I really like what Temple Grandin is doing in many ways. I like that she supports different minds and describes very simply and concretely what autistic people need and might be able to do as work.
There is one thing I’d like to point out to Ms. Grandin, if I may. It’s the assumption about the autism spectrum or “continuum” as she puts it. It is tricky because it has been an easy way to describe and try to understand autism. Yet like most things easy, they are not fully descriptive.
It is the point at which she, perhaps inadvertently in order to simplify the description, lowers the intelligence level of non verbal autistic people to the bottom of the “spectrum,” to the “verbal” autistics who are “brilliant.” For all the non verbal or partially verbal autistic people out there, many of who comment here and/or write their own blogs and even do their own presentations, I’d like to add that non verbal people can also be of “normal,” “bright,” or of “gifted” intelligence. Of course verbal and non verbal people can also be more cognitively challenged. There is no way we can use the “continuum,” really, to effectively describe autism and intelligence and I think we need to talk about this more.
Temple Grandin talks a lot about thinking in pictures and she can verbalize this well. For many autistic folks who cannot, like my son Adam among others, I can say that verbal ability does not equal intelligence. I hope that Temple Grandin can speak a little bit more on that in the future so as not to cast another stereotype that she perhaps does not intentionally mean to cast.
In this blog, I speak a lot about the visual — visual data and the potential for many autistic people to translate so much data into the visual so that we can better understand it. There could be many opportunities for our children if we look at this seriously and nuture the skills. As for her segment on visual perception, I once posted a drawing by Adam, who has motor planning issues, but clearly had an advanced perspective, demonstrated in some of his artwork, over his same-aged peers. I have always noted and recognized Adam’s visual abilities. It’s still incredibly difficult to find teachers who recognize and are able to nuture this ability. It’s incredibly frustrating, in fact.
I do thank Temple Grandin for being out there to discuss the need for mentors and the contributions our children can make to society, if given the chance and opportunities.
One of the most talked about issues in autism is the issue of verbal communication or “functional” speech. That is, speech that is reciprocal, social, conversational. For Adam, there have been major challenges in this area and he has had to use augmentative forms in order to communicate many things, yet for the person who understands his communication, he is communicating all the time. I do not find it too difficult to understand and the one shortcoming I may have is the tendency to feel frustrated when he is — when he cannot get a more complex message across.
Adam turned eight this year and much of this is beginning to change. Adam began to talk in sentences, began to show me things and started to become “the teacher,” in the sense that he would test me on the things he wanted to talk about in books. He learned certain concepts such as what something was NOT as opposed to what it was, among other concepts.
There are a couple of things I want to write with respect to progress in communication ability, quite unscientifically, in this post, for I have not yet found some good citations to support my theories about autism and development. So take it for what it’s worth and perhaps you may see some more of my posts deal with this — with citations.
I’ve been reading how to teach philosophy to children through children’s books: Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature, by Thomas E. Wartenberg. When we refer to teaching “critical thinking” to autistic children, it usually has to deal with teaching the more functional types like putting puzzles together or teaching Feature, Function and Class — for those familiar you know what I mean. These are the basic skills we believe are absent in autistic children because their very expression is difficult to manifest — be it for attentional reasons or motor planning issues, or both.
We do not address for the “profoundly autistic,” “severely autistic” or any autistic child, for that matter, often enough, how to read books, how to question and how to think abstractly because we have decided that autistic people learn literally. While this may be in part true, we miss an opportunity to help along the critical aspects to being human — the ability to question. I’ve read many a time how we wish to teach some flexibility in thinking in autism. To me, teaching through books and by taking a lead in creative ways to view things from different angles is not only an exercise for Adam, but also for myself. We would all stand to gain from working to think in ways that may not be familiar to us.
We are more often concerned with our children knowing how to read the words (certainly this is the first step to reading at all). We do not learn how to talk to an autistic child who has difficulty with that reciprocity, how to really push forward, even though their manifestation of understanding is not what we expect. In my view, I feel it is dangerous to assume that Adam does not understand as much as it is to take for granted that he can just learn the way a typical child does. Yet all those years of puzzles, functional skills and communication issues makes me worried that Adam is missing the most important component of life learning, that is, to ask questions about everything. I’m quite sure I will be writing more about my in-house experiments here.
That said, I have a short story to tell. With some severe weather hovering around Toronto, there was a downburst, or a tornado. Both Adam and I enjoy watching the weather reports. With bad weather, we are glued to the TV. I was talking about funnel clouds and how they are dangerous.
“Why?” Adam asked.
“Because they can rip down houses and trees,” I said.
“Why?” he asked again. I am thinking about a three-year-old I once knew when I was an older kid and how every answer to a question he had ended up with yet another “why?” Like that, the conversation went on a bit between Adam and I. He kept asking me “why?” until I ran out of answers!
For a typical child, asking “why?” is expected. For an eight-year-old developing autistic child, it was another one of our milestones.
With that “why?” also came a series of sentences and conversations this week. With those conversations came difficulty falling asleep and some body jerks. Also interesting that along with an increased in verbal expression came an improvement on his fine-motor skills at the dining table as well as gross motor skills I noticed while watching him outside climbing structures I’ve never seen him climb before. Could this be a reason for the sleeping issues? Could his body be a-buzz?
Again, I am making a possible correlation that needs to be tested because dad let him sleep in over the weekend (school was out) and this is reason enough for not being able to go to sleep the following day and, perhaps lack of sleep and other frustrations lead to more body jerks. Yet I also wonder, only because I’ve seen it before, if sleep issues and body jerks have to do with an increased output of communication and other “manifestions,” — overall “progress.” So often we view “issues” as a result of “delay” and “behaviours” and we label it as if it is something we have to get rid of or something that worries us. Yet, with this example, Adam is trying so hard to express himself and his body may be following him as it attempts to process the steps we have taken for granted. If we take a view that such preservations, behaviours, sleep problems might have to do with processing, progress and development, how might we address and teach autistic children differently?
It’s something to think about when we study autism and when we rethink the, perhaps, very “normal” path of autistic development.
It is said that one should write something that they would like to read. In those early autism years, as I was in that period of coalescing my arguments and thoughts about autism, I have enjoyed writing about Adam, motherhood, and our “journey.” There is a sense of therapy to writing and that can be beneficial for many people undergoing a similar situation. Writing can help us transcend the feeling that we are “all alone.” Yet I have the feeling after being a few years in this, that filtering autism down to miracles and gifts as well as horrors and tragedies has just become naïve. It’s time for all of us to up the ante (I am turning the finger towards myself here).
