Our brains routinely sort and store information along billions of nerve cells connected in trillions of ways. As we learn more about how the brain works, research shows a digital gaming system called the Interactive Metronome or IM may circumvent timing glitches that can occur in the brain’s basic wiring. The treatment (often guided by an occupational therapist) combines movement and sound to boost cognitive, language, and motor skills in people with ADHD, autism, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease.

How IM Works
Interactive Metronome therapy challenges users to precisely match a computer generated rhythm by clapping and tapping. The series of progressively challenging movements are designed to improve timing, focus, and concentration. Training typically consists of 15 one-hour sessions over a three to five week period.

The Theory
Auditory training is based on the theory that timing in the brain is disrupted by conditions such as ADHD, autism, stroke and Parkinson’s, and that improving neural timing helps kids and adults improve behavioral, social, cognitive, and motor skills.

The Evidence 
American Journal of Occupational Therapy:

IM training for ADHD improved attention, concentration, motor coordination, language processing, and reading and math skills in pre-teen boys with the condition.

IM training for chronic stroke resulted in significant functional gains for two patients with arm weakness—even though their strokes occurred years earlier.

For more about the science, patient stories, and to find a provider, go to the Interactive Metronome website.

Brain Fitness The Saturday Evening Post

“Accepting and loving the child with autism—and following the parent’s recommendations—is far more valuable than plying his mom and dad with ideas, contacts, and possible cures,” Dr. Lord emphasizes. Wholesale comments just add stress to parents raising their child the best way they know how.

Researchers believe that lasting differences in the way people with autism communicate and relate to others are linked to brain development before birth. New studies published in the journal Nature now suggest up to 1,200 suspect genes could potentially lead to new targets for treatments.

“There’s no cure yet for autism, but chances are improving all the time for these kids to be independent and have a good quality of life. Families, teachers, and therapists can all make a tremendous difference,” adds Dr. Lord.

Here’s a quick guide to talking about autism from parents of children with the complex developmental disorder enrolled at May Institute’s special education schools.

What not to say:

1. “What’s wrong with her?”

2. “Why do you let him do that? He is scaring my child.”

3. “You know there is no cure.”

4. “Have you tried [suggestion]? If you did, she would be more normal.”

5. “I don’t know how you do it.”

6. “Is she getting any better?”

7. “Why don’t you just leave your kid at home? It would be so much easier for everyone.”

8. “My child doesn’t know how to play with your autistic child.”

9. “Funding would be better spent on normal children.”

10. “Don’t worry—he’ll be okay.”

What the families want you to know:

1. Autism is a spectrum disorder—each child is uniquely affected.

2. Autism is not the result of bad parenting or lack of discipline.

3. Autism can “look” like your daughter, son, niece, or grandchild.

4. Parents of children on the spectrum are not paranoid or always overwhelmed with grief.

5. Just because a child with autism is nonverbal or does not make eye contact, it does not mean he or she doesn’t notice the looks or feel pain from being ignored, bullied, or disregarded.

6. Autism is not contagious.

7. Many people with autism are social and want to interact but don’t know how.

8. It is impolite to reference anyone—be it an individual with an autism diagnosis or any other diagnosis—as “retarded.”

9. It is important to be kinder than you need to be because just about everyone is battling something you know nothing about.

10. Parenting a child with autism is difficult and rewarding, just like it is for parents of typical children. It just takes a little more patience and understanding.

May Institute and the National Autism Center provide educational, rehabilitative, and behavioral healthcare services to individuals with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities, such as brain injury, mental illness, and other behavioral health needs.

How to Talk about Autism The Saturday Evening Post

For those who have read Bissinger’s outspoken column in The Daily Beast or follow him on Twitter, it might be hard to believe he could run out of words. This humbling confession is one of many honest moments Bissinger shares in Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind of My Extraordinary Son.

Titled appropriately after his son, Zach, the first chapter introduces his son as a lovable, simple 24-year-old man who will always be a grocery bagger. It is also the first of many times Bissinger will refer to the shame and subsequent guilt he feels for having a son born with brain damage.

Through a series of IQ and personality tests, doctors were unable to give Bissinger a one-word catchall for his son’s condition, though many tried: autism, Tourette’s syndrome, and mini-seizures were just a few suggested. Bissinger confesses he’s saved all these pieces of partial diagnoses, hoping to find a “cure” to make his son “normal.”

