As I made my way through a long-neglected RSS feed, I stumbled across this gem of an interview in Discover Magazine with Jaak Panksepp:

Jaak Panksepp has taken on many unusual roles in his storied career, but none so memorable as rat tickler: He learned how to stimulate the animals to elicit high-frequency chirps that he identified as laughter. Panksepp’s interspecies game-playing garnered amused media coverage, but the news also stirred up old controversies about human and animal emotions. Since the 1960s, first at Bowling Green State University and later at Washington State University, Panksepp has charted seven networks of emotion in the brain: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. He spells them in all caps because they are so fundamental, he says, that they have similar functions across species, from people to cats to, yes, rats.

Panksepp’s work has led him to conclude that basic emotion emerges not from the cerebral cortex, associated with complex thought in humans, but from deep, ancient brain structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Those findings may show how talk therapy can filter down from the cortex to alter the recesses of the mind. But Panksepp says his real goal is pushing cures up from below.

As a neuroscientist, he was interested in exploring “bottom-up” therapies, such as deep brain stimulation to treat depression and other interruptions in the reward system, but understanding the deep origin of emotions also helps us understand the depth and complexity of emotional regulation. 

There are many aspects of his research that seem immediately relevant to our work with children, including his observations of the emotional and behavioral correlates of the reward system in the brain. He inadvertently identified differences between the quality of behavior motivated by an external reward and that which is internally motivated by the reward system: 

Those kinds of reward experiments had already been going on for years before you got to them. What insights did you add?


I observed that whenever the animal pushed the lever and got the motivating jolt, it explored its world energetically. That was very different than anything that happened when animals were working for food rewards, where they always stopped when they were full. To get at the difference between the two types of rewards, I designed an experiment that injected sugar water into the rats’ stomachs whenever they pushed the stimulating lever. I put one animal in the apparatus and went out to get lunch. When I came back it had killed itself with too much sugar. It just kept pumping more and more until it went into osmotic shock. The next time I didn’t walk away.

So even with a belly full of sugar, the rat was still craving something. 
What was going on?


I tried to answer that fundamental question through the behavior of my lab rats. It was clear that when I stimulated the reward center in the medial forebrain, they were not engaged in the kind of relaxation they felt when they stopped to eat or drink. It was just the opposite. It was the kind of behavior the animal showed when it was looking for food. So I started thinking in those terms: This was mother nature’s way of allowing animals to explore the world. It was an exploratory system; it was about generating expectancies, seeking rewards.

Even more compelling, his work on attachment:

In your next career move, you wound up at Bowling Green State 
University in Ohio in 1972. Why there?

It had a unique lab run by someone I found totally fascinating:John Paul Scott,a biologist in the psychology department who had done more work than anyone else on social attachments in dogs.Attachmentis the bond of selective preference between a mother and a child, whatever the species. Mother dogs and their pups bond, mother sheep and their lambs bond, and so forth. When a real bond has been established, the young selectively prefer their own mother, and follow her around persistently in order to feel comfortable. Conversely, the mother will shower all her devotion on just her own babies. When this attachment bond is broken, the young cry and cry until reunited with the mother; this is the panic system in action. Animals that grow up crying the most because they are separated from their mothers for the longest are generally maladjusted. Scott insisted that attachment had to be studied biologically, but no one knew how.


Then you found a way to study attachment. How did you do it? 
Serendipitously, that was the moment, in 1973, that scientists discovered the opiate receptor—the first neurochemical receptor in the brain. The day I heard that, I said, this has got to be the attachment mechanism. Opiate addiction is another phenomenon that creates a powerful bond. We call it by a different name, addiction, but it is activated via a molecule that produces good feelings, and mom produces a lot of good feelings in the young ones, too. They feel comfortable, they feel soothed, and opioids have that same property, psychologically.

This has always astonished me… that, in essence, attachment is an addiction. The sensations we experience and associate with relationships, from the euphoric “warm fuzzy” feelings of connectedness to the hollow ache of loneliness, are simply chemical messengers in the brain directing our bodies to find the next “hit.” 

How could you test the idea that social attachment is related to 
chemical addiction?


