Archives for category: Autism
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Different, not less (or broken)

February 5, 10 //
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Tomorrow night HBO will premier the film Temple Grandin:

Starring Claire Danes, Julia Ormond, Catherine O’Hara, and David Strathairn Temple Grandin paints a picture of a young woman’s perseverance and determination while struggling with the isolating challenges of autism at a time when it was still quite unknown.

Temple Grandin and Claire Danes
The film is based on two of Grandin’s books about autism, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (written with Margaret Scariano) and Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism. Given the typical Hollywood treatment of autism (Rain Man, anyone), I had my doubts – fears, maybe – about how this story would be told. A review of the film in yesterday’s The Atlantic has helped to alleviate those concerns:

Stereotypical characters with autism are a convenient and powerful device for convincing neurotypical people to mend their ways, or for demonstrating the saintliness of the people who put up with them.  These cinematic conceits make HBO’s Temple Grandin, a biopic of the acclaimed animal scientist and autism advocate (to premier on HBO on February 6 at 8 p.m.), particularly remarkable.  From the life of one of the best-known individuals with an autism spectrum disorder, director Mick Jackson has managed to make an utterly original movie about autism, simply by allowing Grandin, portrayed in a stunning performance by Claire Danes, to be the center of her own story.

If you are at all involved in the “autism community”, I know that you will probably be checking out this film. If you are not involved with, or even familiar with, autism, I encourage you to watch this film with an open mind. It may just help you understand the sentiment that those with autism are different, but not less, and are most definitely not broken.

You should write a book

January 29, 10 //
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Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Pink when he spoke at a lunch event here in St. Louis. While we were eating lunch waiting for the main event, my friend Gene said to me, “You should write a book.”  Like many people I know, my initial reaction was along the lines of, “Yeah, sure. What would I write about?” And yet…

Over the weekend I gave the idea a bit more thought. Also like many people, I’ve often thought about maybe writing a book, and Gene’s suggestion got me thinking about it again. There are actually many things I could write about: parenting, autism, leadership, systems engineering, FIRST robotics, trampoline and tumbling.

And then the resistance – my lizard brain – showed up. “But that sure is a lot of hard work.” “You don’t even have 100 subscribers to your blog, who would buy a book by you?” “You think you know enough about these topics, but do you really?” “You’ve indulged the idea, now let it go and let’s get back to what we were doing before.”

By the end of the weekend, I’m sad to admit, the resistance had all but defeated me. All I had were the remnants of a very basic mind map to show I had been thinking about it at all. And then Seth Godin told me why I should write a book:

If you’ve never written a non-fiction book, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to. It organizes your thoughts. It’s a big project worthy of your attention.

…and…

If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen…. A book is a physical souvenir, a concrete instantiation of your ideas in a physical object, something that gives your ideas substance and allows them to travel.

A lot of ideas that bounce around in my head, and many of them get published here on the blog. Many more of them are notes and sketches in the many notebooks I’ve accumulated over the years.

Most of these are ideas for change that I want to get across to people, to maybe change their minds about how they view autism and those who are autistic or to show gym owners and team parents how they can run a trampoline and tumbling meet that people will still be talking about years later. I have pages and pages of ideas on how to spread the work and word of FIRST, to get our kids interested in how they can use science, technology, and engineering to change the world for the better.

So, I guess what I’m saying is I’m going to write a book. I’m just not sure yet what I want to write first. Thank goodness for mind maps to help me sort through all the possibilities. Once I have my topic, I’ll set a ship date and get to work.

Compliance or engagement: Which do you prefer for your kids?

January 19, 10 //
9

Like many parents, I always enjoyed taking my sons to their first day of school when they were young. One year in particular stands out.

My elder son was just starting the second grade, his second year at this school. As we walked in on the first day of class, it seemed as if a party were going on. Kids were roaming the halls, teachers and staff were talking to each other and the kids, asking how them about their summer and telling them what a great year it was going to be. Amazingly, they even talked to me, asked me how my summer was, if there was anything they should try to get my son to talk about from his summer vacation.

In other words, “we’re glad you’re here, we’re going to take good care of your son.”

The next day I took my younger son to his first day of Kindergarten. I had to sign in at the front desk before walking him down the hall – an incredibly dingy, quiet, and deserted hall – to his new classroom, where we found about 10 of his new classmates sitting quietly in their chair, hands folded nicely on their desk. No one was talking to them, even the teacher. Especially the teacher, who greeted us with a curt, “Welcome to class, just find a desk and sit down while we wait for announcements.” Huh??? As I walked back out the hall, I took the time to look in on the other classes along the way. I was greeted by much the same as in my son’s room.