There is no new take these days on writing an autism and this in and of itself seems to me that either I’ve become over-saturated with the type of material, or I’ve simply reached a new parenting stage and where it takes me with writing here, I am not yet sure. I have tried to post a few interesting presentations on the blog the past couple of weeks. There are so many performances and exhibitions, and art is a segue to complex ideas often then used and analysed also by science as much as science can influence art. Of autistic performance and exhibition, please don’t label them as “miracles.”
We’ve noted what a detriment to the autistic community such stereotyping can be. Even if it’s true that autistic thinking is different, and of benefit to our society in many ways, this is no reason to call it gifted or a “miracle.” When it comes to a play, or an autistic child typing, or a group of autistic children performing for an audience, I’m really taken aback at references to the achievements being “miracles.” However, if we are referring to all of us as being “miracles,” I sort of get that — I get that embrace of the miraculous state we call human. Miracles are a short-cut answer and resolution to that which is unresolvable. Try to tie it up with a convenient conclusion, and we will all fail.
Acceptance is as acceptance does, and in all likelihood, the name is too simple while embracing everything. “Simplicity embraces exactly the right details, the right difficulties, the right complexity,” but it also requires am effort in learning, observing, studying and yes, striving to argue well here in this contentious autism community. Acceptance is not simple. Autistic achievement is not a miracle, although it has been so unrecognized in human history that it is not surprising that we have labeled it as such. This is humanity we’re talking about. It’s messy, difficult, wonderful, full of frustration, anguish and yes, joyful.
The nice thing about art is that it is a language without words. It’s why I believe strongly that it is an important (not nice and trite, isn’t-the-Autie-a-genius) approach to appreciating not only how autistic people may see and develop, but of course of understanding humanity — a very broad statement, I know, but art is a way to bridge the barriers of looking at people with neurological differences as “abnormal,” “retarded” and the like.
It is also highly ironic that I write about art and that the art world seeks so many words to critique and analyze it. Yet, at the end of the day, we have a gut response to art before we have an intellectual one.
I was thinking about this as Adam has turned to art. This is not just peripheral observation…it goes deeper. Adam studies all the elements of things with ferocity and concentration. He will hold any object in his hand — even a part of an object, turn it around and study it, tap it and consider all of it’s physical properties. He may or may not label it, as he has done since he was eleven months of age (labeling, that is), but I consider that his sharing in this manner is simply his way of sharing with me because he has trouble with words. Yet, his understanding goes far beyond the label.
W.J.T. Mitchell, in his essay Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy? (excerpted from Visual Literacy edited by James Elkins) asks how seeing is different from reading. “Even more interesting, what would happen if we reversed the positions of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor, and treated reading as ‘tenor’ — the thing to be explained — and vision as the vehicle that might help explain it? What would happen, in other words, if we thought of our task as one of research and teaching in reading, based in models drawn from seeing and the visual system?” (p.11).
It is in this vein that I believe we can begin to explain our words about autism and challenge our very basic assumptions. For instance, consider the two drawings below. Adam, at the age of 8 has fine motor planning difficulties. It is very hard for him to hold a pencil or crayon, but in the first drawing one can see it’s coming and that he is trying extremely hard to express himself.
The drawing beside it, also a Lion, was executed by a same-aged “typical” peer. By contrast, one can see the marks in this drawing made with strength and certainty whereby Adam’s drawing seems a little tentative and soft by virtue of his motor planning difficulty. Take another look. Adam took great care and time rendering that drawing. So much so, he even walked away, came back to reconsider it and lightly put the finishing touches carefully on the tail several minutes after it seemed finished. It was so lightly drawn that it was difficult to photograph. Look at the perspective and how he tries to implement it. It is not a flat drawing. He can see how the body has several dimensions. Compare it to the “same-aged typical peer” drawing — wonderful in its own rite but by contrast, there is, as of yet, no conception of perspective. In one drawing the earth is round, in the other, flat.
Adam's "Lion King"
A drawing of a lion from a same-aged "typical" peer
It is interesting to me to watch Adam’s “visualcy” manifest. It is interesting because he does not fit into any developmental mold. While his hand his light, he is ahead of the curve by way of his perception. One might mistake motor-planning difficulty with Adam’s “retardation,” as it was formerly labeled. Now how dangerous is this when we consider how to teach an autistic person? What assumptions about his intelligence are we making? When I think of schools I get extremely nervous about moving him too slow or too fast. One simply has to SEE.
——
Reference:
James Eklins, Visual Literacy, New York: Routledge, 2008.
Here in Toronto, I sit on Inclusion Committees. My son has been included in a Montessori classroom but we are going to leave after June. The school gave Adam loads of acceptance and enabled him to bring his aide, his adapted programs, his computer laptop and the like. The school was wonderful in that it was a calm environment that had concrete Montessori materials for him to use.
We had to adapt his program, ourselves, while staying within the structure of the classroom. He worked alongside the other kids and the other kids loved him. He learned how to engage with them and they learned how to engage with him. It was very important at the time we made the move to a Montessori school that Adam be with peers and be able to learn to tolerate them, the noise, and being able to play and learn with others. It was the right move for him. My wish is that schools would provide more education about people with disabilities: how to be more patient, tolerant and accommodating, and there are programs in Toronto that are attempting to achieve such goals. Last night, I attended Inclusion Awards night in Toronto and spoke briefly with The Honourable David Onley (Governor General of Ontario) who is himself disabled.
It was a successful experience and I have to admit, we’ve not had any problems with our school choices like so many other families who must endure the public school system, the IPRC process and assigned E.A’s. In addition, too many “special needs” schools ironically turn down autistic children with behavioural challenges or children like Adam, who have difficulty talking. I understand that that is very difficult, heart-wrenching and it seems we sit on pins and needles waiting to see if we either get the luck of the draw or if we have to endure another heart-wrenching process as I have also been privy to it. This is the most unjust process I can think of as no child should be turned down from any school, let alone the “special needs” schools, but this is the reality right now. Here in Ontario so far, Inclusion is only as successful as the person who is leading the process within the school. A teacher is only as good who understands the child as a unique and whole human being, and is willing to go the extra mile. But for those of us who live through this daily, I’m not saying anything new.
