Off topic again but I have been
thinking about a TED video that I watched last night. My niece recommended a movie that she had watched for school entitled Temple
Grandin, Thinking In Pictures My Life With Autism. This is an HBO
movie and since my niece was so impressed I searched Google and found
a link for a TED video. (I have shared the link below.)
So today I couldn't help but to think
about folks that I have known that have a child in their life that
has been diagnosed with autism. Maybe it was a friend's child, a
niece or nephew, a grandchild or a neighbor's child but for some
reason I have been involved in many conversations about autism and as
memories kept coming back to me today I was glad that I had taken the
twenty minutes to watch the TED video but I was still bothered
because I know that there are many folks out there that have huge
concern for the well being of a young loved one.
Autism is defined as a disorder of
neural development. That's a big pill to swallow when you care about
a young person. My involvement in home education probably allowed
more time for conversations about autism as home education is a
decent alternative to public education but all the conversations in
the world won't cure a child of autism.
My teenage children laugh at me for
having obsessive-compulsive disorder in which sufferers commonly have
personality traits such as high attention to detail, avoidance of
risk and a tendency to take time in making decisions. Yep, that's me
and as I write this I catch myself smiling. For the first ten years
of my children's lives I blamed it all on the cat by telling them
that the cat found it to be annoying when the house was a mess.
Both diagnosable problems use the word
disorder. There are plenty of other disorders too. Wikipedia has a
whole list. I don't believe that my wanting a clean house and a
happy cat was abnormal and I do not believe that children diagnosed
with autism are abnormal. I've always believed that autistic
children were just wired differently. Temple Grandin showed us the
proof in her TED lecture.
Please take the time to watch the video. You'll have a new perspective tomorrow.
