“He Does That All the Time at Home” What I Heard for Forty Years and Did Not Challenge It comes early in the meeting, usually while the present levels are being reviewed and someone is reading aloud a list of what the child does not yet do. A parent says it. Sometimes it is a … Read more
A teacher sits down on Sunday night to plan for an autistic student who has been struggling. She already understands that behavior is communication. She knows regulation comes before reasoning. She has moved away from reward charts and consequences and is trying to build support around safety, relationship, and autonomy. Then she opens her laptop … Read more
A child returns to the same three songs. Talks about trains through every conversation. Memorizes television episodes, studies maps, focuses on video games, sorts figures, or watches the same short video again and again. Adults often notice the repetition first. We may worry that the interest is taking up too much space. We may try … Read more
Early in my career, I used to stand in front of rooms full of parents—though, in those rooms, they were usually mothers—and tell them that autism affected about 1 in 10,000 children. I believed it. It was the number I had been given, and I repeated it with the confidence of someone who thought she … Read more