10 Best Book For Parents Of Autistic Child
Updated on: December 2023
Best Book For Parents Of Autistic Child in 2023
A Parent's Guide to High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, Second Edition: How to Meet the Challenges and Help Your Child Thrive
Ten Things Every Child With Autism Wishe (Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew)
Autistic Logistics
Children with High-Functioning Autism: A Parent's Guide
Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Processing Issues, Revised and Updated Edition
First Little Readers Parent Pack: Guided Reading Level A: 25 Irresistible Books That Are Just the Right Level for Beginning Readers
An Early Start for Your Child with Autism: Using Everyday Activities to Help Kids Connect, Communicate, and Learn
Explosive Child, The: A New Approach For Understanding And Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
Positive Parenting for Autism: Powerful Strategies to Help Your Child Overcome Challenges and Thrive
The Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children
Where Are All the Autistic Adults?
Autistic children grow up to be adults. So, where are all the adults who were once autistic children? They're all around you.
When stereotypes dominate, such as the one that autism is always a catastrophic, life-destroying condition, there's little reason to think that an autistic adult could offer life-enhancing insights or serve as a guide through a confusing world. There's no reason to wonder if any of the psychologists, lawyers, economists, or artists around you are autistic or have Asperger's, autism's milder expression. Autistics are either doing repetitive tasks in sheltered workshops, or they're friendless geeks with only their computers to keep them company. Wrong.
The amount of information now available about adults with autism and Asperger's is enormous and increasing rapidly. Most of that increase comes, not from professionals: therapists, researchers, etc., but from adult autistics who are blogging, and writing books and articles. The most insightful information about living with autism comes out of personal experience. The majority of individuals on the autistic spectrum overcome many of their early disabilities, through proper treatment of specific problems, through the natural maturation of their neurology, and through learning. Many, all along the spectrum, are turning their minds to the description and analysis of their experiences.
Take note of "analysis." Most autobiographical writing is descriptive: what happened and when, who was involved, how the author felt about it all. Autistic memoirs and autobiographies are unique in revealing a major cognitive attribute: detailed, and sometimes obsessive, analysis. This is a resource that no amount of theorizing or studies by professionals can equal. The work of academic researchers is invaluable in many ways, but it has two significant flaws. It's almost always the work of non-autistics who, however well intentioned they may be, observe and interpret autism through their "neurotypical" filters. Even more important, perhaps, is the simple fact that almost all research, all theorizing about autism is based on children, who are at the very beginning of their developmental path.
The parents of autistic children, and those children themselves, when they are beginning to move out of the shelter of home into the trials of adolescence and young adulthood, need more than studies and theories. They need to know how others like themselves have made it into a satisfying and useful adulthood. They need to know what difficulties have to be overcome and how to deal with them, using the advantages that often come along with autism. They need to know that they don't have to pretend to be something they're not, or even worse, lose themselves and become something they're not.
Resources -- a few accomplished adults on the autism spectrum
Kamran Nazeer - government policy advisor, author of Send in the Idiots
Bill Stillman - blogger, author, lecturer, consultant
Dawn Prince-Hughes - primatologist, author of Songs of the Gorilla Nation