I had the insight that if you wanted to understand attachment, you would have to study crying. My first successful experiments used dogs. We took young pups and gave them morphine. Then we removed them from their mothers. The more morphine they got, the less they cried and the quieter they were. They sat alone and were satisfied, as if the mother was right there. Significantly, we could comfort the animals only with opiates like morphine, not with the types of agents often used to quell anxiety, the benzodiazepines. So we knew the crying wasn’t a physical fear. As with aggression, there were two kinds of anxiety systems. One was fear that a predator would attack, and the other was panic over separation.

Then, he started tickling rats to learn about play. 

Is play embedded deeply in the brain, the way attachment is?
Many experiments over the years suggested it was, but to be sure I removed the upper brain of the animals at three days of age. Amazingly, the rats still played in a fundamentally normal way. That meant play was a primitive process. We saw, too, that play helped the animals become socially sophisticated in the cortex. That’s why it’s so important to give our kids opportunities for play.

And yet it seems that childhood play has become much more controlled than it was when I was young. 
I have gone to ADHD meetings to consider this childhood problem. But the doctors do not want to hear the possibility that these kids are hyper-playful because they’re starved for real play—because they are giving them anti-play medicines. Teachers are promoting the pipeline of prescription controls as much as any other group, because their lives are hard. They are supposed to be teaching kids at the cortical level of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but if they’ve got kids who are still hungry for play, it’s gonna be classroom chaos. And you can sympathize with them, because they should be getting kids that are sufficiently well regulated to sit and use their upper brains. But the kids’ lower brains are still demanding attention.

What happens to animals if they are deprived of play over 
the long term?

They look normal and they eat normally, they’re just not as socially sophisticated. Animals deprived of play are more liable to get into a serious fight. Play teaches them what they can do to other animals and still remain within the zone of positive relationships. If you have play you become sociosexually more sophisticated. Let’s say you have the classic triangle: two males and one female, because males are competitive for sex. So if you’ve got one animal that’s had lots of play and the other animal hasn’t, guess who is successful? The animal that’s had play knows how to stay between the female and the other male. The other guy’s a klutz.

At this point, I have a confession to make… I’m a fraud. I should, by all rights, surrender the blue ribbon awarded to me at my fourth grade science fair, in which I claimed to use food rewards to train a lab rat to navigate a maze and climb a ladder. In actuality, there were several questionable aspects in my methods, including the fact that the lab rat in question was my pet, “Nibbles.” As the object of my affection, he was showered with attention, affection, and treats. Food was never a strong motivator for him and so, when placed in the maze, he would simply climb out to find me. 

Nibbles did, in fact, successfully navigate the maze and climb the ladder, but he didn’t do it for food. To keep him from climbing out, I used a piece of mesh screen to contain him as he moved through the maze and I quickly discovered that he would follow my hand, whether my hand led him to the food or not, because he learned that when he was finished, I would pick him up to play. 

I have often joked that I could trace my career path back to my fourth grade science fair experiment. Just as play and a warm affectionate relationship became the most salient rewards for Nibbles, so too are they the most powerful motivators for children to persevere in face of a challenge. 

I only wish I’d have have been aware of Panksepp’s research at the time…

It’s worth the time to read the whole interview here. 

derring-dont:

sharedattention:

I think I’ve already covered some of this research by Alison Gopnik, but the implications are so important, I’ll risk redundancy. The findings are summarized below, from Discover Magazine’s 80 Beats: 

“Kids are natural scientists, it turns out.

In an article published last week in Science, psychologist Alison Gopnik reviewed the literature about the way young children learn, and she finds that the way preschoolers play is very similar to the way scientists do experiments: Kids come up with general principles, akin to scientific theories, based on the data of their daily lives. Gopnik argues that the research should steer educators and policy makers away from more-regimented, dogmatic kinds of preschool instruction.

Scientists have known for a while—as do most new parents—that babies and small children are phenomenally quick on the uptake. Little ones spend most of their time systematically exploring the world through trial and error, and they grasp what seem like complex concepts very quickly. Babies, we know, have an intuitive grasp of probability: In one experiment, researchers showed babies a box filled mostly with white balls and a few red ones, then drew out a sample of balls and showed it to the baby. If the sample was mostly red balls, the baby looked longer at it than if it were mostly white balls. The infant knew that drawing several red balls out of the bin was unlikely, and therefore noteworthy. Toddlers,multiple experiments have shown, can test hypotheses about how machines work—for example, they can figure out which blocks made a machine play when some but not all blocks trigger the toy.

