Connect with Autism

Emphasizing strengths, celebrating gifts, and categorizing exploratory work on differences rather than deficits.
This is the way.

This is the spirit you will find at Connect with Autism.
The belief in every client and the promise to meet them where they are, no matter where they are.
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Dillan describes how much it mattered when someone saw beyond appearances, believed in him, and kept working to connect with him.

We all make quick interpretations from what we can see. For a person whose speech or movement is unreliable, those interpretations can become limits others place on their opportunities.

Let's begin somewhere different: with curiosity, confidence in the person, and a willingness to keep learning together.

Thank you, Dillan, for putting this experience into words.



ID: Coral and peach graphic with Dillan’s photo, the Communication for Education logo, and the label “Dillan Nonspeaking AAC User.” His quote reads, “Appearances, I suppose, really matter to people. Each day I shaped people’s perceptions about me with my autism. It took finding that person who could imagine me before really seeing me, to break through. A person who believed in me and had so much confidence in me when I had none, was a person worth working as hard as I could for to push through the autism to relate back.”

If you are a provider of ANY SORT and care about this population, you do what you have to do to remove barriers and create access. ❤️

Every parent who has taken an autistic child to the dentist knows the routine. The overhead light straight in the eyes. The drill somewhere down the hall. The bib, the chair, the smell. By the time anyone touches a tooth, the appointment is already lost.

Researchers ran a randomized trial with 162 autistic children to test whether changing the room would change that. Same dental work, different environment: lighting, sound and the general sensory load of the space adapted for the children being treated.

The children in the adapted rooms showed lower physical signs of stress during their appointments. Not self-reported calm. Measurable.

Which is worth saying plainly. The children didn’t need to be better at the dentist. The dentist needed a better room.

Worth knowing: this was one trial, and a package of changes tested together rather than any single feature. But it’s evidence for something parents have been asking practices for anyway.

📰 : JAMA Network Open (2023)

Point of awareness:

There are autistic people not receiving services.
Why?
They are experiencing dysregulated behaviors... because they are autistic.

Make it make sense, please.

Just because a person has “gotten through” to a certain point in life without support doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it now.

For years, an autistic girl could sit quietly in a classroom, get good grades, have a few friends and never be recognized as autistic at all.

That is part of the reason autism has historically been diagnosed far more often in boys.

Autism does not belong to one s*x, but researchers increasingly understand that it can be less obvious in some girls and women. Instead of displaying behaviors adults immediately associate with autism, a girl may become extraordinarily good at watching other people and copying what works.

She studies how other girls talk. Rehearses conversations before they happen. Forces herself to make eye contact. Memorizes jokes and expressions. Suppresses movements that might attract attention. She may even construct different versions of herself for different social situations.

Researchers often call this masking or camouflaging.

Even intense interests can be overlooked. A boy obsessively interested in train schedules might attract attention. A girl intensely focused on horses, celebrities, literature or a particular friendship may simply be described as passionate. What matters is not necessarily the subject, but the intensity and function of the interest.

And masking can come at a price.

Holding yourself together through an entire school day can be exhausting. Some girls appear socially capable in public, then become overwhelmed at home. Anxiety, depression or eating disorders may be noticed long before anyone considers autism.

There is another problem: much of the early research that shaped our understanding of autism disproportionately involved boys and men. The picture clinicians learned to recognize was therefore incomplete.

That picture is changing.

Women are now being diagnosed in adulthood after spending decades believing they were simply too sensitive, too anxious, too intense or inexplicably exhausted by things everyone else seemed able to do.

Sometimes autism wasn't absent.

The signs were there.

The girl had simply spent years learning how not to let anyone see them.