The message I took from that school: “we’ve got your kid for the day, as long as he does what we tell him there will be no problems.”

As many of you know, one of my sons is autistic and attended a private day-school while the other attended the local public school. Care to guess which was which in this story? (I’ll give you a hint: we were very fortunate that our autistic son went to the school he did.)

The first school is all about engagement, the other all about compliance. You may recognize this theme of compliance and engagement from Dan Pink’s latest book, Drive. These two schools are also representative of a key theme in Seth Godin’s newest, Linchpin, that we are churning out future “factory workers” when we should be developing artists.

More on that tomorrow in my review of Linchpin.

Happy Birthday, Dad

November 26, 09 //
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On February 17, 1986, shortly after excusing himself from the ice for a breather from the hockey game he was playing with my brothers and some friends, my father collapsed and died from “massive coronary failure”. Had he lived, today would have been his 70th birthday.

Bud - WeddingI usually refrain from writing anything that is overly personal here on this blog, but my dad deserves much of the credit for my interests and my direction in life. The things that make their way onto this blog are things that he and I would no doubt have spent many hours discussing over the years.

My sense of humor, my interest in how things work, and an unquenchable curiosity about the connectedness of everything can be directly traced back to the time he and spent together watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus and James Burke’s Connections on PBS during my formative years. The former gave me an appreciation of why we shouldn’t take anything too seriously, and the latter was the catalyst that eventually led me down the path of complexity and knowledge management.

My appreciation for the importance of doing a job well, and for taking care of the people for whom you are responsible, come from his willingness to take me along on the job – he was a Roadmaster for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. This came in very handy in my early career as an Army officer. Aside from the sorrow inherent in losing a parent so early, I was also saddened by the fact that he didn’t live to see me receive my commission and that he and I never had a chance to swap “war stories” about life as a leader of men.

My greatest sadness from his early death is that he never really got to know my wife, Julie, and that he never had the opportunity to meet his grandkids. I am very happy that Julie and dad did meet, even if only twice and then only briefly. My sons would only have benefited from knowing my dad, and I daresay he would have “corrupted” them even more than I have managed to do on my own. I can only imagine how dad would have reacted to Zeke’s autism, but I have the feeling he would have taken it in stride and treated Zeke just like any other kid.

Although I am saddened by the time I’ve not had with my dad for the past 20+ years, I am very thankful for the time I did have with him. Like any teenager / young adult, I have the feeling I didn’t appreciate him as much as I probably should have at the time. Like any parent of teenagers, I have the feeling that my kids don’t appreciate me as much as I think they should. I can only hope that one day they will look back on this time in our lives and appreciate it as much as I do mine.

So, on this day of thanks giving I would like to say, “Thanks, Dad.”

And Happy Birthday.

Autism and the “helicopter parent”

November 5, 09 //
9

Every now and then someone will write an article – or a comment on an article – that pins the cause of autism on “overprotective” parents. These parents – also known as “helicopter parents” – are so involved in their kids lives, the argument goes, that they warp them into being autistic. (Almost the opposite of the old “refrigerator mother” theory, since this new “cause” is the result of too much – not too little – love and affection.)

flyingwoman1Before I go any further here, let me say emphatically and without qualification that I don’t believe helicopter parents – or any parent, for that matter – can cause autism by spending too much (or too little) time and attention on their kids.

I do think, however, that helicopter parents may play a potentially significant role in the ever increasing number of autism diagnoses.  Consider this definition of helicopter parents from wikipedia:

Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child’s or children’s experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions…. Helicopters parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not.

Who better to recognize early signs of autism and bring them to the attention of a doctor for evaluation. So in addition to “increased awareness of autism” as a possible reason for the increased number of diagnoses, we should also consider that “increased awareness of your child” might be contributing to the number of people who have their children evaluated. Which in turn will lead to a higher number of diagnoses.

The interesting thing here, at least to me, is that once a child is diagnosed as autistic the natural tendency of parents, especially those who are already “helicopter parents”, is to become even more involved in their kids lives, to become more overprotective. The nature and structure of our society, especially our education system, builds on this natural tendency to make it for all intents and purposes a necessity.

The challenge for parents is to figure out how to remain involved, as an advocate, in their child’s life without trying to live their child’s life for them. They need to figure out how to evolve, over time, from being a helicopter parent to a young child to being a slow-parent to a young adult.

If only it were as easy to do as to say.

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Brett's Waste Blog by G. Brett Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at blog.gbrettmiller.com.