Although I am thankful for our successful early years, our weekends were left struggling to find play-dates from many of these children. Adam always gravitates to the other students with special needs anyway, so it became easier to enroll him in social programs for special needs children. It’s a common story: like attracts like. We feel more comfortable with the people who may understand us and with whom we may understand, and we have to allow room for all of this in the Inclusion process. Adam’s school was a brilliant jumping board for Adam to graduate to the next level, so he will be attending a school that will be able to accommodate his learning needs more appropriate to his new found curiousity. Or so I’m hoping.
Inclusion is nascent in the Toronto community. Still, there are attitudes to hurdle, not to mention a reluctance to invest time, money and training, perhaps because these attitudes are not really up-to-speed. If a question I received yesterday from another parent with a child with another disability was any indication (“is your son violent?” ),one may begin to understand the many general assumptions that exist out in the world about autism and wonder if fear is the biggest barrier to Inclusion. I certainly don’t blame anyone for asking such questions — there are people with many challenges out there. Adam is not violent. He is affable, social (for an autie — he just does it differently but often craves being with others even if he may engage in the “Adam way”), and he wants to learn, even if he struggles with what appears to us like distraction (or should I rephrase that and say it is also us as the parents and teachers who struggle with it because it challenges us to have to learn and see the way our children might?). Adam is talking more now and he was approved for a new device which will enable him to communicate even more. He is bright, able in so many ways. He has a handicap in a world where his style of being is the minority, mind you, but this doesn’t stop him, or me, from moving ahead.
This is the first year I’ve engaged Adam in more special needs programs — for social skills, life-skills and general leisure. He is still Included in a “regular” summer camp, but Adam now needs a different kind of support as he grows into the world. I am very happy for him that he will be gaining these new skills and looking forward to his ability to help others, as I believe it is crucial in life that we all find our areas in which to swagger. In fact, as I’ve sat with it for a few days now, I’m thrilled. I still have no doubt that he will be able to do contribute and go on to further education in his future. It’s not an outrageous expectation: I’m basing it on the person I see in front of me who is utterly capable and who is a privileged boy in that he is being given two healthy, willing parents who enable opportunities for him in his life. I still work in Inclusion because I want to see more opportunities for Adam by the time he reaches his twenties. We have to work at all angles — both in Special Education and Inclusion. The trainings co-exist and are not exclusive of each other.
This lead to another thought I had this morning as I still read the many pleas for money for “Early Intervention.” I wondered why, after I’ve come so far in my own thinking, the term still bothers me to the extent that it does. So here’s my answer: Adam doesn’t need intervention. I may be lucky that Adam is an only child as I have nothing and no-one to compare him to except for my own childhood. I figure we have made our own normal. Our weekends are full — yes, we do visit friends and other children, we have programs to attend, concerts and plays to see — and yes, these have to be pre-planned (but then again, what family doesn’t organize a play-date?). No, I cannot drop him off and leave him alone in someone else’s house yet, but like all things Adam, he will do things his way and his own time. I could sit here and cry and bemoan that fact that he is not doing all of the “typical” things other boys his age might do, or imagine that he is somehow lonelier for it. But is he? He has no siblings to compare himself to. He is competent in our home, a burgeoning artist, musician and cook. He enjoys other children and will likely gain a long-time friend when he is ready. Like myself as an only-child, he has learned to entertain himself or play with me or spend time with his grandparents or much older half-siblings when they return from university. For us, our normal was early engagement and we grew into acceptance. For certain when Adam was two years old, I believed all this engagement would make him more “normal,” whatever that meant to me at the time. Six years later, I can see that our life is normal. It is normal to us and aside from our personal struggles recently with life transitions, I really love our life. I figure that one of the many gifts I might be able to give to Adam is my belief in this. All I have to do to believe it, is to let go.
It is not. Autism is our normal. Autism simply means that I needed to engage differently at those early stages of growth, not employ the tactics of early intervention. I wish I had had someone to tell me this when Adam was first diagnosed as it has taken me time to grow into my thoughts and words. Adam was not ready for the forty hours of ABA that was suggested back in those days, and we all know that even with all that ABA and all those promises, our children are still autistic.
When I hear parents complain about autism (see this blog on Kim Stagliano and her recent tirade on blaming autism for Aiden Johnson death), I can feel myself being sucked into a vortex and I do not see how that helps us become better parents to our children. Yet I suppose if certain parents truly feel empowered by believing autism is like cancer, if that gives them some kind of hope as the walks, marathons, runs do to defeat disease, then they will work and talk hard. They will use fighting-words.
I am of the belief that by fighting, one is defeating the child, not the autism. I am of the belief that by attacking the child from every angle like a huge dose of chemo sends a message to that child with a different perspective and manner of engaging in the world, that THEY are wrong. I see autistic children as they grow older with those beliefs surrounding them, absorbing the idea that autism is a disease and that “they are more than their autism.” What does that mean other than a denial that autism has truly effected the way one perceives and engages with others and the environment? Why not be proud of that and learn ways to take advantage of it?? I’m so sad to see parents fight so hard and then become so despondent.
I propose that while we are changing schools next term, that we again look at the terms we use. Had I intervened with Adam in an aggressive way, I truly believe he would have regressed into himself and perhaps with more aggressive behaviours. Instead, I propose we act gently. We have to challenge ourselves everyday with the notion that there are many kinds of normal in this world and while the world may not yet totally get it, it is through our use of terms and our actions that will enable the rest of our communities to jump aboard.
I am very uncomfortable using the term early intervention for assisting autistic children. I believe we have to work to change not only our attitudes, but our terms have to catch up. Perhaps we can use terms such as early engagement and early promotion of the different forms of play that we can engage autistic toddlers in the same respect and presentation we promote play for typical toddlers. Of course, the earlier we can do this, the earlier parents may be able to accept their autistic toddlers, and this supports everyone.
I love this video. It’s just that simple. “You get rid of the autism gene and you get rid of Mozart, Einstein, Silicon Valley…” I love how Temple advocates and it’s this kind of advocacy that assists us in putting ourselves, as neurotypical parents and teachers and therapists, with outrageous expectations, under a much needed spotlight. Beyond listening to her story about “gifts” is an opportunity to consider the disconnect we create when we try to “fix the problem.”
We’ve had some encouraging messages lately, haven’t we? The HBO production of Temple Grandin played by Claire Danes shows that while (and many of us have read Temple’s books already) the world caused her anxiety, she could “see details other people are blind to,” she says. “I have a gift.”
