Brendan pictures

[celticdragonfly]

Brendan's school picture proof came home today.

Oh dear. Austistic kids are SOOO bad at faking a smile. I doubt we're going to get any.

Comments

[evolynrayne.livejournal.com]

Hey! It's been a while, how are the kiddos doin? and do you think ya'll will be back on this side of town any time soon?

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Eh, the babies are doing well. Brendan's story is much more complicated.

I doubt we'll be back over there any time soon - the mailing list that got us over there for that dinner flamed me enough I decided not to bother any more and left it, long ago.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

If it is any consolation, non-autistic kids are often not good at faking a smile. We taught our younger son to NOT smile for school photos, and they got a lot better!!

Christine

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

What she said. Little kids are either smiling spontaneously and genuinely, or they're NOT. And much of the photographer's effort revolves around causing the former.

Around age 6 (earlier for some kids and later for others), pretty much ALL kids figure out that they're supposed to "smile" for pictures, and pull their lips into an imitation of a yellow "smiley face" icon. It takes several years of this before they learn how to fake a *convincing* smile. An ability which seems to just *hit*, all of a sudden, much like the sudden appearance of that awful "camera smile".

Brendan may be a bit slower to get to each of these stages than other kids, but if he's picked up the Standard Elementary School Hideous Camera Smile at age...8, right?...he's within the usual range.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

*MAGGIE* will smile for the camera when asked, and it generally looks pretty convincing. And she's two.

Brendan doesn't have a hideous camera smile so much as a bizarre grimace.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. I know. I've taken pix of Maggie. :-) But she would qualify as "small child" in my earlier comment.

Sadly, she'll most likely lose that winsome and natural mugging-for-the-camera face, and pick up an obviously-fake "camera smile" that you ONLY see when the camera's out for a posed portrait, around age 5-6.

Hmm. Thinking about it, "child beauty contest" kids don't seem to do this. It might simply be that that's a group that self-selects for kids who don't have a bad "camera smile", but OTOH maybe the constant picture-taking keeps them "in practice", as it were. So perhaps the ubiquity of cameras in this digital age will affect that stage of social development....