People often ask me, what's the hardest part of raising or teaching a special needs child? I always answer: On what day? At what hour? My autistic child is an independent adult now, and this last decade I’ve been responsible for the welfare of a beloved parent going through the bedeviling stages of dementia and physical decline. I saw it [...]
Autism, and all learning differences, are very, very complex. That seems so obvious, but I still get questions asking for a “single most important thing” about educating autistic kids. My answer, “as if there could ever be such a thing,” doesn’t satisfy, of course. What I offer instead of “single best” is a more global truth: that it is critical [...]
Do we think of our autistic kids as more rigid than resilient? In that mindset, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a symptom of our own rigidity—or can it become an opportunity for both parent and child, teacher and learner, to understand and grow? “That's it! It's all over! I've just completed my Associate’s Degree. I am officially a college [...]
When I was a kid we celebrated George Washington’s birthday by gluing white silhouettes of our first president to red and blue paper, reading about Valley Forge, the Continental Congress, wooden teeth, and the legend of how, as a boy, he chopped down a cherry tree, then confessed the deed to his father with the words, “I can’t tell a [...]
“Normal.” Now there’s a word we’d like to see omitted from your social vocabulary entirely – in not just what you say, but how you think about your child and his autism or Asperger’s. For many parents, emphasis on this two-syllable trip-off-the-tongue utterance can become a handicap of immeasurable dimension. Learning to think social and be social in whatever degree [...]
Children with autism love absolutes, and one of life’s absolutes is that everyone makes mistakes. It’s the degree, the nuance, the scale, the gradation of these mistakes that confounds the child with autism. But autism is often characterized by the ability to generalize. To this child’s concrete, black-and-white thinking, each mistake or failing stands as his and his alone, and [...]
My baby nephew came to visit when he was just a few months old. I missed him as soon as the door closed when he left. He smelled so good. With his head on my shoulder and my face next to that sweet head, I couldn’t get enough of that smell. I wanted to smile and say, “You aren’t always [...]
A parent asks: We have an eight-year-old daughter with autism. We’ve always agreed on our approach to parenting her, and we have no trouble loving her just the way she is. She gets speech therapy and other interventions through her school, which have helped her progress in her schoolwork and with interacting with her classmates. We’re new to the community, [...]
A mother asks: My preschooler has autism. He’s in a summer school program because of concerns about regression. On our first day, he threw a tantrum when we arrived. The teacher said he’d be fine, but the director of the program said that I either had to go in with him, have breakfast with him, and take him to the [...]
A parent asks: My husband and I are working parents of a four-year-old son with autism. When I see videos or read about abuse of autistic kids, I question my son’s school. He’s never shown any signs of abuse or complained about anything. But how can I know that my son’s teachers do right by him and do their jobs [...]