Certainly the idea of giftedness, which happens in non autistic and autistic persons, can be yet another stereotype in assessing autistic people. Perception, on the other hand, is something to think about deeply.
When Adam was very young, we had these water blocks that were dyed different colours. Adam was mesmerized by these blocks watching the water swish and swoosh. Then all of a sudden, my wobbly toddler took them up to the window and peered through them. Ah, I thought. If only we could all stare at the world through coloured water blocks. How beautiful it would be. I know was also in part a cooing mother of a young autistic boy, so anything he did like this made me hyper-aware. But still.
When he got his “legs” and we began walking around the neighbourhood, Adam memorized his routes. To this day, if we take him to his old house and walk from there or the park nearby, he will remember how to get to that park or get back through the old “secret pathway” to the old house — which has even since been torn down and rebuilt! Remember, that was his two-three year old brain. In April, he will be eight-years-old.
Coming out soon will be a new version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton. Many people suspect that Carrol was himself autistic with his different perceptual abilities. He is often cited as a person who “suffered” from micropsia and macropsia, which is a neurological condition that changes the way the brain perceives the size of objects. When Alice falls down that rabbit hole, we get a look into Carroll’s mind.
Scientific American Mind published Extraordinary Perception by Wray Herbert this month. It discusses how psychologists at University College London “think that it might be a mistake to consider [autistic] distractability as simply a deficit. To the contrary, Anna Remington and John Swettenham and their colleagues speculate that people with ASD might have greater than normal capacity for perception, so that what appears as irrelevant distraction is really a cognitive bonus.” I added autistic to distractability as many therapies for autism as well as medications are geared at lessening it.
The test, the article shows, was for subjects to “rapidly determine if the letters N or X were present in the ring” on a computer screen. Participants had to then “hit the corresponding key on the keyboard. Some of the circles — those with more letters — were more difficult to process than others. There were also other letters floating outside the circle, but the subjects were specifically instructed to ignore those letters. Those floating letters were the laboratory equivalent of an irrelevant distraction in the real world.” In measuring perceptual capacity, researchers saw that “everyone was slower at the task when the ring contained more letters. The researchers were also measuring distractibility. When a letter outside the ring was one of the target letters (N or X), the subjects often took a longer time finding the N or X in the ring — indicating they were distracted by the presence of a target letter in the location that they were supposed to ignore.”
The researchers reasoned “that as long as the subjects’ total perceptual capacity was not exhausted, they would also process the irrelevant, distracting letters within their visual field. Once they had surpassed their perceptual capacity — once the ring of letters was sufficiently complex — irrelevant processing would stop [bold mine]. So if ASD subjects in fact have greater processing capacity, then they should process more distracting information even as the main task becomes increasingly complex.”
In conclusion, “although there was no difference among subjects in either reaction time or accuracy on the main task, those with ASD processed the irrelevant letters while solving much more complex problems...Put another way, they weren’t ignoring the main task, nor were they distracted away from it. Instead they were completing their work and moving on, using their untapped capacity” [bold mine].
This article also concludes that while this is a benefit, it also does have “real-life consequences.” They begin and end the article citing Tim Page, an author with Aspergers from his book, Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s. Page recounts his time in school who failed an essay about his field trip which was quite detailed in terms of his way of perceiving it, and how he was scolded for writing in that particular way. “I had noticed the wrong things,” he writes.
As a parent of an autistic child who has difficulties with verbal communication, I have to ask the question: “whose problem is this anyway?” Certainly I have been dealing with issues, at least issues for me as Adam cannot comment here yet, so I am fully aware that I need to be fair. He has very real sensory and perceptual differences, so I set up a basement full of equipment for him to self-soothe. He has even learned to “self-regulate” by going to read his own books, and I never had to teach him that. His body will completely quiet as he flips through pages of encyclopedias, dictionaries, cookbooks, among many other subjects. He may even appear to layperson as not really paying attention and just flipping pages, but I know it’s more than that. His body-jerking almost always stops, which is how I conclude that he is soothed by his books. I am imagining him looking at those books over and over again, and what he may be gleaning from them. Still, when it comes to getting the responses WE need, he using a “special” reading program at school. Indeed it is really helping with his expressive reading ability, and maybe even with his vocabulary. So I need to let him do both. He needs to learn to respond in a world that doesn’t yet understand the way he learns. He also needs to flip through pages and pages on his own. I can sit beside him sometimes also and talk about the books he is reading. We can type about what he is reading, we can draw stories and make more conclusions or assumptions about what he is reading. When we do things together calmly, we are having lots of fun.
When we teach him a new communication device, it may appear to the person who is teaching that Adam is not focused enough — indeed he appears to be “highly distracted.” On an AAC device (we are still awaiting one from a service-provider here in Toronto) his finger will go to the right picture, letter, or answer, and then he will quickly go to another one to check out what it will do. A keyguard helps him direct his finger more quickly to the correct response. He may have trouble finishing sentences (when he types) and then be reminded to “stay on task.” This is in large part what Facilitated Communication attempts to assist with if done correctly — to remind and assist with the focus. To a person who cannot detect that Adam was about to give the “right” answer (or rather the answer that was requested of him), he would receive a failing grade. Adam is very young and I believe he is not given the benefit of the doubt enough, although his team members are good with this.
It is only fair to say that we do not KNOW everything he knows. We do not fully understand how he takes all this knowledge in and we are the ones that deem his versions of knowledge as irrelevant. We have not developed sufficient ways to measure his responses or his way of learning and seeing, except for the ways we measure responses and knowledge from people who are not autistic. This brings me back to the old ABA adage, “if we can measure it, we can deal with it.” Unfortunately, the way we have historically dealt with autism is by eliminating the behaviours and learning patterns that are essential to an autistic person’s existence. Perhaps continuing to fund this research more heavily is important because as we understand how autistic people learn, we can not only develop better learning tools, but come to better appreciate our children.
Trying to understand this is a first step. As Adam’s parent, I see many of the so-called “issues” being mine, and yes, I become just as frustrated as many other parents out there. It’s really hard to see Adam in distress and it’s even harder to always be guessing what may be causing anxiety or body-jerking (Lack of calcium? Trouble at school? New self-awareness of difference? Trouble with transitioning from task to task? Lack of sleep? Seizures? A very long winter? Lack of exercise? Another neurological issue?…The guess work list is too long). Since Adam appears to be in discomfort since late last fall, I am really working hard at figuring this out (wait-lists are long here in Toronto). Sleep issues, anxiety issues — I know when I have a level head, there is more that I can do for him to ease the situation. We need science now to figure out many of our questions.
