She has had conflicts in the past with administrators at Austin's school over his Individualized Education Program - a set of goals for a child with a disability. Wagner said enrolling her son in the study will help with the rest of his education. It's really slow," explaining that when she watches her son, he is very deliberate. "When they print, they don't like you and I do," she said. While researchers may have realized that many autistic children have bad handwriting, they did not know if it related to their autism, or whether it was a problem understanding the forming of words, or whether it had to do with motor skills.īarbara Wagner, a mother of two boys with autism spectrum disorders, enrolled her older son, Austin, 14, in the study, although she knew beforehand there was something different about how he wrote. A new study out this week in the journal Neurology explains some of the reasons for that phenomenon - and why bad handwriting might even lead to nonverbal communication problems.