Mother of Autistic Child Anna Khvorova Wants to Establish Her Son’s Link With the World

“We are a happy family. The windows of our apartment look on a marriage registration office, and its is a lucky omen when one sees weddings,” the mother of a handicapped son told The Day’s correspondent. Stricken hy misfortune, Anna Khvorova managed to retain her spirit and did not bewail her hard luck. Instead, she braced herself to fight her son’s illness and make her family happy, setting an example for other mothers to follow.

From his birth Andriy astonished people around him with his meaningful and serious gaze, something children lack. It soothed doctors and gave hope to his relatives who expected that some slowness and divergence in his development would disappear with time and the child with such a clever look in his eyes had a bright future ahead. Andriy’s father even wanted him to go to a mathematics magnet school, but the doctor’s diagnosis, child autism, ruined all such plans.

According to the experts, autism involves certain interruptions in mental development, quite as common as deafness or blindness, but still not known well even to specialists. This illness is manifested in various forms and at various stages of intellectual development. Children suffering from autism can be found both in kindergartens for ordinary and handicapped children, even in prestigious schools. Such children typically find it difficult to cooperate with other people. Autistic children are often erroneously perceived as spoilt, freakish, and bad-mannered. However, given understanding and support, such children can get the chance to learn how to interact with other people.

To date, there is no special institution in Ukraine to deal with autistic children. With her son soon to turn seven, Hanna Khvorova is doing everything possible for him to enter school on September 1 with other children of his age. Ms. Khvorova knows much about the disease, consulting with specialists and studying the case histories of autistic children. She has never been ashamed of her problem child, although many accused her of spoiling her son or not treating him with due care. She has sought ways to bring her child closer to people. So far, she has relied on her own efforts to help her son get in touch with the world, studying his behavior, strengths, and painstakingly training him every day. Training autistic children is quite a challenge, for they do not tolerate any guidance and want to act only according to their own preferences in learning. Experts at the Institute of Defectology under the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences gave Anna Khvorova their latest handouts for development classes with mentally handicapped children, and she wants to apply these materials to raise her son.

Andriy had gone to a kindergarten since he was three. First, it was an ordinary kindergarten, then one for speech handicapped, and now he goes to a child group with a focus on developing creativity run by the Kyiv Academy of Science. Children there are involved in elementary acting, drawing, and sculpture. Compared to his fellows, Andriy’s progress is not so noticeable, but his ability to assemble any mechanical gadgets quickly is amazing. Recently, Anna Khvorova saw her son, just back from kindergarten, training various facial expressions in front of a mirror. Children afflicted with autism show considerable problems with their emotional reactions and must be taught from scratch to feel and understand the emotions of other people. Another big problem is teaching them to interact with others, even with members of their own families. Such children find it difficult to ask for something or about something, they are captives in their own small world, viewing the outside world as a sequence of fragmented impressions that they piece together in a fashion known only to themselves. They are like aliens in this world, and we seldom realize that individuals living in other dimensions live side by side and need our understanding and assistance. Before they were mistakenly confused with mentally retarded and kept in isolation. Recall The Rain Man, a film depicting the life story of an autistic person confined in an asylum and his healthy brother. Following a period of isolating mentally handicapped children, we have now gone to another extreme: to get carried away with integration, we tend to underestimate schools for handicapped children. Ms. Khvorova read in a medical journal about an autistic child who went to an ordinary school in one of Europe’s countries. His training was limited to merely attending classes and taking walks under escort from a teacher’s assistant, with the afflicted child interfering with the studies of the other schoolchildren. Such ineffectual schooling does not suit Anna Khvorova, and she continues to knock on the doors of research institutions and education authorities in her efforts to provide better schooling for autistic children. Even schools for the handicapped are not good for such children as the education of those with no skills of communicating with the outside world cannot be narrowed to their desires. They need contacts with ordinary children, understandably, without affecting the latter’s studies.

Hanna Khvorova kept on looking for solutions with decision-makers. She spoke to the officials at the Ministry of Education and Science and received help from Head of Kyiv’s Department of Education Mykhailo Zhebrovsky. Teachers at Boarding School No. 7 for children with speech impediments (Kyiv) began a project involving autistic children with adequate intelligence quotient by opening two classes for them. According to Anna Khvorova, Ukraine should not get its fingers burnt by following the experience of more advanced countries. She makes a strong case for development and societal accommodation of autistic children speaking to practicing teachers and experts from the Institute of Defectology. In their views, the problem can be solved by integrating schools for children with speech impediments and the ones for autistic children, running classes for autistic children in integrated schools where victims of autistism will be able to attend some classes for children with speech impediments, apart from being involved in their normal upbringing.

Currently, Ms. Khvorova is looking for like-minded persons who can support and help implement her initiative, as well as doing preliminary work to organize a summer tourist rehabilitation camp for autistic and other mentally handicapped children. The camp project involves about fifty persons, including twelve handicapped children, their brothers, sisters, and parents, along with volunteer teenagers. The initiative may prove short-lived, unless supported by specialists ready to work in the camp in summer. It would be a shame if this effort to address this problem in Ukraine does not receive adequate help. Camp experience could be the start of a targeted study of this unusual disease and lay the groundwork for the integrated schooling of children with special needs. If the project does get off the ground, the dream of Andriy’s father to send him to a mathematics magnet school might come true, the more so that autistic children quite often reveal remarkable mathematical abilities.