We have to be careful, though. This exploratory, quasi-scientific approach to the world doesn’t last if adults teach kids to do something else: Kids will let adult instruction override their natural curiosity. Gopnik cites an experiment in which a teacher bumped into a toy and made it squeak, as if by accident, then left the kid alone to play with the toy. The child made the toy squeak, but also figured out several other things about it. When the teacher said, “Here is my toy,” and then made the toy squeak, the child left alone with the plaything only imitated what the teacher had done. Researchers titled the paper about the squeaky-toy experiment “The Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy.” After the “lesson,” the kids ended up learning less about the toy than they would have if left to simply play.

All this research, Gopnik concludes, argues against adding more instruction to preschool curricula. Let the little scientists play and the world will teach them what they want to know.”

Gopnik makes a(nother) compelling case for tempering our expectations for skill-acquisition, placing value on open-ended and exploratory learning, not only in traditional academic environments, but in all interactions with children. 

I’m struck by how easy it is to extrapolate how children with autism and other processing challenges are especially vulnerable to losing their “scientific” curiosity, with very serious consequences for their sense of self-efficacy and ability to stay emotionally regulated in moments of challenge or conflict. With an inefficient processing system, this kind of flexible cause-effect learning can be impaired, leading kids to become overly dependent on rigid routines and rote behavioral solutions to problems. It becomes, then, even more important that they should be supported to engage in self-directed, hands-on, exploratory play, rather than trained in specific skills and behaviors. 

Find the post here. 

What makes you say that autistic kids are more likely to lose scientific curiosity than neurotypical kids? If anything, I get the impression that scientists are more likely than the general population to have autistic traits or actually be autistic. I don’t think I would have the same talent for thinking deeply about the processes behind things if I weren’t autistic, and this ability has been serving me very well in my science classes, so how am I more vulnerable to losing the same skills that I am far more skilled at than the majority of my peers?

Please allow me to clarify, as I certainly do not mean to malign the considerable intellect and ability of the children I work with (or you, for that matter, though I do not know you). I used the term “scientific” not to refer to aptitude in the area of scientific pursuits specifically, but instead, put the word in quotation marks because Alison Gopnik describes the innate incidental and social learning of children as analogous to the scientific method. 

The reason why I suggest that children with autism and other sensory processing challenges might be more vulnerable than so-called typically developing children is that, in my experience, children with autism typically present with some degree of difficulty integrating information from the discrete senses to create a unified picture of their experience (a gross oversimplification would be akin to watching a movie where the audio and visual tracks are out-of-sync… it’s hard to pay attention, let alone follow the nuances of plot and character development.) The brain depends on synchrony and timing to form causal relationships between events and experiences. Even a split-second delay of one mode of processing can have an impact on this system, causing the children that I work with to over-generalize, under-generalize, or simply misattribute these causal relationships. This is the source of significant anxiety, fear, frustration, confusion; avoiding these emotions often results in an understandable need to depend on their considerable abilities in patterns, systems, and memory to preserve sameness, predictability, and routine. (At the risk of really complicating matters, it’s this same system that forms the foundation for generating ideas about how to solve problems, whether that problem is motor, social, or more cognitive/abstract (i.e. praxis). As a result, these kids sometimes have limitations in their ability to organize a purposeful response to those experiences and feel chronically powerless to act to change their experience.)

What I’m suggesting is that children with processing challenges might already have some difficulty making accurate predictions about the relationship between events and experiences in their environment. I see this as a vulnerability, not because of an “ableist agenda” in which there is inherent value in one over the other, but because of the significant anxiety it causes and because of how often it interferes with the child’s participation in their world and in their own interests. This is compounded by the most popular educational and behavioral approaches, in which rote skills, facts, and behaviors are taught, rehearsed, tested, and rewarded. This is exactly what Alison Gopnik is suggesting is so potentially damaging to young scientist learners… having an adult dictate how to solve a problem inhibits the child’s natural problem solving instincts. 

Incidentally, my blog is mostly directed at my colleagues and my clients, who are already familiar with the kind of work that I do, which is designed to improve the child’s processing in order to help them to be better “scientists,” if you will: to more effectively tolerate the experience of being in the world, to pursue their own ideas at their own pace, to communicate and collaborate their findings, and to enjoy the findings of those they esteem. This is why I appreciate (and share) research that supports our approach. 

