Autism Interview #63 Part 2: Ally Grace on Communication and Fighting Stigma

This post is a continuation of an interview with Ally Grace, Respectfully Connected blogger and autistic mother of five. Last week Ally discussed unschooling her children and advice for parents considering therapy for their children. This week Ally offered suggestions for communicating with your autistic children and challenges us to rethink how we advocate for them.

Autism Interview #63 Part 1: Ally Grace on Unschooling, Therapy, and Autism

Ally Grace is an autistic mother of five from Australia. Ally strongly believes in challenging the pathology paradigm of autism. She blogs at Respectfully Connected about her family, rejecting conventional autism assumptions, challenging social norms around raising children, unschooling, and being autistic. This post is part one of a 2-part series with Ally. This week she shared her experience unschooling her children, as well as advice for parents considering different therapies for their children.

About Autism by Tina Sheers

The following essay was written by Tina Sheers and printed here with her permission. Autism is a human neurological variant, which makes our lived experience more intense. This makes us have less attention and energy available to focus on the subtleties of social interaction. These intense experiences are sensory, such as sounds, touch and smells.…

Autism Interview #61: Michael John Carley on the Current State of Autism

Michael John Carley is an internationally-recognized autistic author, speaker, and public advocate. He is the founder and first Executive Director of GRASP, the largest organization in the world comprised of adults on the autism spectrum. He’s also the former United Nations Representative of Veterans for Peace, Inc. He’s been featured in many national publications and media outlets and has written several books on autism. This week he shared his perspective on the current state of autism in America, some of the differences between his experiences and those of his autistic son, as well as advocacy tips for parents.

How to Hide Your Autism

This article was written by autistic advocate Kieran Rose and was originally published on autismawareness.com and his website The Autistic Advocate. It is reprinted here with his permission.

If you are the parent of an Autistic child, I’m going to introduce you to a concept that’s going to scare the pants off of you:  Your child is going to grow up to be me:

I am an Autistic adult.

Some people are of the belief that Autism can be grown out, or that with the right support and interventions, Autism can be cured or lessened.

If you’re one of those people, then I’m about to blow your minds with a second concept: Nobody grows out of Autism and a child cannot be trained out of it.  We just get better at hiding it.

Autism Interview #60: Kieran Rose on the Fatigue of “Masking”

A campaigner for Autistic rights, Kieran Rose has turned his passion for writing to good use, focusing on Advocacy and Acceptance for Autistic and Neurodiverse people, with his blog The Autistic Advocate. The freedom for Neurodiverse and Neurodivergent people to speak for themselves and be heard is paramount for Kieran, mostly due to the fact that he has spent his whole life immersed in Autistic life and culture as an actually Autistic person, with Autism diagnoses for much of his immediate and wider family; and now two Autistic children of his own.

Kieran lives in Durham, England, with his wife, Michelle, where they run their Marketing Consultancy: www.custardandbear.com (With a little help from their three children, Quinn, Albie and Olivia). The whole family all live in a happy bubble of Sensory overwhelm and underwhelm.

This week Kieran shared some of his personal experiences as an autistic individual as well as important advocacy tips for parents and families who live with or near autistic individuals.…

7 Reasons Why the Neurodiversity Movement Matters to Parents

neurodiversity for parents

How invested are you in the neurodiversity movement? The societal shift to treat autism (along with a variety of atypical neurological conditions) as a difference rather than a disease has improved autism acceptance, thereby potentially improving the quality of life for individuals on the spectrum. But it would be a mistake to think this movement is only for autistic people. Parents too have several important reasons to embrace neurodiversity.