No Book for Jenifer
August 13, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Scrawled across the first page of the copy of Christina Adams‘ A Real Boy: A True Story of Autism, Early Intervention, and Recovery that I checked out from the library are the words
No Book for Jenifer
They are written in red ink, in a childish script. And that phrase has been on my mind while reading the book: Who is Jenifer? Is she autistic? Is she the mother of an autistic child? Why did the writer note that A Real Boy is “No Book” for her? Is she the mother of a child who has clearly not “recovered from autism,” for whom reading this book will only be a painful experience of what did not happen for her own child?
I am not, I should note, reading A Real Boy to find out how to recover my own autistic child from autism; there is no need to make him “not autistic.” I do remember another mother of an autistic child describing Karyn Seroussi—-author of Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder: A Mother’s Story of Research & Recovery—-that she was “one of the lucky ones.” Lucky because she recovered her son from autism.
So that would make me and, possibly, “Jenifer,” not lucky—when actually I always feel like I have won the lottery when I’m with my son Charlie.
My son is not “recovered”, yet he is real (and complex
). I long ago gave up on the purely *imaginary* notion (to meaningfully propel forward the math-pun in the previous sentence) of “indistinguishability from non-autistic peers”. *To what end*, such indistinguishability? Such a goal bespeaks a disturbing pessimism about the feasibility and *necessity* of changing the *surrounding world* to accommodate and accept difference.
I apply a simple Occam’s razor to (the many flavors of what is marketed as) ABA, and for that matter to any other intervention, therapy, treatment, etc.:
Is the goal to *build intrinsically useful skills*, or to *normalize*?
I embrace the former, and reject the latter. For my son, and for myself.
And *that* is what “neurodiversity” is about. *Not*, as the pernicious strawman constructed over and over again would have us believe, “doing nothing about autism” or “letting autism fester”.
A bit of an answer, here.