I sincerely appreciate your question and hope this helped to clarify. 

I think I’ve already covered some of this research by Alison Gopnik, but the implications are so important, I’ll risk redundancy. The findings are summarized below, from Discover Magazine’s 80 Beats: 

“Kids are natural scientists, it turns out.

In an article published last week in Science, psychologist Alison Gopnik reviewed the literature about the way young children learn, and she finds that the way preschoolers play is very similar to the way scientists do experiments: Kids come up with general principles, akin to scientific theories, based on the data of their daily lives. Gopnik argues that the research should steer educators and policy makers away from more-regimented, dogmatic kinds of preschool instruction.

Scientists have known for a while—as do most new parents—that babies and small children are phenomenally quick on the uptake. Little ones spend most of their time systematically exploring the world through trial and error, and they grasp what seem like complex concepts very quickly. Babies, we know, have an intuitive grasp of probability: In one experiment, researchers showed babies a box filled mostly with white balls and a few red ones, then drew out a sample of balls and showed it to the baby. If the sample was mostly red balls, the baby looked longer at it than if it were mostly white balls. The infant knew that drawing several red balls out of the bin was unlikely, and therefore noteworthy. Toddlers,multiple experiments have shown, can test hypotheses about how machines work—for example, they can figure out which blocks made a machine play when some but not all blocks trigger the toy.

We have to be careful, though. This exploratory, quasi-scientific approach to the world doesn’t last if adults teach kids to do something else: Kids will let adult instruction override their natural curiosity. Gopnik cites an experiment in which a teacher bumped into a toy and made it squeak, as if by accident, then left the kid alone to play with the toy. The child made the toy squeak, but also figured out several other things about it. When the teacher said, “Here is my toy,” and then made the toy squeak, the child left alone with the plaything only imitated what the teacher had done. Researchers titled the paper about the squeaky-toy experiment “The Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy.” After the “lesson,” the kids ended up learning less about the toy than they would have if left to simply play.

All this research, Gopnik concludes, argues against adding more instruction to preschool curricula. Let the little scientists play and the world will teach them what they want to know.”

Gopnik makes a(nother) compelling case for tempering our expectations for skill-acquisition, placing value on open-ended and exploratory learning, not only in traditional academic environments, but in all interactions with children. 

I’m struck by how easy it is to extrapolate how children with autism and other processing challenges are especially vulnerable to losing their “scientific” curiosity, with very serious consequences for their sense of self-efficacy and ability to stay emotionally regulated in moments of challenge or conflict. With an inefficient processing system, this kind of flexible cause-effect learning can be impaired, leading kids to become overly dependent on rigid routines and rote behavioral solutions to problems. It becomes, then, even more important that they should be supported to engage in self-directed, hands-on, exploratory play, rather than trained in specific skills and behaviors. 

Find the post here. 

From Discover Magazine’s 80 Beats Blog: 

Young children need attention—and not just to keep them from wandering off or yelling their lungs out. Social interactions actually help their developing brains. We know about this from studying children and animals raised in relative isolation: Neglected children, like those raised in Romanian orphanages, suffer from behavioral and cognitive deficits as adults, andisolated young monkeys grow up to have weaker memory and learning abilities than their socialized peers. Just what is happening in the brain to trigger these mental problems?

According to a new paper in the journal Science, it’s all about the fatty tissue myelin, and the cells that produce it. Babies are born with very little myelin in the brain—as they develop, specialized cells called oligodendrocytes wrap insulating myelin sheaths around the long, rod-like sections of certain neurons. These myelin coatings help electrical signals travel more quickly through children’s brains.

To test myelin development in a neglected brain, researchers raised mice in three different environments after weaning: alone in a cage, a standard cage population of four mice, or an enriched environment with eight mice to a cage and lots of toys. After four weeks, the isolated mice demonstrated less social interaction and weaker working memories. And the myelin layers around their neurons were thinner, produced by oligodendrocytes with simpler structures than the oligodendrocytes in the more social animals.

Further tests showed that this poor myelin production occurred even when mice were isolated for only two weeks after weaning and then returned to a social environment. In addition to showing one of the possible causes of cognitive problems in neglected children, this finding illustrates the fact that isolation during the critical period of children’s development can cause irreversible damage to a their brains.