Sometimes it feels that makeshift solutions only lead to more issues. Sure, we all want things to be a little easier, but Adam requires more consideration in order to achieve that balance between helping him through discomfort as well as accommodating his needs. As I have been through a difficult year, like many of you out there, I completely understand the reasoning, but I have to keep a level head and look at what Adam has also gone through with a “broken” family. I have needed my sleep, but if Adam cannot, I have to find safe ways of letting him stay up until his body will sleep naturally. I know what I’m saying isn’t easy and there are still days I will resort to the Melatonin, even though, because of the guesswork involved, it pains me to do so. Yet I also know it’s important to stop and slow down and think about how Adam feels and perceives. When I do, everything seems a little easier. As a parent, I can even become proud of myself (it’s important) that I’ve not only managed well, but have helped Adam out too. We are still on that path to finding out if we can help Adam, but I am always wondering excessively about how I perceive the “problem.”
I’m interested in what people in science think about this Perception study. I think we have to spend a lot more time imagining what it feels like to be in Wonderland.
——-
Excerpts from:
“Extraordinary Perception” by Wray Herbert in March/April 2010 issue of Scientific American Mind, pp. 68-69.
Further Reading:
Selective Attention and Perceptual Load in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Anna Remington, John Swettenham, Ruth Campbell and Mike Coleman in Psychological Science (in press). Published online October 14, 2009. www3.interscience.wiley.com
Adam is almost eight years old. I can hardly believe how the time keeps marching by; how the year of separation from Adam’s father has also gone by. Soon, Adam and I will be living in our new house and rebuilding our lives.
Adam is changing and I reminisce from the early days — when he was diagnosed at 19 months of age, how I started this blog back in 2005. He is becoming more curious, more adept, stronger. He is always learning. He gets frustrated. He still cannot communicate with words very well. He must use a device. He does not understand, I believe, inherent dangers as he explores his new exciting world. Laundry chutes, small dark corners are inviting spaces for all little children. I teach as best I can with a firm “no,” a new rule that he can easily comprehend, and a stop sign posted to various areas of the house. It may not be “designer” but style makes no sense where safety is concerned.
Adam is also heading out into the world. Yes, he has his aides. But as a newly separated person who now must share time with Adam’s father with regards to Adam, I find myself during lonely nights thinking about how life is always about letting go: of fear, of things, of little children growing into bigger independent children (or quasi independent in our case). As Adam grows, I must learn to let him out into the world with others so he can learn more. It is a great challenge for any parent, and perhaps even more punctuated when one is a single parent. And as all things with our children as we watch them grow, it’s (delightfully) bittersweet. Adam would grow up resenting me if I held him back and did not let him explore. I have to let him do it in safe ways, in stages. When he grabs that sharp knife to cut a piece of fruit, I have to teach him with a dull knife (and with supervision of course). I have to let him explore dark spaces by creating safer dark spaces. I have to let him jump around the house, not on furniture where he may hurt his head, but on equipment set up for the task of jumping. In the case of Adam and his neurological needs, I also have to LET him be who he is and get the feedback he needs.
He needs to run, he needs to jump, explore, and yes, eat lemons. I would never be able to hold him back to change these activities because they don’t look like typical play. I need to provide him safe avenues to explore these things. Instead of viewing these things as “overwhelming” because they are not what all typical children necessarily do, I must learn new ways of helping him explore. While there are not as many programs and “how-to” books out there, common sense, time, and a deep breath help me figure it out.
It’s the same at school and we are lucky right now to have a school that allows Adam to explore safely, that allows aides, that allows us to bring in adaptive technologies and programs that help Adam learn in the way he can. But when people first meet him, I am starkly aware of how they will measure him — what “competency tests” to assess what he does and does not know that are delivered in a way that we take for granted, and perhaps that Adam would not be able to respond to. Far less effort (and money) is paid to adapting those tests so that he could respond — like visual options for answers, multiple choice. Adam is extremely visual and “performs” well when given this option. And I write this because I saw the movie NELL last night with Jodie Foster. I have been calling Adam — among many nicknames like boo boo bear, moo moo, Adiboo, Adamame… and Chickabee — the nickname Nell uses in the film. I must have picked it up a few years ago when I first saw it. I love the movie Nell because it reminds us that humans can create languages that perhaps not everyone understand easily and in the way we are used to, but how we create meaning.
And Adam communicates, indeed. He has a language that I’ve learned to, believe it or not, take for granted! But as he goes out into the world not everyone will know his language. He would be given those “competency tests,” and maybe even fail because they don’t measure in a way that addresses how he can express what he knows. So yes, my Adam now goes out further into the world. And yes, we have to teach him to communicate within it and learn the more common way of communicating. But I still believe he will and should always keep his mother tongue.
As a curator of art I have a special interest in “self-taught” art, otherwise known as “Outsider Art” or “Naive Art.” I find these latter terms unfortunate if not unnecessary and, noting my bias, degrading as terms to describe the work, typically, of challenged individuals. In the Art World, the term was used to create a category of art because it did not seek a point of reference from within the “higher” art world.
This post for me is thrilling.Today’s Parent magazine in an article called “Is It A Learning Disability?” , suggested that children with learning disabilities (LD’s) ..” don’t draw,” the caption said, “they scribble.”They is used as yet another “outsider” term, using the “they” as a foreign connotation. I retorted at how important any human marking is, a scribble or a sun. Adam’s motor planning issues makes holding a pen or pencil very difficult. He could draw letters lightly when he was very young and his first “picture” was a happy face with long hair when he was six years old. When I asked him who it was he said “mommy.” Of course that stays in my treasure chest forever.
I like to draw and I’m quite average at it. This past summer, I spent a few hours with Adam drawing what was around us at the cottage we rented, and I tried to teach him how to paint by numbers with a watercolour set — to “stay within the lines.” So counterintuitive is the paint-by-numbers set to me, but I noticed Adam’s willingness and effort to gently use a small watercolour brush, and his keen interest in painting. It also doesn’t hurt that one of his grandmother’s is a painter, his grandfather is a photographer, and his half-brother, a master at etch-a-sketch, not to mention his other artistic pursuits. Adam is interested in all of their work and I’m certain they have all imparted their own abilities to him.
