Jennifer Byde Myers

Phew. This is the first edition and I'm going to recommend you wait until the second edition comes out.
This edition was published in 2011 and it's quite the mix. There's a lot of background on things I had heard of, but had no experience of--like all the diets parents put their money in and kids through to try to 'cure' their autism.
But it also has parents wailing and 'grieving' their kids for 'a century' and special ed teachers talking about how they had to quit because their lives were just so hard (guess what, we don't get to quit being autistic no matter how hard the world makes it for us) alongside autistic people just trying to talk about being accepted.
So that was fun.
I mean...I guess feelings are feelings and you can't help how you feel, parents, but dang. We can see you. Are you not worried your kids are going to find this writing? Your kids don't exist to make your life complete or better or whatever you thought was going to happen. You exist to make your kids like themselves. And it's impossible to like yourself if your parents hate you. (And you hate your actual child if you're busy grieving what you thought you were going to get. Sorry you didn't win the procreation lottery you thought you were playing, but don't take it out on us.)
In this book, parents casually talk about ABA therapy (which is torture) and now the blog this book came from denounces ABA. Here is the great post about it. So the parents are definitely learning.
What this book sent home for me was that, if I had been diagnosed as a child in the 80s/90s, I would have been tortured by my parents--fans of gay conversion therapy--so they definitely would have been on board for ABA.
As terrible as my parents were without a diagnosis--they just mocked and shamed and belittled me in front of strangers for being 'weird' rather than paying a stranger to try to make me behave the way they wanted. It achieved the same results--anxiety and depression and always thinking I was inherently wrong before I even spoke. Eight year olds aren't supposed to be suicidal.
Trying to read this edition of the book was triggering (in the psychological sense, not the colloquial sense) but it gave me some perspective and history on terms I see people use, so it was useful.
And the actual blog is progressive and pro-autistic. I want to stress that this book was a portrait of its time. You know. 2011.… (más)

This book, as a compilation of all sorts of opinions, elicited mixed feelings in me. It was obviously targeted mostly at parents, since the predominant majority of essays were written by parents. There were some essays that I felt should definitely be read by as many as possible. The ones I can remember off-hand that were very positive were the one about eye contact, the one about writing a letter to neighbors about bullying, the one about toilet training, and the one by Kristina Chew that talked about how to choose the best school for your child. I also liked Emily Willingham's essays. However, some of the essays I disliked because they either enforced certain stereotypes/non-autistic culture-constructed social expectations, promoted a normalization/socialization agenda, or did not take the child's feelings, thoughts, or personality enough into account (were too parent-sided). I've also noticed that the autistic voices section consisted of experiences that were mostly negative, but there were some more positive essays by parents on the spectrum in another section, perhaps to balance it out. Also, "teaching social skills" was a recurring motif throughout the book, which cuts against a recent research finding that autistic people don't inherently have bad social skills but have social challenges due to sensory processing differences.

This book stuck a lot at the question of "what is autism", highlighting that it is a spectrum and bringing out the underlying threads in the mozaic of humanity. I was slightly concerned about the fact that the pseudoscience section dismissed the effectiveness of the GFCF diet as well as Facilitated Communication. As someone who has seen both methods work, I would attest that there is a small proportion of autistics for whom these methods do work. I think that the GFCF diet only really works for those with GI issues in the first place, and can also improve the lives of non-autistic people who may also have the leaky gut syndrome. Therefore, the beneficial effects of the diet can be seen in a certain percentage of the population, but perhaps have been given more attention in the autistic population because the behaviours of autistic people tend to be under more observation/scrutiny in general and the symptoms of leaky gut, if present, exacerbate the already-present autistic symptoms. Also, I believe that FC does serve educational value for a small percentage of autistic people, as I know of people who started typing unassisted after years of FC. In addition, I've seen first-hand FC being performed on a group of people, and some people's communicated language matched their nonverbal expression. However, I think that it is just as commonly, if not even more commonly, a hoax than it is genuine, which is why scientific studies don't yield significant results.

As difficult as it is to review a book like this, I feel that this book represents the strides that we have made to understand and accommodate for autistic people in our society. However, this book only represents a transition, and not the final stop in this journey.… (más)