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By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not “symptoms” of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness.
neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors.
The architect of the spectrum model was the mother of an autistic child herself, a British psychologist named Lorna Wing.
By overturning his conception of autism as a rare, inevitably devastating, and homogeneous disorder, she made it possible for tens of thousands of children, teenagers, and adults to gain access to the educational placements and social services they deserved, for the first time in history.
Instead of seeing the children in his care as flawed, broken, or sick, he believed they were suffering from neglect by a culture that had failed to provide them with teaching methods suited to their individual styles of learning.
Finally, at age seventy, Goodman was able to get the diagnosis and access to services he needed. Joining a support group for adults run by the Asperger’s Association of New England, he says, was “like coming ashore after a life of bobbing up and down in a sea that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions.”
One of the most important lessons that Shannon and Craig have learned on their journey with Leo is patience. Instead of comparing his arc of development to an idealized set of milestones, they have come to accept that he is unfolding at his own pace. Two steps forward and three steps back—and then, one day, a hurtling leap into his own future, as if he’d been saving it up.