In an attempt to better understand his son, Bissinger decides he will take Zach on an unconventional westward journey. Unlike most family road trips fettered to national landmarks and museums, Father’s Day takes a chronological journey through Zach’s “literal landscape”: Chicago, Milwaukee, Odessa, and Los Angeles. The stops Bissinger has chosen hold personal significance for Zach; they are cities filled with people he knows.

Zach is the perfect navigator — he loves maps and was born with a memory that doesn’t forget. Routes, people, events, and dates are stored forever on his “hard drive.” As they travel into the cities of their past, Zach regales these concrete facts, “I remember David Jackson he worked with you as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune I remember his desk it was near yours…”

Bissinger’s memories in contrast are weighted with feelings of pain and guilt: the birth of his premature twins, struggles in his writing career, his divorce from Zach’s mother, and a lack of closure surrounding his parents’ deaths. These memories are woven into the plot as they venture further west, and Bissinger tries to gauge Zach’s feelings regarding all of them. In the end it is Zach’s action that brings Bissinger peace in an unlikely place: Los Angeles, the city where he experienced his most “personal and professional failure.”

Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and from Amazon at a list price of $26.00.

Book Review: Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son The Saturday Evening Post

The notion that “insanity is infectious,” as virologist Ian Lipkin of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health bluntly puts it, goes back to antiquity. As late as the 1800s, the mentally ill were locked away because, among other reasons, they were thought to be contagious. The notion wasn’t completely misguided. Until the discovery of penicillin ushered in the age of antibiotics, a major cause of mental illness was syphilis. But biomedicine is subject to fads and fashion no less than skirts are, and over the last 40 years disease detectives seeking the cause of mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder have turned from microbes to genes as the cause. And now, a parade of discoveries suggests that viruses may be the culprit rather than your family tree. The new research indicates that viral infection can affect the developing brain and contribute to mental illnesses even before birth.

At first the evidence for a viral link to mental illness was spotty and inconsistent. Early studies piggy-backed on observations that when mothers suffered an infection during pregnancy, the children who were in utero at the time had an elevated risk of developing schizophrenia. But rigorous studies of whether that link was real produced contradictory results: Some found that maternal infection with influenza increased the risk of a child developing schizophrenia 20 years later, but others did not. Only in the last few years have scientists sorted it out. Instead of assuming that every child who had been in utero at the time of a flu outbreak had been infected, researchers began examining mothers’ blood for the telltale antibodies that indicate a past infection. With that advance, the link became clear: As researcher Alan Brown of Columbia University calculated in a 2010 paper, more than 30 percent of the risk of developing schizophrenia comes from prenatal exposure to the flu virus.

The flu virus is not the only culprit. In 2000, Brown and colleagues produced the first watertight evidence that young adults who had been exposed to the rubella virus (aka “German measles”) while they were fetuses less than three months old had a five-times-greater risk of developing psychosis—including schizophrenia—than their peers who had not been exposed to the virus.

Contrary to expectations, however, it is not rubella or other viruses, per se, that harm the developing brain. That became clear as scientists documented a veritable menagerie of maternal infections able to cause psychiatric and neurodevelopmental illnesses—not only flu and rubella but also toxoplasmosis and genitourinary infections. To their shock, scientists began to find that, although mothers had antibodies to flu in their blood (showing that the mother had been infected), the kids—in utero at the time—often did not: They were not infected with the virus.

“It is the reaction of the mother’s immune system to the infection, not the infection itself, that affects the developing brain,” says Columbia University’s Dr. Ian Lipkin.

So what was happening? It’s not that the fetus becomes infected. Instead, the infection triggers the mother’s innate immune system, the army of molecules that prime other cells to kill the invaders. “It is the reaction of the mother’s immune system to the infection, not the infection itself, that affects the developing brain,” says Lipkin. Specifically, a flood of antibodies and other immune-system chemicals with names like chemokines and cytokines surges through the placenta and into the fetus. “The result may be compromised fetal brain development,” explains Dr. Robert Freedman, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center.

Researchers put the final piece into the puzzle when they exposed pregnant mice to a molecular mimic of viral RNA (viral genes are often made of RNA instead of the closely related DNA). That exposure put the brakes on special stem cells that give rise to new nerve cells (neurons)—not just in the embryo but on into adulthood. Most egregiously, it blocked the growth of a specialized kind of neuron destined for the neocortex, the most advanced region of the brain.

How bad was the damage? The offspring of the virus-exposed mice could not even walk normally, reported epidemiologist Mady Hornig of Columbia and colleagues last year. And, after the mice grew to adulthood, they had other neurological abnormalities as well.

