When he turns 16 he can volunteer at the Humane Society and also the Zoo. We will be working on his resue to help him secure a job.

My other son turns 12 next month and is nonverbal and not sure what direction to go with him yet.

Thank you for much for this. I will keep all of it in mind as we move onward teaching Charlie. In particular, I very much like your phrase about how the “communal belief in the child’s future employment prospects rub[s] off on the child.” That means a lot, and your noting of dreaming—-I would really like Charlie to do something active and that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk, as he seems to thrive on being outdoors and active. (I am very unsure about him working as a courtesy clerk or at a store—-he needs more space and fresh air.)

And thanks for sharing about Sharky online. Very best—

I’m happy to hear you and others are thinking about employment so many years in advance. From my perspective as the person who could one day be trying to find your children a job, please allow me to pass along some advice:

1) Start talking to everyone you know about your ideas of future employment for your child. Plant that seed in all their minds, because for many people it never occurs to them a a person with a disability would have a job unless you tell them. This gets everyone in the child’s life visualizing the child in that light. This leads to some good suggestions from others. Also, the communal belief in the child’s future employment prospects rub off on the child, who then in turn believes it as well. Employment as an adult becomes an assumption and a healthy expectation.

2) Start thinking of your friends, families, coworkers and anyone else you know in terms of opportunities for networking and connections.

The fact is that it is rare for an agency providing supported employment services to have an established network of businesses that they can simply place a call to and wrangle up a job. Only the largest employers are able to create several supported employment positions (and the prestige and good compensation these employers make the competition for such jobs high). So when I establish a relationship with an employer and create a job for someone, I usually cannot go back to that well over and over again. Each time we must move on and create a new relationship.

Most of our jobs, and almost all of the good ones, come from connections the family had. And this does not have to mean that Uncle Bill gives the person a job at his accounting office. It might mean that Uncle Bill has a friend who works in a law office, and one of the partners at the law office has a golfing partner who manages a software company, and the software manager has a nephew with autism. If parents can start a job developer on that path, the developer can then navigate that path to find the right person and negotiate a job.

3)If the child expresses vocational interests, probe into the root reasons for those interests, and see if that can lead to a widening of the interests. For example, I might talk to someone who has never worked, ask him what kind of job he wants, and he’ll tell me he wants to work at Best Buy. If I ask what about Best Buy appeals to him, he might tell me that he likes electronics and computers. If I ask what he likes about computers, he might tell me he likes gaming. From that, I can then arrange for him to have some job tours of software companies that are focused on gaming, and things of that nature. Maybe this appeals to him. Now we’ve got the Best Buy option, and we’ve got the software company option. If this process is already in motion when someone like me shows up, it gives you a head start and shortens the amount of time the job developer devotes to discovery.

4) Start dreaming. One of the questions I always ask when in the discovery process with an individual and his or her family, is what type of work has the family always dreamed of the person having (and this is a standard question from a widely used Customized Employment Profile created by Marc Gold and Associates). I am often disappointed when the family answers something like “recycling,” or “grocery store.” Come on now, no one dreams their child will one day be a courtesy clerk! The career aspirations of a person with a disability need to be grounded in reality, just as they do for all of us, but there is no reason to fear having high hopes and dreams. Believe me, having a child with autism I know all about the fears associated with ever getting your hopes up, but it is very important to never sell our children short, in general and specifically as far as what they can and cannot do for work.

Also point that was made was about job coaches. Charlie is very used to having 1:1 support but he’ll have to learn to work with one supervisor, him, and other workers.

My grandmother was still sewing clothes for stores when she was in her 90s!