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Encountering the Limits of My Professional Autism “Expertise”

Anonymous Photo © Carissa Rogers | Flickr/Creative Commons [image: Adult and two children, silhouetted against a lake and colorful pink sunset.] I started working with autistic children in the mid-nineties, as a volunteer in a magnet school. The experience was influential, and I went on to become a psychologist, getting a PhD focused on autism research. Since then I’ve been working in academia for almost a decade, and have published numerous papers reporting on novel autism studies. I’ve built a reputation in my sub-field within autism research and am, I’d like to think, fairly well-regarded professionally. All of this was established well before I had children. Earlier this year, following about a 12-month process plus a longer period of discussion between myself and my partner, my daughter Penny was diagnosed with autism. In many ways nothing has changed—Penny is still Penny, my work is my work. In other ways, of…

An Open Letter to Special Needs Professionals

Pia Prenevost www.thecrackandthelight.com Hello? New teacher, or therapist, or doctor? Is that you? Oh hello… I just wanted to chat with you a second. To caution you. Or warn you. Please, tread carefully. You see, what you might not realize as you look at me, talk to me, tell me your opinions, our options, our lack of options, and your predictions of our outcomes is that; well … you see that heart? The slightly broken, definitely bruised one? Yeah, that’s my heart. My slightly-broken, definitely-bruised heart. Now, I realize that as you look at me you might see … a confident parent … or an angry parent … or a happy-go-lucky parent… You might think that I understand everything … or nothing … or that I have all the experience in the world because I have done this before … or that I know the rules … or that I…