Because the mother’s immune system’s response to infection causes the harm to the fetus, almost any virus is a potential threat to the developing fetus. “The damage to neurons and neural stem cells might not be evident right away,” says Hornig, “but manifests later as cognitive and behavioral problems.”

How bad will those problems become? “The specific result depends on the timing,” says Lipkin. He explains that if neural stem cells are killed by the flood of immune-system molecules (the chemokines and cytokines) before they mature, they will not take their rightful place in the brain’s neural networks. Circuits that are forming at the time of the infection will be most vulnerable, while those already hooked up are spared. In schizophrenia, for instance, there are abnormally low numbers of neurons and incomplete clustering in a particular area of the brain, hinting that something went wrong when these regions were being constructed. The effect of the viral infection may be delayed even into adulthood if a circuit damaged by the cytokine flood is not recruited until that time.

The apparent link between prenatal viral infection and later brain disorders led Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital to establish in 1998 the nation’s first pediatric research center to investigate links between severe mental illness and prenatal or early childhood viral infections. Last year, Robert Yolken, who heads the Stanley Division of Developmental Neurovirology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and colleagues reported that in their study of all children born in Denmark since 1981, mothers who had been infected with herpes simplex 2 had a 56 percent greater risk of having a child who later developed schizophrenia.

Dr. Robert Yolken of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center believes that better understanding the role infections play in developing schizophrenia may lead to more effective treatments in the future.

Although current thinking holds that the mother’s immune response, not the virus itself, is the culprit behind viral causes of mental illness and neurodevelopmental disorders, there may be exceptions. Yolken, for instance, suspects that herpes and influenza viruses (as well as the Toxoplasma gondii parasite carried by cats and other warm-blooded animals) might invade the brain and lie dormant for years before triggering schizophrenia or bipolar illness.

The evidence that viruses can cause psychiatric illnesses and neurodevelopmental disorders does not mean they are the only causes. For example, bacteria can also trigger an immune response, which may explain why strep infection can damage the developing brain, leading to the constellation of tics, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other symptoms called Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections (PANDAS). Additionally, many mental illnesses are more likely to arise in people with a family history of them, indicating that they are at least partly heritable. But the failure of geneticists to find genes that have a strong effect on the likelihood of developing schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, or autism suggests that genes do not cause these complex disorders the way a single gene directly causes, say, sickle-cell disease. More likely, says Lipkin, genes make people more or less susceptible to other causes of these diseases—including viruses.

Although the research is still new, scientists believe that it is not too early for obstetricians to take the emerging findings into account. The most obvious step is to monitor pregnant women closely for infections—even those that seem mild—because what may be a minor inconvenience to the mother could be devastating to the unborn child. Women should be educated to be aware of when they might have contracted a viral infection and to tell their obstetrician, who may need to treat them more aggressively than is current practice. In animal studies, after pregnant females were exposed to virus genes, the damage to their unborn pups was prevented when the mothers were given nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen. That provides a rationale for using these drugs when a pregnant woman contracts an infection, says Hornig. Currently, obstetricians prescribe acetaminophen (Tylenol) for pain relief in pregnant women, but that compound does not have the anti-inflammatory effects needed to turn off the cytokine flood.

The old expression “take two aspirin—or ibuprofen—and call me in the morning” never had so much meaning.

Nathan Wolfe’s research on viruses has earned him the nickname “the Indiana Jones of virus hunters.”

The next deadly scourge—and where it’s most likely to originate.

It is no coincidence that the most widespread and dangerous viruses began infecting humans some 11,000 years ago, says virologist Nathan Wolfe, CEO of Global Virus Forecasting (GVF) Initiative. When animals and people live in close proximity, as they began to do with the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, viruses from the former can jump the species barrier—as did HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, and more kinds of flu than you can count.

Wolfe, who founded GVF in 2008 and has been nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of virus hunters,” warns that our fellow mammals aren’t done with this problematic sharing. Some 60 percent of emerging viruses—that is, those new to medical science—come from animals. And as the world becomes smaller and more connected, allowing a traveler to get from the deepest jungles of Africa to London or New York or Tokyo in less than a day, the chance of a virus jumping from a monkey to a bush meat hunter to a western tourist and the entire developed world has soared. In his upcoming book The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (to be published in October), Wolfe argues that this has made us sitting ducks for another global epidemic.

