I realize I’m saying all this into a (temporary) vacuum — I don’t know yet the particulars of Noah’s situation. If he’s already reading at some level, you’re way ahead of some parts of this.

But once he has a reliable and *respected* medium of expressive communication, he can work on *describing* what ails him as an alternative strategy to letting a “funnel cloud” develop.

I’m on the board of the Autism National Committee, and although my 17-year-old autistic son Jeremy is verbal, I know many families whose autistic family members have profoundly improved their quality of life by attaining and leveraging effective alternative means of expressive communication.

(For that matter, although Jeremy acquired speech between the ages of 3.5-5.5, the refinement of his speech abilities into sufficient expressive power to really describe what was going on with him or ailing him was slow enough that we could readily observe the difference it made in his levels of frustration and conversely his quality of life. The same picture is simply writ larger in cases where an individual has to acquire and develop a total alternative to speech, for one reason or another.)

I keep stumbling across this quote in the last 24 hours and it seems apropos here:
“Bad things happen when good people do nothing.” Your family is again proof that good things can happen when good people do something, anything, to help their children.

My son Noah turns 17 in November, and he is non-verbal. He is remarkably into new people, walking up to new people in our home with curiousity and attentiveness; when we make our routine Saturday rounds of various groceries, he is “Mr Congeniality” to the point where I need to gently remind him not to bug the cashiers (some of whom know him by sight) while they’re working. But, juxtapose this with his, as you aptly put it, “thunderstorm” moments (we tend to call them tornadoes due to his physicality), and your lighter-than-air moments are easily overcome by the weight of despair, and just trying not to fight him too hard. At 5′8 and 155 pounds of mostly muscle, when he has some kind of physical discomfort (digestive, or possibly knots in his shoulder or neck, or a canker sore), I am afraid for the ten to fifteen minutes that it occurs that he will possibly hurt one of us, or himself. He isn’t self-injurious in the classic sense, but he tends to bite things. Medication (milder ones) have helped him deal with his anxiety, but we still have to watch him for our tutors’ sake (he is back at home now after a couple of tantrums at his last school–a non-public placement by our district–were too much for them to handle)

Anyway, our concerns are just like yours, even though our children are very different. Thanks for listening, and for your website.

Jerry (Ben Lomond, CA)

thanks, Emily!