I was not expecting these drawings passed to me from school the other day because I guess we can never know if or when we can expect things to happen, and it wouldn’t be anything I’d force upon him. Adam draws, as of this week, by his own motivation. He suddenly copied pictures from books and I’m utterly breathless at his line and his attention to detail. He told his aide what the pictures depicted and you can see her handwriting — a verbatim record of what he said. From a developmental perspective, I suppose you could say he is seeing the “whole picture.” His attention to detail, bearing in mind his motor challenges, seem remarkable particularly when one’s child has not been able to express themselves easily.
Art can tell us a lot about what a person sees, how they see it, and how they can express it with certain challenges. As I was always certain that Adam could “see the whole picture,” I post here, I suppose, what society needs and what it likes to chew on, which is the sad part of being a part of such an achievement-oriented society. But let’s for a few wonderful moments just savour how beautiful his lines are — how delicate and careful.
Maybe we all need to be as delicate and careful when discussing the abilities and challenges of all people. We may not all become artists, we may not all talk, but it certainly does not mean that we do not understand or have anything to say.
I’m hard pressed to ever state that Adam really can’t express himself. I mean, I find myself saying it some days in terms of verbal communication. But really, he is an expressive guy. If I were to take an accounting of his “expressiveness” and his “ability to communicate,” I might end up with something like this:
1) He is so affectionate, but not to everyone. He is discerning in who he expresses affection to;
2) He only really wants mom and dad and gives us extra special hugs and tends to shun others away as he wants us all to himself;
3) He knows who his family is because he has variants of affection for different people;
4) He cries when he knows he has broken or made a mess of something;
5) He cries when he thinks he’s upset someone, or that he knows someone is upset;
6) He dances when he’s happy (not the happy dance, but real dancing);
7) He sings what he can’t say — when mom and dad were together with him the other day, he sang Beyonce’s “I’m a Single Lady” — a song that came out at the time of the separation. Here I will add a little bit of my memory of other children I knew when they were little who dreamed of their parents back together again. I imagine this is Adam’s way of telling us the same and that he recognizes the current situation;
8) He laughs at funny things — he laughs at my jokes and he laughs when he’s trying to make me laugh;
9) He talks more and more each day;
10) He types more and more (independently) each day;
11) He reads out loud and understands what he is reading;
12) He knows how to manipulate certain people who all respond to different things. He knows how to “work it”;
13) He uses a word to describe what he is looking at (i.e.; he may type sock and then I can help him build a sentence to correlate with the work GAP he is peering at on his sock so he can type, see and say).
I could go on but it’s late and I’m tired and I’m just basically trying to say how Adam is such a Mensch to me in every way. He works really hard, he wants to do things, he loves people, and his will is strong. I see and experience how hard it is sometimes for him to stay focused and I’m still very proud of him. When his fabulous assistant (she has been with us for five years now and counting), told me that he went wild for Carmina Burana at school, I smiled. I went wild for Carmina Burana when I was young and consider it to be my foray into classical music because it’s so dramatic. Adam danced and moved his body to the music. When I see his notebook wherein Adam is struggling to draw, he is specific about what he is drawing (his assistant writes what he has named his characters that he struggles motorically to draw). And all I can do is keep trying hard with him, to learn, to keep an open mind, to provide him various modalities with which he can work and express himself.
Expression, thank goodness, comes in so many colourful forms.
I was sitting in a waiting room recently when I picked up this from the April 2009 issue of Today’s Parent magazine’s article, Is It A Learning Disability by Marcia Kaye. I turned the pages reading about “conceptual and motor problems,” and in the middle of the page was a photo of a drawing.
“They don’t draw, they scribble,” said the caption.
Who are they? I thought. Does she really know who she is referring to?
The they, is the Adam who when he made is first intentional scribble on the page, I jumped happily. Whose “motor problems,” and indeed they are challenges, in holding a pencil or a crayon seemed to be surpassed. At least the first step had been made. You see, I’ve kept every one of Adam’s “scribbles,” his effort rewarding by his marking that later turned to a happy face, a letter, a sun and a tree and one day, a happy face with long hair which he named “mommy,” at the age of six. The theyare people. They are Adam. They are individuals who are challenged but not unintelligent, who continue to progress at their own rate on the exterior, while on the inside, have many ideas and things to share.
And then there is the category of Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities, which I read with great interest. For the Today’s Parent article stated that “this category encompasses non-verbal learning disabilities (NLD’s), which is a controversial area, with possible overlap into Asperger’s syndrome and mental health issues. But the LDAC [Learning Disabilities Association of Canada] considers NLD to be a bona fide learning disability. A child with an NLD may have a great vocabulary, a good memory and an excellent grasp of detail, but miss the bigger picture. He may be a good reader, but a poor comprehender…if you say ‘Oh great, I have to get a root canal!’ they may take you seriously.” It goes on to describe the social awkwardness and anxiety issues that we so often talk about with regards to autism.”
And to to muddy the waters even a little bit more, we have the discussions over DSM V [Diagnostic Statistical Manual] and removing Aspergers or what differentiates individuals along the autism spectrum:
The Neurodevelopmental Disorders (ND) work group’s discussions have focused on three areas:
1) Possible modification of ADHD criteria to allow for co-morbidity of autism and ADHD (currently excluded). The ADHD & Disruptive Behavior Disorders Work Group has agreed to consider this possibility.
2) Discussion of the validity of Rett’s disorder as a separate disorder and inclusion of a new modifier within the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which might include genetic and medical disorders and other biologically-definable conditions.
3) How to address Pervasive Developmental Disorders – Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). The individuals currently diagnosed with PDD-NOS may still be described in DSM-V, but the work group will discuss whether they can redefine ASD in such a way that the PDD-NOS diagnosis isn’t necessary, as this diagnosis currently captures a very heterogeneous group of individuals.
The ND Work Group will be seeking additional feedback from advisors and other experts prior to “finalizing” any recommendations.