The greatest threats come from two sources: completely new viruses (such as HIV/AIDS) and viruses that mutate. Primates are the most likely reservoirs of the former because the closer the evolutionary relationship, the more likely a virus is to cross over. (For example, there are no cases of viruses jumping to humans from fish or insects, says Wolfe.) But viruses from mammals other than primates can also spread through the human population like wildfire. The H1N1 virus from pigs was so highly transmissible that it went from infecting zero percent of the human population to 10 percent in only a year, notes Wolfe, killing some 20,000 to 30,000 people. The only reason its toll has not been greater is that transmissibility and lethality are inversely related; that’s why Ebola, though deadly, is not highly transmissible.

An even greater threat is mutation of existing human viruses. If one that is deadly but not very transmissible or very transmissible but not deadly acquires genes for that second trait, the results could be catastrophic. That is most likely to happen when viruses from widely separated regions come into contact—as is more and more likely in what Wolfe calls “this viral mixing vessel” caused by global travel.

“Viruses aren’t static,” he says. “They change over time; they exchange genes with other viruses, which can make them more likely to develop deadly recombinants. The greatest threat is probably something we don’t even know is out there.”

Medical Breakthrough: The Viral Link to Mental Illness The Saturday Evening Post

Nathan was diagnosed as “highfunctioning autistic” as he entered first grade. We are blessed! The Richardson Independent School System (Richardson, Texas) and specifically the math, science, and technology magnet school has been and continues to be exceptionally supportive and understanding about my grandson’s needs. Nathan is mainstreamed and is at or above grade level (third grade) in all subjects. He is a loving, happy, witty, wonderful child, and the school administration, his classroom teachers, even the parent volunteers continue to help him succeed. I was touched by Thomas’ grandmother’s comments about the books, tapes, tears, and prayers. Been there, done that. She is right…love and enjoy the child for who he/she is!

A DVD that I purchased may be of help to Thomas and other autistic children (thetransporters.com).

The DVD has been developed specifically for autistic spectrum children in association with the Autism Research Centre Cambridge University. Nathan’s third-grade teacher informed me about the sites (autismresearchcentre.com).

Daisy

Autism Déjà Vu The Saturday Evening Post

My husband, Tom, placed three letters on the table. The first was a payoff notification from the bank. After 30 years of monthly payments, the house was finally ours. The second contained the finalization of Tom’s retirement package. No more Monday-through-Friday nine-to-five days. Every day would feel like Satur­day. However, the third note brought the biggest smile to our faces. It listed the itinerary for our recently booked European vacation. After years of being tied down to family, work, and home responsibilities, we would finally have the life and foreign adventure we’d dreamed about.

Tom’s excitement equaled mine. “I promised Thomas that Grandma and Grandpa would buy him something in every city we visit,” Tom said.

Sixteen-month-old Thomas was our only grandchild. He didn’t communicate, nor did he respond to the world around him like other children his age. His pe­diatrician labeled Thomas a late bloomer. Because we are members of a genera­tion who’d been raised to believe a doctor was never wrong, Tom and I accepted this. Our daughter, a single mother, did not. Her gut feeling said something wasn’t right with Thomas. Despite the pediatrician’s lack of concern, she insisted Thomas be referred to a doctor who specialized in developmental disorders.

During the past two weeks, Thomas had undergone a series of physical and psychological tests to answer the ques­tions our daughter had raised. The neurologist, who headed the testing team, asked us to meet him at his office the same day we took our suitcases from their attic storage. The diagnosis, a mere six letters, changed our lives forever.

“There are several degrees of autism. Some children remain trapped within the confines of their own worlds; others are able to progress into functioning adulthood. Only time will tell how severely Thomas is affected,” the neurologist explained.

I’m a writer, a lover of books. At his birth, my gift to Thomas was an entire set of classics in anticipation of the two of us exploring Sherlock Holmes’ eerie moors and sharing the intrigue of King Arthur’s court. Now the possibility existed that Thomas would never read nor develop the comprehension neces­sary to enjoy such tales.

Whenever a person says that his or her “heart broke,” it’s usually thought to be just an expression of speech. However, at this diagnosis, my heart did break—with an emotional pain so severe I almost fainted. Everything else the neurologist said that day about early intervention and specialized education didn’t register in my numb mind. My grandson, the light of my life, had been condemned to what I considered a living death.

My daughter and my husband, who are both “glass-half-full” optimists—in­stead of a “glass-half-empty” pessimist like me—accepted and adapted to the addition of autism into our lives. Tom canceled the trip he knew neither of us now had the heart to take, while our daughter investigated how best to get Thomas the help he needed.

