The ongoing narrative that autism is an entity separate from the person distracts parents from learning how to support their children. Deficit-based assessments of autistic children only add to the confusion. As I mentioned in Chapter Five, autism is not a behavioral diagnosis. It’s a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, which means it stems from within a person’s nervous system. Autism isn’t “a thing” that is separate from the person, like a freckle. It’s all-encompassing. It’s a way of being. Our children think autistically, feel autistically, live autistically.
