Temple wasn’t always so “high functioning”. She has been privileged to have the resources to mitigate the most important things that held her back, and to find and thrive in environments which accommodated those things that she didn’t want to have to change.

And in those environments, the things she could really be good at were able to flourish — and be profitable.

And that’s what it’s all about, really.

If we devote our resources to precisely that balance of mitigation and accommodation, we get to a workable situation. Maybe not fame, fortune, power, or an intellectual summit of one kind or another, but a workable life. We defang the dire prognostications that fuel so much of the fear and irrationality driving the mainstream responses to autism.

Instead of imagining your autistic children non-autistic, imagine specific hurdles overcome, and imagine living environments in which differences which presently constitute barriers are accommodated and accepted. And then find and nurture the talents they do have, that will lead to vocations and avocations that they will enjoy. Just like you would with nonautistic children.

Didn’t mean to go on, it’s just an interesting topic for me, given that I have 4 high functioning kids on the spectrum and I wonder where life’s going to take them. I hope that they are as successful as Ms. Grandin in many ways.

Both her and Germaine Greer have both ‘paid the price’ of not having the ‘typical’ adult female roles (i.e. the ‘mother role’ and ‘wife’ roles) but it’s questionable whether or not they would have been helped or hindered by those roles anyway.