If your child is going through Autistic Burnout, they will need your support. They will need your understanding, flexibility, increased sensory regulation time and a decrease in demands both from family and school environments.
You can listen and understand and believe and respect autistic adults every bit as much as you do those things with autistic children. If you don’t, you’re being ageist.
“The way we diagnose kids overwhelmingly leads to Black and Latino kids getting diagnosed with behavioral disorders instead of autism. It also excludes a lot of women and femme people, to say nothing of transgender males and nonbinary people. We also ignore a lot of people for whom English is a second language.”
We need to highlight the plight of autistic people in Kenya, especially in rural areas where many autistic people are kept hidden and abused. It helps for information about autism in Kenya to appear in blogs and videos.
Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: Photo of a teen wearing a jacket and baseball cap, seen from behind, far ahead on an oaken hillside trail.] Shannon Des Roches Rosa @shannonrosa When I was in physical therapy to rehabilitate a busted knee, the kind, competent therapists tended to make small talk—which invariably meant fielding
The autistic community owes it to the next generation to show them that the world has a place for them, and that in this place they will always be welcome. All autistics deserve to accept themselves for who they are.
How is joy usually characterized? The absence of sadness? Unbridled gladness and glee? That is Knox, every. single. day.
These revelations, about presuming competence, human dignity, and the least dangerous assumption—they don’t apply only to kids who are secret geniuses. They apply to everyone. They are the most important for the kids who really do have intellectual disabilities, who really can’t read or use full sentences and who really do need extensive support.
When we deny the validity of self diagnosis, we fail to recognize how broken health care systems can be. We effectively restrict our support to those privileged to afford a formal diagnosis.
Kerima Cevik http://theautismwars.blogspot.com “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” -James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Photo © Kerima Cevik, posted with subject’s permission [Image: The author’s biracial nonverbal autistic son, at about
