What Is Autism?

There are people who are complete strangers to autism.  I have to keep reminding myself because I spend my days immersed in thinking about my child, autistic persons, disability rights, barriers, myths, and stereotypes.  But there are many people who don't know anything about autism.  What would I tell them - someone who approached me and asked to learn about autism?

Autism is a way that the brain receives, processes, and responds to information.  This way of processing results in variations in the way the world is experienced and the way learning, communication, and movement occurs.  Autistic persons often have sensitive hearing, vision, touch, sense of smell, or taste.  They direct their eyes away or use their hands differently to regulate input.  They may develop skills on a different timetable or in a different order than expected.

Autism comes with a deep passion for interests, allowing autistic persons to focus in great detail on specific topics that they enjoy.  Autistic persons are often emotionally intuitive, picking up on strong emotions very easily.  That sensitive emotional radar may even cause them to be overwhelmed.  Autistic persons are  individualists, not easily swayed by peer pressure, in what interests them or how they move or talk.  With autism comes a need for movement, sometimes to comfort anxiety, sometimes to experience joy, in patterns and ways that are individual.  Some movement expressions include rocking, flapping, spinning, hand movements, dancing, or jumping.  Autistic persons often recognize visual, musical, social, or emotional patterns that others cannot.  This set of strengths - interests, passion, drive, pattern recognition, and individualism - allows autistic persons to excel in many different fields.

The challenge with autism is providing accommodations in the environment, learning, public accommodations, employment, and society to allow autistic people to experience the world, learn, work, play, and live with the same ease as everyone else.  Accommodations include providing education tools, like Universal Design for Learning, incorporating interests into learning, and using multi-sensory methods (including movement) of learning.  They include mindfulness training for the person and the support team so they can both learn ways to process overwhelming emotions.  Yoga and breathing mediation provide tools to become aware of and calm the mind.  Other accommodations include allowing for more processing time with questions and answers and reducing the amount of sensory input, like fluorescent lighting, flash photography, strong odors, and noise levels.  There are sensory accommodations like noise-cancelling headphones, movement tools like fidgets, ball seats, and mini trampolines, and tinted glasses to reduce glare.  Autistic persons should have communication accommodations available to them such as typing or alternative augmentive communication devices.

Autism is a disability and with it comes difficulties like sleep patterns, intense frustration, anxiety, difficulty with daily living skills, depletion of energy.  Other problem areas include difficulty recognizing faces, the passage of time, or body signals, and a fluctuating ability to communicate or express verbally.  If the right accommodations are not in place, the autistic person becomes at risk for exhaustion, malnutrition, depression, abuse, neglect, or social isolation.

The biggest challenge for autistic persons is the common misunderstanding that autism is a disease that requires treatment to make them look "normal," to get them to stop looking, talking, or acting so different. A first step in overcoming this misunderstanding is parent training, like DIR/Floortime and Playful Parenting, and to help the family understand how autistic children receive, process, and respond in relationships.  Resources for autistic persons and their families that help in this process are Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, the books I Love Being My Own Autistic Self, and Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking.

And then I'd tell them about my child.  I'd tell them how his experience of the world gives him an amazing focus on detail, how he can tell the difference between a 2005 Jeep Wrangler and a 1985 Jeep Wrangler by the placement of the word Wrangler.  I'd tell them about his ability to pick up on emotions so easily that he can tell when I am tense before I am aware of it.  I'd tell them about his joyful dancing, the way he runs back and forth in excitement.

I'd tell them that parenting an autistic child is intense.  It requires flexibility, an open mind, exertion, and mindfulness, just as being an autistic person does.  But I'd also tell them about how my child and I recreated Lincoln's death and funeral, building the funeral hearse with black draping, lantern, and gilded eagle - all at his request.  I'd tell them about how much he loves cars, presidents, bowling, cats, horses, dogs, his family and friends.  I'd tell them about his natural curiosity, how much he enjoys learning about ideas, things, people.  I'd tell them how much I've learned about my own frailties and how much I've grown.  And I'd tell them how bubbly my child is, how much he loves, and how joyful he is.

That's what autism means. 

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