“Don’t let your children grow up in a world where society devalues their lives.”

Lydia Brown  autistichoya.blogspot.com To the parents of Autistic children: We need you. Sometimes in public discourse, Autistic adults and non-Autistic parents disagree over very important issues that affect each of us personally. Sometimes this disagreement is spectacularly explosive. But there is no way for the autism and Autistic communities to move forward without creating some type of group cohesiveness. Yes, that means that we will have to enter into painful dialogue and discourse, and yes, that means we will have to accept the validity and legitimacy of the ideas and feelings of people with whom we may disagree. It does not mean that we have to set aside all of our differences, because that would make us self-deceivers. But it does mean that we have an obligation to each other and to ourselves to recognize what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “inescapable mutuality.” Every Autistic child, youth, and adult…

California’s Autism Advisory Task Force Needs Autistic Representation!

Sarah Pripas www.autisticadvocacy.org “Nothing about us without us” is the unofficial motto of the disability rights movement, yet discussions of disability continue to occur without people with disabilities at the table. One of the latest occurrences of this is in California, where the Department of Managed Healthcare recently announced the formation of an Autism Advisory Task Force. Of the eighteen people appointed to the task force, not a single one is autistic. While it is, unfortunately, commonplace for autistic people to be absent from government-appointed task forces related to autism, that doesn’t make it acceptable. The California chapters of the Autistic-Self Advocacy Network (Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Jose) are asking that the Department of Managed Healthcare rectify this omission by appointing at least one autistic person to the task force. If you would like to tell the Department that autistic people should be represented on this panel, please sign…

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Spread the Word to End the Word

Sunday Stillwell Adventures in Extreme Parenthood This week hundreds of thousands will stand up and ask our family, friends, and coworkers to Spread The Word To End The Word. This means I am asking you to stop using the words “retard” and “retarded” because when you do, even if you’re joking, even if you don’t mean it as a slur, even if you’re talking about yourself what you are doing is disrespecting people with intellectual disabilities… people like my sons, Sam and Noah. Would you call my sons retards? Would you say that the ways they stim or perseverate on things is retarded? Of course you wouldn’t, but I have heard it said to them by kids on the playground who think the way Sam jumps up and down and flaps his hands looks strange, or because Noah likes to make loud screeching noises and run in circles. So I…

Sam, at Nineteen: On Transitions and Autistic School-Leavers

Charlotte Moore www.ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk Charlotte Moore is an author, journalist and Parent Patron of Ambitious about Autism. Here she writes about her hopes and fears for her son Sam as he moves on from school and in to adulthood. We hope readers will share their own experiences and opinions about this transition period. My son Sam left school in July 2011. Sam has autism with learning difficulties. At 19, he has reached the age at which the government relinquishes responsibility for the education of people like him. I hope I won’t come to look back wistfully at Sam’s school years as a lost golden age. I hope that the home-based timetable I’m in the process of constructing will serve his needs. But I’m daunted to discover how much is down to me. For a long, long time — almost as long as he can remember — Sam has been in a…

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Role Modeling: The Evolution of an Apology

Jo Ashline joashline.com themomblog.ocregister.com/author/jashline I took the long way, but I think I’ve finally arrived First, I wrote I Told Autism to SUCK IT. Yeah. I Said It.   Then it was My Point Still Stands: Autism Can Take a Flying Leap. Then From Proud Mom to Bigot. Then Us vs. Them. Finally though, I think I get it. I think. Maybe it’s because I’m just a few short days away from my period … I don’t freaking know but in any case I’m over here bawling my eyes out because one week later I think I finally get it. I’m passionate. I’m truthful. I write truthfully with passion. And I wrote something that others found offensive and I came back and said…”Who gives a damn? This is MY SPACE, SO F$%% off.” Except. The universe doesn’t just belong to me. It belongs to everyone. And what I put out…

Take Offense, Create Change

Rob Gross I read a post recently in which the author imagines creating a “grand new conference consisting of members of the disability community of all stripes” including disabled people, their parents, professionals, writers and journalists.” He continues, “This mythical conference of ours would have only one rule. No one would be allowed to be offended” (emphasis added). The author states that by following this rule, “no one [would be] silenced…dismissed… [or] called out for the way they make their argument.” In response to this post, many parents of disabled children commented on how refreshing this would be. However, numerous Autistic adults took strong exception to this, as did some parents. Why? What could possibly be wrong with allowing people to speak their minds without restriction? Two weeks ago, one parent did just that. On her Orange County Register blog, Jo Ashline, the mother of an Autistic child, said that…

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Scripted Language and Authenticity

Photo © Fran López | Flickr / Creative Commons [image: Photo of a page from a play script, furled so the words form a spiral.] Bev Harp www.aspergersquare8.blogspot.com It seems that one of the hardest things for typical people to understand about autism is the way skill sets can seemingly change overnight, so that although, for example, I spoke very well yesterday, I can barely manage to put a sentence together this morning. I understand the skepticism I’ve encountered about this; before I knew much about autism, it’s one of the things that most made me doubt myself and question my sanity. This doesn’t apply only to speech and it isn’t always about short-term changes either. That’s just the aspect of life I’ve chosen to talk about today. Some of the people I interact with on a regular basis are familiar with some of the scripts I use on days when…