Questions still under active discussion for ASD include:
1) How to describe the “spectrum” of disorders now known as ASD (e.g., how many domains will define the disorder);
2) What is the specificity of repetitive behaviors in ASD and how might they be better defined;
3) Whether Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD) is a unique and separate disorder, and if so, what are its defining characteristics;
4) Whether autism is a life-long diagnosis or whether it is possible to recover/remit to the point where the diagnosis is no longer applicable;
5) Whether Asperger’s disorder is the same as “high-functioning autism”;
6) How the DSM-V can alert clinicians to common medical comorbidities (including genetic disorders, epilepsy/EEG abnormalities and sleep, or GI problems) and potential biomarkers;
7) How to include consideration of severity and impairment in diagnosis (currently defined as “qualitative impairments”) and how to integrate these with the overall structure of DSM-V; and
8) How/where to discuss cultural influences on diagnosis (e.g., Korean use of reactive attachment disorder rather than ASD to avoid family stigmatization).
What is most poignant to me is the purpose of both the differentiation and the suggestion that the atypicalities are abnormal rather than a way of being in the world. If Adam’s way of obtaining and processing information about his environment and the people around him are respected (as they are in his household and school), then he continues to grow, mature and learn. And while there continues to be little research that truly helps us understand how “severity” has often to do more with outward “functioning” rather than intelligence, I struggle with articles that fail to discuss how society tends to want to categorize and differentiate individuals based on the severity of their learning disability rather than discussing how people with different or atypical learning needs learn and how we can better support them.
When I read the suggestions for broadening autism to emcompass Aspergers and other characteristics in the DSM V, the issue as I see it is not the damaging effects that calling Asperger’s or PDD-NOS or NLD to autism is to the person or family. For I view it as the families’ discomfort in perhaps being associated with autism. I see the issue is a continued determinism about autism and herein lies the problem. Until autism and many issues are no longer viewed as problems to be solved, but rather atypicalities that require our understanding and providing for, we will forever find ourselves spinning on the hamster’s wheel.
Many of us have read Oliver Sack’s Musicophilia and I attended his lecture here in Toronto a couple of years ago when the book was released. Neuroscientists study the innate rhythm of our brains, citing that no other species possess this capability. Apes cannot synchronize if one ape taps a stick. The other apes cannot keep up the rhythm. So this is innate to human beings and perhaps a way we have evolved. Our ability to socialize, to gather as communities have been largely facilitated by this ability.
Young babies can understand musical structure before they understand language. Alzheimer’s patients can remember emotions and early memories, as well as right/wrong notation and words of music even if every other faculty is gone. In other words, music is the last thing, the only thing and neuroscientists are looking at this aspect of our humanity.
For Sting who had an MRI done in order to study aspects of this, when finally looking at images of his brain after it had been evaluated post-testing, he became a bit undone. He said he didn’t want to know the inner workings of what is otherwise a mystical, spiritual experience for him. While interesting, dissecting his musical brain was unnerving.
It is also said that by learning a musical instrument, we may be able to ward off Alzheimers. Similarly, a child will increase their I.Q. by 7% by learning a musical instrument.
Adam is learning to play piano, and like all people, my autistic little boy loves music. He can sing better than he can talk. He tries, although motorically challenged, to keep a dance rhythm with his body, but is otherwise a wonderful drummer. Rhythm, be it through music or rhyme has composed a major aspect of our lives in just basic communication in our home, and I’m lucky because it also comes naturally to me as I have been a singer, have learned many musical instruments in my life (violin, guitar, flute, piano, recorders…). But use it or lose it. I’ve forgotten how to play what used to come so easily, although I can pick up tunes by ear very easily using the piano. We sing “home-made” opera in our house — sort of a daily dialogue in a Bugs Bunny/ Wagnerian way.
Use of music and rhythm is extremely important for any of us to use language, and it is highly effective with non verbal people. It makes me wonder why we don’t discuss and utilize this so much more. We love to make utter fools of ourselves singing our home-made opera in our house — from asking for the juice to brushing our teeth, there is no shortage of home-made songs for every occasion. And even though it is I who makes the major fool of myself the most by doing it, I think Adam enjoys it as he tweets back my silly tunes in his smaller, more cherub voice. I also think if we all did a little more of it, we all might be a bit happier as well. Music does ignite the pleasure centre of our brains.
It was a happy and a sad day, Adam’s last day of the day camp he has been attending for the past three years. I remember when he was very little — around three — when I’d drive him in for a half day. I worried so much in those early days. I worried if something would happen to him. I worried if he would be happy or upset, as he was so easily in those days. I hung on every word and report the staff would give me and I would jump if my cell phone ever rang while he was not in my care.
Several years later, Adam seems to be a bit of a bigwig at camp. I am happy that he seems to swagger on and off the bus, and this year he did his last week without an aide, except for Greg (seen on the left) who agreed to shadow Adam on his last week. I had, of course, asked permission to publish this photo.
I picked up Adam at noon so we could head up North for his last couple weeks before school starts. And what did I find? Adam was hugging and playing with his counselors and their affection for him was in no short supply. We could barely leave after saying multiple and lingering goodbyes. Alyssa was sitting with him waiting for mommy. Greg was as well. When we headed for the car, Jeff had to stop Adam one more time. Some other counselors waved from afar and didn’t make it into the picture.
This was a phenomenal summer for Adam — Addy is what I call him at home. He rocked the rock-climbing wall. He hit the target a few times in archery and had his first forays into baseball and golf. My kitchen shelf is FULL of ceramics and other arts and crafts. I can’t even keep up with all the songs he comes home with. Today, said Greg, it was “Tonight’s gonna be a good night,” by…oops I forgot…but it’s on the radio a lot. Adam tries to talk and it’s a challenge, yet it’s coming. He picks up a lot from his friends at camp and every day, I could tell Addy was, well, a happy little camper.
The end of Summer 2009 for Adam, in this year of enormous change in our family’s life, has been a successful one. Thanks to all the staff at his camp (which I will not name for obvious reasons), for accepting Adam and letting him succeed… as he is.
By 2012, accommodating disabled persons in Ontario will become mandatory for all non profit organizations. Accommodating people with disabilities will be enforced, and this will make it necessary for all not for profit agencies — which includes hospitals, schools, religious organizations, transportation services and the like — to be able to utilize and/or make available Assistive Devices for non verbal individuals as well as other equipment, environmental provisions and the deliverance of the “products and services” (which entails what we commonly refer to as accommodation) for a diverse population of individuals with various needs.