It’s compelling research; we’re sometimes referred children adopted from austere orphanage environments. As individuals, they present with a wide range of functioning, but the common themes include extreme sensory sensitivities and poor organization and sequencing of actions and ideas, so it’s no surprise to find that there’s an underlying problem of communication and connectivity.

What isn’t clear is the extent to which this might be remediated. The article uses the term, “permanent brain damage,” and suggests that the effects can be seen not only in the myelin sheath, but also in the health of the oligodendrocytes in the brain. Certainly, this is a disadvantaged situation, especially when you consider the likelihood that these cases of extreme social deprivation might be complicated by comorbid conditions caused by poor nutrition or exposure to teratogens, and yet, we know that the brain is remarkably plastic. It seems that with intervention, the efficiency of those pathways might be optimized, interventions that focus on pacing the interaction to support multi-modal pairing and processing.  

Find the article here. 

mosaicofminds:

“Best of the IMFAR Press Conference: - Rebecca Landa, Ph.D of Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) at Kennedy Krieger Institute examined head control in 6 month old babies and 93% of those that had head lag later went on to have an ASD.”

—

-Autism Science Foundation facebook update

This finding underscores the relationship between motor problems and the ASD, Note that if you have trouble holding your head up and moving it, it’ll probably be harder to engage in gaze following and joint attention.

Exactly. The sensory and motor coordination required for social orienting is incredibly complex, even from the beginning: 

• attune to the salient sound of your mother’s familiar voice amidst a sea of environmental sound
• determine that the sound is coming more quickly to your left ear than to your right 
• activate and coordinate the muscles that will turn your head to the left, in the direction of the sound
• maintain that head and neck position to provide your eyes a stable platform from which to work
• coordinate the eye muscles to work together, scanning the busy visual field to find the movement that is happening in synchrony with that sound
• maintain that position and focus long enough to register and give emotional meaning to this event 
• do all of this quickly enough to coordinate a purposeful response that will provide mom the warm fuzzy feeling of reciprocity and encourage her to continue 

This is why I find the pervasive myth of the detached, distant, and disinterested child with autism so very frustrating… when you can modify the pace or otherwise accommodate an underlying processing challenge, you’re inevitably left with a warm, loving, and available child. 

mosaicofminds:

paisleytie:

Something I’ve always found weird are those charts that are supposed to teach autistic kids how to read facial expressions, but they’re just pictures of cartoon people’s faces that look nothing like real human faces, making ridiculously exaggerated facial expressions that look nothing like real…

YES GOOD POINT. 

A family member used these briefly in elementary school and I remember thinking they looked nothing like real human faces.  I figured the idea was, once he got the basic principle down solidly with the simplest possible example, he’d be gradually able to generalize to the real thing.  But that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it, all the subtle details to integrate, the rapid changes…the fact that real human beings have mixed emotions, try to conceal their emotions, and often express small traces of emotions on their faces that they don’t even know they’re experiencing? 

A slowed-down computer program using real faces probably helped him a lot more.

YES! 

Not to mention that facial expressions may be interpreted in very different ways depending on context. I wish I could credit the original source, but I recall seeing someone showing a picture of Serena Williams… 

and pointing out that, if you looked at the expression in isolation, it would appear to be anger, but it was actually taken in the moment of hard-earned victory. 

Experiential factors shape the neural circuits underlying social and emotional behavior from the prenatal period to the end of life. These factors include both incidental influences, such as early adversity, and intentional influences that can be produced in humans through specific interventions designed to promote prosocial behavior and well-being. Here we review important extant evidence in animal models and humans. Although the precise mechanisms of plasticity are still not fully understood, moderate to severe stress appears to increase the growth of several sectors of the amygdala, whereas the effects in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex tend to be opposite. Structural and functional changes in the brain have been observed with cognitive therapy and certain forms of meditation and lead to the suggestion that well-being and other prosocial characteristics might be enhanced through training.

(Source: fuckyeahneuroscience)

From The Huffington Post:

This is such an important message… as someone who works with children with autism and their parents, I often find that my primary goal is often to restore a parent’s sense of optimism about their child’s future. More than any other measure, this seems to be the best predictor of a child’s future happiness. Even in the most physiologically challenged child can be supported to feel more confident in their ability to participate and be an agent in their world.

I tried to find an extractable excerpt from this, but couldn’t. 