I simply fell apart. I didn’t leave the house for a week. I cried; I worried; I questioned my faith each time I read a research summary that stated there is no cure for autism. I did things to­tally out of character. I took Thomas to a faith healer and probably would have participated in a curse-removal ceremony if I’d known somebody who practiced voodoo. I made bargains with God and the devil. My love for my grandson was so great that I would have gladly given up the remaining years of my life and burned in the fires of hell if my eternal suffering would cure this little boy.

I rarely slept more than an hour at a time. I lay awake in the dark and tor­tured myself with questions that never had an answer. How did this happen to us? Why? No members of our fam­ily tree have it, so it can’t be genetic. Was there something in the air? In the water? Did something go wrong dur­ing a pregnancy that had no notable problems? Was it, maybe, undercooked meat? How about the pesticides sprayed on fruit? Food additives?

One Sunday morning I had an altercation with a judgmental church member who announced in front of the entire congregation, “God punished your daughter with an autistic child because she had him without the ben­efit of marriage.” If not for the pastor’s intercession, we probably would have come to blows. I did not regret Thomas’ birth before the diagnosis, and I do not regret it now! It took several weeks, but I finally came to terms with the unex­pected life thrust upon us. Within the remnants of my broken heart, I deter­mined to stop grieving for the grandson I once dreamed Thomas would be and put all my energy into developing the person he was.

Our daughter did not ask us to change our chosen senior life path to provide home care for Thomas. We volunteered to stand by her side while she struggled to support the two of them and do what was in Thomas’ best interest. Our world-travel plans were put indefinitely on hold. Tom got a part-time job that allowed him the flex­ibility to spend many hours a day with Thomas. Our lives revolved around the schedules of the six early intervention therapists working daily with Thomas at our house.

Each morning after his 6 a.m. arrival, I cupped Thomas’ chin in my hand, looked deep into his eyes, and told him, “I know you’re in there, Thomas. Don’t you worry. I’m going to find a way to come in and get you. We will explore the world, maybe not the way I planned, but in another, better way.”

Thomas hugged me whenever I told him this, and I felt an understanding in the little arms wrapped around my neck. I stopped reading emotionally devastating case histories and listen­ing to the dire predictions of doctors. Instead, I developed a new hope in the intervention path we’d chosen to pur­sue with Thomas, along with the total family involvement that continued and supplemented the therapy.

The months spread into years. Life fell into a new routine where tears no longer had a place. We took weekend trips to the New Jersey shore where Thomas splashed in the ocean, went to restaurants, Thomas & Friends events, and the circus. We never avoided any family event because of Thomas’ autism.

Challenges? Many! Thomas went through a period where high-pitched sounds, such as those emitted by a house alarm, sent him into a panic. He’d bolt into traffic if he weren’t held onto tightly. This terror disappeared, only to be replaced by fear of a certain color of ice-cream truck. The sight of this truck would send him into a melt­down of sobbing and hiding in his bed. This reaction also left him as mysteri­ously as it came upon him. Thankfully, neither problem has resurfaced.

By age 4, Thomas proved to be high-functioning. He was toilet-trained, able to converse, and possessed a memory that was sometimes sharper than mine! However, despite his aging out of the early intervention services he’d received at home (and therapists’ recommenda­tions that he be put in a mainstream program with an aide), he was denied entrance into a universal pre-K.

Ignorance, unfortunately, exists in school systems. For her first excuse, the school administrator said, “We don’t have any autistic children in our school.” She also said, “We don’t allow aides into our pre-K classrooms.” However, if a child was in a wheelchair, or needed medical care, an aide would be permit­ted. Finally, I was callously informed, “There are schools for kids like this.” The administrator, who hadn’t taken the time to meet Thomas, handed me a list of schools she’d written out on a yellow sheet of paper; each school was for severely retarded kids. Thomas is not retarded —he simply learns in a different way than other children.

I was offended, and I vowed to fight back. Thomas has his quirks, but in a group of other boys his age, it would take a trained eye to realize he is autistic. He is not violent, he is very social, and he loves all the things other boys do—playground swings, slides, worms, fire engines, building snowmen. The only reason he has an aide is to help keep him on track when the class transitions from one task to another. He would much rather work on an art project than practice printing his letters!

Believe me, hell hath no fury like angry grandparents. Together, Tom and I declared war on the ignorant segment of society that doesn’t have a clue when it comes to autism. Vocal opposition, writing letters, public protesting with signs—we’ve become so visible at local rallies that we are affectionately known as Grandma and Grandpa Autism. We’re disgusted with the parents who don’t invite Thomas to their child’s party because they’re afraid he might act up. Put 10 4-year-olds in a room for any amount of time, and some will mis­behave —it’s the age, not the condition.

