Shanon Des Rosa Roche, parent of an awesome young man and one of the people behind The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, has a piece in the Washington Post: How listening to autistic adults helped me understand and support my son.
Here’s a small quote from the piece.
Parents need to hear from people who have lives similar to what our children will experience. These adults can warn us about avoidable mistakes, and they can counter our assumptions about what it means to live a good life — even when that life is complicated.
Please go and read the entire piece. It’s not long, but it is very good.
There are a lot of people who could benefit from this article. Parents who recently found out their child is autistic are one group. Even parents who children have been diagnosed for some time, even those who run autism parent organizations, could greatly benefit from the ideals presented so clearly and succinctly in Shannon’s article.
Read the article and see for yourself what you take away from it.
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By Matt Carey
Left Brain Right Brain 
Just to be clear, conciseness is a value. Something I want to get better at. So not long can make the piece even better. 🙂
Yes – concision is a big thing, Dorit!
Sharper and more honest and not so overloading.
And listening to autistic adults can help you with this – especially when it comes to considering and minimising cognitive load.
[even if the listening is via writing].
conciseness has its place. As does a lengthy discussion.
Parents new to an autism diagnosis for their child, for example, face a huge influx of information. A concise discussion like Shannon’s would’ve been very helpful to me. I just didn’t have the focus to dig through lengthy essays.
Matt:
what happened to the tags?
which tags?
thanks–I saw the problem and fixed it. I don’t usually use tags, so I don’t know how those random tags were used.
Sullivan:
there was a tag that had a website reference and none of the usual ones that would lead to that topic.
How are the categories going, Sullivan?