Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

Hovering is bad for neurotypicals, but it is even worse for kids with disabilities. I have observed many children held back by the label. Some parents embrace the disability mindset so fully that they fail to teach their child useful skills that they could easily learn. I’ll never forget meeting a couple, both computer programmers, who wanted advice for their autistic son. They described him as brilliant at math but content to spend all his time in the basement playing video games. I asked if they ever thought of teaching him coding. It had never occurred to them. I’ve met parents of fully verbal children with an autism label who are so overprotective that the children never learn basic skills such as shopping and having a bank account. In a book I cowrote with Debra Moore, Navigating Autism, we call this “label locking,” which is a failure to see the whole child. This may also keep parents from exposing their kids to things that could develop their abilities, such as tools, math books, or art materials. I recently met a young autistic adult who had figured out how to make accurate working replicas of vehicles from Legos. Neither his teachers nor his parents thought to expose him to tools or a machine shop class. They were locked into the label. I see it all the time: the child is pathologized and never given the opportunity to explore the world or potential gifts. So many object visualizers (neurotypical and neurodiverse) can build the most complex Lego structures. These ...