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For me, I get asked what's my identity.
Being a college professor, working in the cattle
industry, designing equipment.
Autism is an important part of who I am.
I wouldn't want to change it because I don't like
the illogical way that most people think.
But it's not my primary identity.
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I looked really terrible when I was
two years old.
Kids can look really bad.
And then as you work with them some kind of pull out
of it, others don't.
But you don't know until you start to work with
them.
And that's why early intervention is so
important.
And what I'm seeing as I travel around the country
is we're doing a better job on the early
intervention but where we're really falling down
is with the older kids, teaching job skills,
driving, that's going to take longer because of the
multitasking issue.
I did 200 miles on dirt roads at my aunt's ranch
picking up the mail every day, which was three miles
away, before I did traffic.
A lot more practice in really safe places.
When I was four years old I was non-verbal, had all
the symptoms of severe autism.
I was fortunate to get into a really good early
intervention program, lots of turn taking games,
teaching me language, teaching table manners,
that was done in a much more structured way back
in the '50s.
What I want to demonstrate is how you walk back by
them to get them to come up in the chute.
If you've got three-year-olds that are
not talking, the worst thing you can do is just
to wait.
You've got to start working with that kid now.
I've seen too many situations where the
diagnosis is holding fully verbal kids back because
there's a tendency to baby them and they're not
learning how to drive, they're not learning
working skills.
And very often today I have grandparents come up
to me and they discover they're on the autism
spectrum when the kids get diagnosed but those
grandparents had decent jobs because they had
paper routes at age 11, learned how to work.
Social skills in my generation were taught in
a much more structured way.
In the '50s we had sit-down meals, you were
taught how to take turns in conversation and that
is one of the reasons why a lot of the older
generation had jobs and kept their jobs.
You see, a brain can be more thinking or a brain
can be more social-emotional and a
certain amount of this is just normal variation.
And years ago I said, who do you think made the
first stone spear back in the caveman days?
It wasn't the yackety-yaks around the campfire.
It would have been somebody probably on the
autism spectrum in the back of the cave trying to
chip that rock and tie it to a stick.
What you've got to do with kids on the spectrum is
stretch them, stretch them just outside the comfort
zone but give them choices.
Now, the way I got into the cattle industry is I
was exposed to it when I was a teenager.
I came from a non-ag background and when the
opportunity came up to visit my aunt's ranch
mother gave me a choice.
I could go for a week and come home if I hated it or
stay all summer.
Not going wasn't one of the choices.
But giving some choices of stretching activities.
The other thing we cannot let these kids do is
become recluses in their room.
They get so anxious they just don't want to come
out of their room.
Exercise will help on that, I do 100 sit-ups
every night.
But you've got to get them out doing things.
And I've had parents say oh, he got a job at a
store and he's just blossoming.
You see, a person on the spectrum has lots of
memory.
So let's compare to a computer system.
So you've got the cloud computing memory back
here, tons and tons of memory, but a really small
chip.
Working memory is a problem.
And so anything that requires remembering a
sequence of steps like maybe doing the ice cream
machine at McDonald's, pilot's checklist, and
when I worked in a dairy when I was a graduate
student they had a checklist on the wall on
how to set up the dairy equipment, the milking
machine equipment, and I would have been in a lot
of trouble without that checklist.
That's a real easy thing to do.
Let's look at situations in the environment that
can cause problems for people with autism and
that is lighting.
Certain kinds of lighting flickers.
I was just in a hotel room the other day that was
completely horrible.
It had chevron black and white stripes on the floor
and compact fluorescent lights and I could see the
pattern on the floor going like this.
Now, I tolerated it okay, but there are certain
people where this would be completely awful.
I have some sound sensitivity problems.
One of the ways to help get over sound sensitivity
is let the kids control it.
All right, let's say he's afraid of the vacuum
cleaner, then let the kid turn it on and off.
Let the kid control that vacuum cleaner where they
are controlling that sound and then they can
sometimes learn to tolerate it if they
control it.
I get asked all the time, should I tell the kid they
have autism?
He's having a great time, I wouldn't bother telling
him.
And I'm seeing too many kids where their whole
identity is autism.
And they say, oh I want to be an autism activist and
I explain to them, you will be a better activist
if you can go out and excel in a job, maybe an
engineering job, an art job, writing job or
something like that, and then you do the activist
stuff.
I always emphasize all the things I've done at work
and what I learned is I learned to sell my work.
People thought I was weird.
But when I showed them my drawings and my pictures
they looked at that and go, oh you designed that?
People on the spectrum usually are good at one
thing, bad at something else.
We need to be putting a lot more emphasis on
building up the area of strength.
Talking to the FFA and the 4-H students today just
about some basic things about animal behavior.
And one of the things I learned from animals was
learning how to work.
I was not a good student in high school but I
learned how to work in my school's horse barn.
Big problem I'm seeing today is not learning work
skills because I'm afraid that some of those kids
today are just ending up getting addicted to video
games and they're not going anywhere, they're
not becoming video game designers.
If they were becoming great video game designers
I wouldn't be criticizing it, but that's not where
they're going, and I'm seeing a really big
problem on not learning working skills.
How about walking dogs?
How about church volunteer jobs?
Find things in the neighborhood that the kid
can do that is on a schedule outside the
family.
I was bullied in high school.
I got bullied in school.
It was awful.
Fortunately, I was not bullied in elementary
school.
Because Mrs. Deitch, the third grade teacher
explained that I had a disability, but it wasn't
a disability you could see like having a wheelchair
or crutches, and the other kids ought to be helping
me.
So high school was a disaster, complete
disaster of bullying.
In elementary school other kids liked to do craft
projects, so I had friends who shared interests, this
is a really important thing, friends who shared
interests.
Then when I was in high school and I was still
getting bullied the only places I was not bullied
was horseback riding, model rockets and
electronics.
Again, that is shared interests.
It's really important to get kids maybe involved in
band, the school play, it could be lots of different
things.
Being a woman in the feed yard industry was much
harder than being autistic, way harder.
Well, I don't do the bar scene.
That's too socially complicated for me.
Also I can't hear, I've got some auditory
processing problems with background noise and I
can't hear.
I think what makes my life interesting and worthwhile
is work.
Also if you quickly walk back by them like that
they'll go forward.
I was very happy to have a lady come up to me in the
airport last night and tell me that she had read
my books and looked at some of my videos and that
had really helped her daughter.
That's something that gives meaning to life.
This program is part of the Move to Include
Initiative made possible with support from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private
corporation funded by the American people.
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The Max and Helen Guernsey Charitable
Foundation, in support of educational programming on
statewide Iowa Public Television.
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