Sensory Eating is not Picky Eating

I want you to imagine that you are a kid once again, maybe ten or eleven years old. You are sitting down in the evening with your family for dinner. The table is set, and your parents bring out what will be tonight's entree: a cut of cold, raw chicken breast. It's slimy pink mass …

Understanding Meltdowns and Autism

"Beneath every behavior is a feeling. And beneath every feeling is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behavior, we begin to deal with the cause and not the symptom." - Psychologist Ashleigh Warner I used to have daily meltdowns. There was a time in early elementary school where …

Autism from the Insider’s Perspective

There's something interesting I've noticed about the way people talk about autism. It's that non-autistic people and autistic people always seem to describe autism in a very different way. Ask a non-autistic person (non-autistic people have in the past and still continue to dominate the narrative about autism) what autism is, and if they're at …

Never say Never

I spend a lot of time on the interwebs hanging around in autism parenting groups and fielding questions from parent of autistic kids. I've found it so rewarding to do my best to explain things and give my experience to help people. I generally try to stay in the communities where things are positive, and …

Sesame Street partners with Autism Speaks – A step backwards for autism acceptance.

Have you heard of the Sesame Street character Julia? She's one of the newest characters in the Sesame Street lineup, and when she was introduced represented what was perhaps one of the most important steps forward for broader autism understanding and acceptance. Julia is Sesame Street's first autistic character, and one of the first openly …

Unintended Consequences of School Rules – How you may be hurting your autistic students and not even know it.

Pretty soon, I'm going back to school for the last time before I am an adult. It's the start of my senior year of high school, and by the end of the year I will have completed the journey of public education that I began thirteen years ago. For essentially as long as I remember, …

What does listening look like?

When we were all kids, we inevitably heard quite a few bits of questionable information. We have all likely taken a few of these little factoids to heart, hence the reason why Wikipedia needs a "List of Common Misconceptions" page. I bet most of us, though, also heard something that just clearly didn't add up …

Asking Direct Questions

I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons I have mega-anxiety about being approached by people is because they will inevitably ask me what is probably my least favorite question of all time: "How are you?" I cannot process this question. Or other questions like it, such as "how was your day?" or even …