We’re angry about our major medi­cal plans. Our daughter must work a certain number of hours to maintain medical coverage. No plans cover the cost of all the specialists Thomas must see, and some specialists, knowing how desperate parents of autistic children are, do business on a cash basis only. The retirement savings Tom and I had put aside has been depleted to pay for services Thomas must have and his mom can’t afford.

We’re tired of always having to re­tain legal representation for Thomas to receive the services, school placement, and benefits he’s entitled to under law. And yes, he is now attending the pre-K we applied to and doing better than many of his classmates, but help was necessary to gain acceptance.

We’re disappointed in the behav­ior of former friends, some of whom have been part of our lives for decades. Rather than support us emotionally and accept that Thomas is who he is, they decided to ignore his existence. When confronted, a common defense was, “We don’t know what to say.” Not an acceptable excuse. A simple “How is Thomas?” would have done just fine.

Most of all, I’m concerned for my declining health. Conditions brought about by stress affect my life, yet I must hang on until the day when Thomas realizes —and he will —that he was born into a cruel world where people will always shun him because he has autism. I must be here so that I can instill in him that autism doesn’t matter to those who love him. Yes, he has a mother who is his greatest advo­cate, a grandfather who adores him, and two aunts ready to assist him in his life journey. Still, I believe there is no love more intense than a grandmother’s love. So I take my prescription medica­tions, diet, exercise, and pray a lot!

Thanks to intensive one-on-one early intervention therapy, a strong family support system, and his now-mainstream class, Thomas continues to make excellent strides in his devel­opment. He is a good boy and will become a good man, despite the tough future he faces. We believe the day will come when an adult Thomas, with some supervision, will have a job and be able to live independently.

This past summer, Thomas received his passport. He would like to visit the Caribbean because he wants to swim with the dolphins. If I can squeeze myself into the bathing suit purchased for the canceled retirement trip, I just might take that swim with him.

Occasionally, someone asks us if we regret not taking that European vaca­tion. Tom and I always laugh because we have been on a never-ending journey called autism. It’s our everyday foreign land. We don’t speak the language; we learn as we go; we get confused, lost, and exhausted. Still, we are not unhappy as we move forward with our senior lives. The addition of autism to our family made us stumble, but we did not fall. Together, with high hopes for the future, we go onward.

Advice for grandparents who have an autistic child

1. Let out your grief! Cry. Rant. Break some glasses. Throw rocks at the ocean. It won’t cure your grandchild’s autism, but you will feel better.
2. Accept that you are second in command. Although you may feel strongly about what should be done for your grandchild, the final decision ultimately belongs to the parents.
3. Do not compare your grandchild to other autistic children. Although each child shares some behaviors, they are all different.
4. Learn your grandchild’s legal rights! Find a lawyer who specializes in representing children with disabilities. Some offer a free consult, a senior-citizen discount, or base payment according to economic need. It is also a good idea to find the best way to legally protect your grandchild’s financial future after your death.
5. A pediatrician will be one of the most important persons in your grandchild’s life, so it’s imperative you help your son or daughter find someone with autism experience. A knowledgeable doctor will be able to care for your grandchild’s special physical needs, and he or she can also guide you to other beneficial services.
6. Network. Speak with others who have an autistic grandchild. It helps you mentally to know that you are not alone with your fear and your hope. With autism reaching epidemic proportions, it’s not hard to locate families who share your situation. Other families are also great sources of information when you need to locate activities such as an autism-friendly Cub Scout pack or a Little League geared to special-needs children.
7. Do not assume you must refinance your home to help pay for your grandchid’s care! Our neurologist referred us to an Early childhood Direction Center that, in the state of New York, is administered by the Office of Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities. They helped us secure services that Thomas required – free of charge. However, financial allowances for services for Individuals with Disabilities. They helped us secure services that Thomas required – free of charge. However, financial allowances for services, such as home-based early intervention, vary from state to state.
8. Take time for yourself. I like to sit in the silence of our local Barnes & Noble, browsing through books that have nothing to do with autism. Tom enjoys stretching out on the sofa and watching vintage television shows.
9. Spend quality time with each other. Tom and I take evening walks along a favorite oceanfront path. We also take advantage of early-bird specials and eat out once a week.
10. Finally, just love your grandchild for the special person he or she is.

Autism: An Unexpected Life The Saturday Evening Post