Under the Ontarian Accessibiltiy Act which became law in 2005, non profits will all have to comply by 2012 and other businesses by 2025. The use of such terms as “customer service,” positions the act to read that it requires to view our disabled population also as clients and consumers — the latter term which, in our current economic belief and behaviour, renders Ontario’s disabled as more “valuable” citizens. It is true that the disabled are important part of our society and contributors to our economy, and it makes sad but true sense that our legislators have to enforce the accommodation of all our citizens by using these terms. Economic terms. We deliver a basic human right via “customer service.”
Now that it is soon to become mandatory for an area that I’m particularly interested in — schools — I wonder why there is continued resistance in Ontario to use AAC (Assistive Augmentative Communication). Adam needs the computer in his school to communicate his understanding of the concepts being taught. It seems like simple ABC to me. In this day and age where technology is common and relatively inexpensive, and where autistic children can indeed excel, it makes little sense that we have to make enforceable the ways and means that autistic children can participate and be included in the classroom and with their peers. This argument goes beyond devices and right down to understanding how autistic children can learn and respond and how the format of the lessons and teaching styles need to be delivered. For if our children are now viewed as valuable “clients,” then one would think they should certainly be entitled to no less.
I for one am working with the act and terminology to encourage service providers unfamiliar with accommodating disabled people in Ontario to adapt and include. Once we can help others to understand that disabled children do not “pull their other children down,” but in fact propel them forward both as compassionate human beings as well as academically, we can create more just classrooms. “Research shows that for typical students in inclusive classrooms, academic performance was equal to or better than that of general education students educated in noninclusive classrooms.” (Exceptional Children, 64: (1998) 239-253) “And, contrary to the worries of many parents of typical students, the inclusion of students with severe disabilities (when there was appropriate support) did not reduce teaching time nor create many interruptions.” (Exceptional Children, 61,3 (1994): 242-253).
Yet the burden of proof will remain heavy upon us for some time. There is not really a day that we do not confront resistance to inclusion (or “barriers” which is a commonly used term), in the name of safety, medical needs, the guise of inclusion under the term “mainstreaming,” competition and more myths about why special needs children should not be included in our communities, schools and daily life. It is up to us to hold steady with this burden to keep up the research and the dialogue about why inclusion is good for everyone.
As Adam goes to an inclusive school, it seems logical that we learn to teach by teaching and we learn to include by including. Legislation or no legislation, we will still have a lot of work to do in order to help others understand autism and autistic people as valuable and entitled in their own rite.
In this photo, Aimee is photographed with prosthetic legs which she fashioned after the hind legs of a cheetah. She runs with these legs and has a dozen pairs of differently-designed and fashionable legs, which also give her five different heights.
In the UTNE article, she discusses how she puts the legs on a table for young children to view and discuss. She asks adults to stay out of the room because “they [children] only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way and censors that natural curiousity.” Instead of being stared at as some kind of freak, Aimee invites the children to explore. Unabashedly, they touch the legs an wiggle the toes, she explains. She says to the children “I woke up this morning and I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house. If you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?” The children shouuted “Kangaroo! Frog!” and other amazing possibilities. Of this she explains, “I went from being a woman these kids would have been trained to see as disabled to somebody who had potential that their bodies didn’t have yet. Somebody who might even be super-abled. Interesting.”
As in autistic people speaking for themselves in any way or means they can, which also incites new ideas of what it means to be capable, valuable and above-all, human, Aimee raises two very important points. First, she has taken the bull-by-the-horn to invite people to explore instead of stare. The stare can be intrusive, full of, often misplaced, assumptions that the disabled person is less worthy and valuable or even capable. The stare can be overlayed with assumptions that an disfigurement is ugly.
Autistic researchers who redefine paradigms of how autistic people learn are no different than the likes of Aimee who not only redefine disability, but refuse to let non disabled or autistic people define it for them. Because Aimee’s disability is more visible, this point may be easier to absorb. Cognitive disabilities are still not understood in the same fashion.
Still, Aimee talks about becoming the architects of our identities, and this holds true for our autistic community. As a woman who is admittedly still influenced by how I should look and behave and still tortured by it, I still have an awareness of how oppressive imposed identities have on us. She makes note how Pamela Anderson has more prosthetics in her body than she does but that “nobody [calls Pamela] disabled.”
While its true that no one calls Pamela Anderson disabled, I would argue that she is entirely disabled and entrapped in a male view of what a woman should be. We are entrapped also by what we should be as contributors to an economy, which is restricted itself in the ways people can contribute to it. When women or any person works so hard in order to please others before themselves, they are no longer architects of their own identities, but slaves to an imposed identity.
Having visited the MIT lab when I gave a lecture there a couple of years ago now, I was a priviledged witness of astounding design for the disabled. I believe the article hits the nail on the head as it suggests that this is no longer about accepting disability or discussing potential (although it is frustrating for many of us that the question continues to swirl), but about the potential issues regarding augmentation.
In Graham Pullin’s book, Design Meets Disability, I believe we are witnessing devices and prosthetics for the disabled that are not meek and discrete, but that wears disability as fashionable as anything I’ve ever seen. And I know that MIT works with autistic people in their lab so that devices are in fact useful and empowering — not based on a model of making up for deficiency. It will be interesting, however, to see where augmentation takes us in the sense of designing humanity. Like any other kind of design, there is such potential for abuse. I would view women who augment themselves to extremes like Pamela Anderson a form of self-abuse, and I am admittedly not immune to it.
If sexiness is empowerment, I believe that Aimee is way too sexy for Pamela Anderson anyway, or for that matter, for many men equally dis-empowered by mass-media images regarding the women they are told should be at their sides.
As a woman full of so-called flaws, can I just sneak in here that well, I’m just too sexy for the status quo. Or at least I should, like the rest of us, keep convincing myself as such. Aimee certainly helps us all redefine beauty. And that is entirely liberating.
ESTÉE KLAR
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Writer/Curator/Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project. Lecturer on autism & the media, and parenting. Graduate student Critical Disability Studies, York University. I like to write about our journey, musings, attitudes towards autism.
It was a happy and a sad day, Adam’s last day of the day camp he has been attending for the past three years. I remember when he was very little — around three — when I’d drive him in for a half day. I worried so much in those early days. I worried if something would happen to him. I worried if he would be happy or upset, as he was so easily in those days. I hung on every word and report the staff would give me and I would jump if my cell phone ever rang while he was not in my care.
ESTÉE KLAR
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Writer/Curator/Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project. Lecturer on autism & the media, and parenting. Graduate student Critical Disability Studies, York University. I like to write about our journey, musings, attitudes towards autism.
