To Those On The Spectrum:

I would like to issue this note in honor of those on the autism spectrum. The passions and goals that now compel me to continue to assist the lives of young autistic children and their families are based on the personal experience and knowledge about the considerable physical discomfort predominant in profoundly involved young autistic children today.

This effort should in no way be interpreted or categorized as any kind of discounting or dismissal of the true and actual autistic person and that individual's birth right to be loved, accepted and acknowledged for who and what they are. My goals for any given child are to achieve comfort and the highest availability to learn and function as independently as possible, and not just to attempt to make him/her like everyone else. Secondarily to provide the family with insights about the differences in how those on the spectrum experience aspects of life compared to how others do, and to suggest changes the family can make in various areas to better interact with the child, with more effective and empathic approaches, so that the precious uniqueness of the child with autism can be better responded to, and his/her different methods of receiving/processing the world, respected, understood, and reveared.

Dawn Prince-Hughes, PhD, on a playground encounter with another parent:

Strange parent: That's some boy you've got there.
Me: Yeah, I think I'll keep him. (This always gets a laugh, so I have adopted it as a script line.)

Strange parent: How old is he?
Me: Three. How old is yours? (This last part is required, so don't try to get out of it.)

Strange Parent: I sure wish I could bottle their energy!
Me: Yeah, we'd make a fortune. (Stranger chuckles, and then there is a silence I never know what to do with.)

"The conversation goes on in this way until I walk off to play with my son, which is usually fairly quickly. I hate these conversations. I am just bursting to ask what the stranger thinks of the idea of folded space and superluminal communication, or the possibility that a common hominoid ancestor could have been bipedal previous to the ape-human split, or the phenomenon of resonant formative causation. Sometimes I think I'll die if i hear another parent relate the way their daughter loves to dress up as a princess."

Excerpted from: Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, by Dawn Prince-Hughes, Ph.D.