NBC's "Parenthood" will shine a light on Asperger's, advocates say

From The Record in N.J.:

Max Braverman is not your typical 8-year-old.

The younger child of a central character in NBC's new "Parenthood," Max wears a pirate costume to school every day, fails to acknowledge a classmate's "hello" and bites a kid who calls him a "freak" (after Max keeps crumpling up construction paper).

After that incident, the school's principal gingerly recommends that Max see an educational therapist — whose evaluation we later learn in a heart-wrenching scene.

"She thinks he may have Asperger's … high-functioning autism," Max's mom (Monica Potter) tells her husband, Adam (Peter Krause), who's deeply in denial and argues why this couldn't be so. "Honey, there's something wrong with our baby," his wife says, pleading, "Please don't make me be alone with this."

This scenario is something many parents of "Aspies" will relate to, says Nicoletta LaMarca Sacco of Cliffside Park, who has a 12-year-old son with Asperger's syndrome and is coordinator of the Bergen County chapter of ASPEN (Asperger's Syndrome Parent Education Network). "Even if you are raising one child and don't have any siblings to compare him to, you can tell if something's off."

Although she and the other local autism experts we contacted had not previewed "Parenthood," based on our description of key scenes and the fact that one of the executive producers has a child with Asperger syndrome (also called disorder), they are hopeful the show will educate the public about this autism spectrum disorder.

"Given the large percent of individuals out there with Asperger's, I think that it is really important that the media is catching up with incorporating characters on TV and in movies that reflect the true-life experiences of individuals with a spectrum disorder, especially Asperger's," says Jeanne Marron, clinical director of Asperger's Related Services at West Bergen Mental Healthcare in Ridgewood, Ramsey and Oakland.

Linda Meyer is executive director of Autism New Jersey, a non-profit agency providing information and advocacy, services, education and consultation. She recalls that after "Rain Man" premiered in 1988, the Autism Society of America said the movie "did more to promote autism to the public in something like two months than they had managed to achieve in many, many years."

The downside of "Rain Man," she adds, was that "for years everybody thought the character that Dustin Hoffman played was autism," rather than one portrayal of it. She's hoping the new TV show will broaden people's understanding that there is a spectrum.

"Persons with Asperger's disorder have problems with behavior and social skills, but they don't have problems generally with language and communication," explains Meyer, one of the founders of the Alpine Learning Group, a Paramus-based non-profit school for children with autism, in operation since 1989. "These are the individuals, particularly at school age, who are very capable of expressing themselves. Frequently, they stay on one topic. … It might be trains or insects or some form of science or weather. When they're sharing their vast knowledge of this particular topic, they're not aware that it might not be of interest to others."

NBC's hour-long "Parenthood" is based on the 1989 movie, which featured a child with an unspecified emotional disturbance. Director Ron Howard noted recently that "the Asperger's diagnosis wasn't on the radar 20 years ago."

Howard, who also produced a short-lived half-hour spinoff in 1990, is an executive producer of the new project. But the "show runner" is executive producer Jason Katims, who has firsthand knowledge of Asperger's.

"I have been researching it steadily for the past 13 years, because I have a son with Asperger's," Katims told television reporters in January, adding that it "is very important for me to depict that as realistically as possible."