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…