. “We would use every stratagem we could invent to assail her fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce her into the human condition.” Very slowly, feeling their way, they make amazing progress. I should keep a note of what or who prompts me to buy books, because they go to the end of my TBR queue and, by the time they come up, I’ve forgotten the prompt. But whatever it was in this case, I’m really glad to have read it. I was employed one uni vacation in a children’s home for under 5s, whose little inmates broke my heart in a wide variety of ways, mostly through their neediness of the love they were variously lacking. When I got cuddly with one of them, I was called to the office, where I was told to stop cuddling as I would be gone in a few weeks. Under stern surveillance I stopped, causing more distress, I believe, than a loving goodbye would eventually have done. One child, a pretty, waiflike little blonde girl, sat apart every day on the grass, in her own world, rocking, showing no need of anything or anyone. No one ever engaged with her or spoke to her and I was told not to bother. Wrong. Wrong, Wrong.

The original autism parents book, fighting back against the silly psychotherapy ideas around autism of the day. Park is a true heroine. - Antony Morris