We are inundated with disturbing imagery depicting autism in the media. Perhaps one of the most famous was a video made by a well-known organization several years ago. It was a montage of a number of parents expressing their distress and the difficulties they face while raising an autistic child. Their children were almost always present as the parents spoke. The camera cut to those same children in full meltdown, stimming or sitting alone in a playground in stark contrast to their neurotypical peers who were running, shouting and laughing, while playing with one another. At one point a parent discussed how, for a brief moment she allowed herself the fantasy of driving off the George Washington Bridge with her autistic child in the backseat.

No one disputes raising a child can be challenging, and raising a nonverbal child all the more so, but that is not the entire story. As someone who once devoured anything on the subject of autism through the lens of ignorance and as a result was paralyzed with the fear these depictions induced, I am aware of the underlying emotional manipulation that is often so obviously being employed. It is propaganda, whether intentional or not, biased, deeply prejudiced and intended to create fear. And it is doing tremendous damage to autistics and to all of our autistic children who will soon grow up to be autistic adults. These types of imagery perpetuate the marginalization and unfortunate stereotyping of people on the spectrum. In using the images of autistic children it negates and ignores the effect these depictions have on those same children 10 or 15 years from now, when they grow up to be autistic adults. Sadly, it is not just any one organization engaged in this kind of negativity and bias. News programs routinely air shows about “savants” who are seen as fascinating curiosities or programs about the tragedy and horrors of autism, citing statistics and the growing numbers, with shrinking resources available.

For those who do not have an autistic person in their life or have never met one, these depictions are what you base your perceptions and assumptions on. Just as when I was first told my daughter, Emma, was autistic, my mind latched onto the image of Dustin Hoffman rocking back and forth while muttering in his role as Raymond Babbitt in the movie “Rainman.” Emma is as dissimilar to Raymond Babbitt as I am. But at the time of Emma’s diagnosis I knew of no other autistic person, so this was who I immediately thought of and then felt confused as to how my daughter could possibly be autistic. Many years later, when I met Temple Grandin at a lecture she gave, I again found myself looking for similarities. There were few.

Over the years I have read about and met countless autistic children, teens and adults. While some share one or two behavioral similarities to Emma, I have yet to see any where I think “Oh, that’s what Emma will certainly be like in 15 or 20 years.” Comparing Emma to adults on the spectrum is something I have been doing for years without realizing it. This is not something I do with my eldest child, Nic. In fact, it never occurs to me to compare him to adults. I know and trust that Nic will continue to mature and grow up to be the responsible, kind, thoughtful, intelligent human being that he is already showing himself to be. Why do I not do this with my daughter? Clearly this is where my work lies. It’s a double standard that I hold, one for my neurotypical son and another for my autistic daughter. Here is where using the word neuromajority really is appropriate and more accurate. Nic is in the neuromajority, and therefore I assume things about his future that I cannot know any more than I can predict my daughter’s. But because he is in the neuromajority I am able to lull myself into a state of calm, thinking that I know, or feel that the chances are at least better than good that he will grow to be the person I can see him becoming now.

Emma’s future remains a giant question mark, and so I fall easily into fearful thinking. The single most important thing to effect my thinking regarding my daughter has been communicating with autistic adults. There are a number of them I particularly like and admire, whom I reach out to and are kind enough to take the time out of their busy lives to communicate with me. I do not assume Emma will grow up to be like any of them, but in communicating with them I am given tremendous hope, because unlike the media coverage of autism and autistic people, they do not live their lives from one dramatic sound bite to another. They are complicated, interesting, intelligent people studying, working and living their lives.

As a result, the frightening portrayals the media seems so enamored with are softened, and I am able to be logical in my thinking when confronted with those images and now even choose to avoid those programs. I do not need these depictions to compete with the very real autistic person in my life who struggles, yes, but who also progresses, is funny and happy, smart and kind and loving, sensitive and unique, who will continue to progress and mature to become a young woman with all of those qualities and more. Being in contact with these kind autists has taught me more than any specialist, article, book or news show. These people with their writing and blogs have opened my mind to the very real possibilities that exist for my daughter. This gives me hope. I fall easily into fearful thinking, but I was capable of that long before Emma came into my life.

For a list of some blogs by autistic adults go to: Emma’s Hope Book

For more by Ariane Zurcher, click here.

For more on autism, click here.

Original post can be found here.