Asperger's Syndrome is a developmental disorder on the Autism Spectrum Disorder spectrum. Children diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome have difficulty with social interactions and understanding unspoken social cues. As such, it is often the case that kids with Asperger's Syndrome get into more trouble in school, exasperate teachers and are the subject of bullying.

Asperger's Syndrome sufferers are often highly intelligent and highly verbal. Boys are four times as likely than girls to be diagnosed with Asperger's, but it remains unclear whether this is because they are four times more likely to develop it, or if the different socialization processes for girls and boys improves Asperger's girls' social abilities so that they become indistinguishable from non-Asperger's girls.

When normal infants are learning to read caregivers' moods through facial expressions, Asperger's Syndrome children are not. When threats and dares are uttered on the playground, normal children might know when another child is bluffing, when to ask an adult to intervene and when to stand up for themselves. Asperger's kids might miss all these cues, and get into unnecessary fights, or allow themselves to be cowed by a kid who was only teasing, marking them as an easy target for bullies.

Teens and adults with Asperger's Syndrome are often unable to discern that they are talking too loudly for the circumstances. They also develop monomaniacal interests in esoteric topics, and cannot understand that others are less interested. Clues that they are boring someone with the depths and details of their interests pass them by, so Asperger's Syndrome people often find themselves socially isolated as peers avoid them.

People with Asperger's Syndrome can be taught to decode social cues intellectually, rather than instinctively. This is a fairly lengthy and frustrating process, because most people cannot verbalize what they understand instinctively, but recruiting friends and family to help is useful. A teen with Asperger's Syndrome might tell their most trusted friends, for example, to give them a particular hand signal when they are speaking too loudly, or a different signal when they are belaboring a topic that no one else is interested in.

It's not a uniformly bleak picture for those with Asperger's Syndrome, however. Their ability to focus like a laser on very intricate topics make them extremely well-suited to certain fields of endeavor; the computer field is a natural haven for those with Asperger's Syndrome.