“Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg.”
― Paul Collins
This is my Kate. She has autism and I wrote about her diagnosis here. I have dedicate a blog to raising her and her sister Grace. You can visit it here. This is a sensitive one for me and just want to make something VERY CLEAR. These children SHALL NOT be reduced to a set of behaviors. They are so much more than that. As a teacher I have witnessed too many professionals discuss these children as if they were made up of a set of behaviors that needed to be extinguished. This is heartbreaking and wrong. Our Kate is happy being flappy and we never force eye contact. We DO NOT allow discrete trial teaching. We feed the language and in and wait for it come back out. We follow her lead and love her to bits. It is as simple as that.