To summarize this chapter, parents and teachers need to “stretch” individuals on the autism spectrum. They need to be stretched just outside their comfort zone for them to develop.
By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society.
The educator’s job is to ask... “well, what IS she like”?
The younger the subject, the earlier the possibility of intervention. The earlier the intervention, the greater the potential effect on the trajectory of an autistic person’s life.
The diagnosis of autism can sometimes help you better predict a child’s behaviors, but it tells you nothing about their specific way of thinking, their idiosyncrasies, their strengths, or their individual personality.
Every person with autism is unique, with a different profile of strengths and challenges.
The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world.
Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization.
Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.
All people want to feel their efforts matter, and individuals with ASD are no different.
There is often too much emphasis in the world of autism on the deficits of these children and not enough emphasis on developing the special talents that many of them possess.
Geeks, nerds, and eccentrics have always been in the world; what has changed is the world itself and our expectations of others within it.
Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most “optimistic’ teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn’t learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what “he” is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don’t blame the student.
Do not allow a child or an adult to become defined by a DSM label.
Instead of making the children do good behaviors by threatening to punish them if they don’t, the teachers watch the children until they spontaneously do a good thing and give them rewards to reinforce the behavior and make them more likely to do that behavior again in the future.
Being negative is natural and being 100 percent positive takes work.
A much more meaningful perspective is to teach this population the academic and interpersonal skills they need to be functional in the world and use their talents to the best of their ability.
The Asperger’s child at the gifted meeting is doing well in school, but the Asperger’s child at an autism meeting may be in a poor special ed program, bored, and getting into trouble because adults in his life hold lower expectations of his abilities. Unfortunately, in some cases, people are so hung up on the labels attached to students that they teach to these low expectations and aren’t even curious to learn if the child is actually more capable.
Parents and teachers should look at the child, not the child’s label, and remember that the same genes that produce his Asperger’s may have given the child the capacity to become one of the truly great minds of his generation.
Campbell’s Law, which says that any metric used to determine social decision-making will become corrupted by people who want to affect those decisions.