Christopher Boone Case Study Essay

Conclusion: Christopher Boone has ASD and due to his disorder, has persistent deficits in reciprocal social communication and social interaction. He also has restricted patterns of behavior and interests. These cognitive and behavioral deficits negatively affect Christopher’s ability to form relationships, to understand people’s perspectives, to be able to walk into a strange situation and not be completely overwhelmed, to have a regular sleep/eating schedule that is not affected by a fixation on a specific subject, to behave less disruptively, and to be able to cope with stressful situations. His impairments can each prove to be constructive and destructive to his everyday functioning. Parent’s responses also interact with the impairments.

This can be seen when Christopher’s deficits in verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors add to his impairments in social-emotional reciprocity as his inability to interpret other people’s expressions, gestures, jokes, and other methods of communication enhance his inability to form and engage in reciprocal relationships. Due to his impairments in social communication, his parents were not able to completely understand Christopher’s behaviors and Christopher was not able to understand his parent’s perspectives. Therefore, his parents were not completely cognizant of their son’s triggers to the extent that they should have been. Their inability to read their child’s social-communication signals disabled them from interacting with their child in a more responsive way.
His mother was especially guilty of this and made it worse by using and modeling maladaptive regulation strategies. This probably aided Christopher’s development of high emotional reactivity and his tendency to engage in aggressive behaviors. Unlike Siobhan, her mother and father did not provide Christopher ways of coping that enabled Christopher to ease his anxiousness and his hypersensitivity without the need to engage in maladaptive