By Ron Sandison December 7th, my wife Kristen and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. One of the challenges I experienced with autism was relationships. While dating, I had difficulty filtering my comments and unusual behavior: a lack of eye contact, monotone speech, and I often nervously tap…

Resilience is a key strength for autistic people. By Catherine Londero I was once told by a preschool assistant that “your son needs to work on his resilience.” I couldn’t disagree more. It struck me that so often autistic people, particularly children, are judged by their behaviour. A…

By Kris McElroy Back-to-school time is a huge transition time full of different emotions and to-do tasks. As a autistic parent with chronic illness & disabilities, there is an excitement mixed with anxiety, stress, and overwhelm as we prepare for the fall season kickoff of work and our 2 year o…

By Dennis Procopio “Dennis, please just get in the f***ing car.” This was my mother, pleading with her 9-year-old son to sit in a friend’s car which had crushed velvet seats. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. It felt…. unbearable. As she herself was diagnosed with a laundry list of clinical diagnoses includ…

Infinitely Polar Bear articulates an encouraging message about the ability of neurodivergent individuals to be successful parents, a goal they can achieve through love and support from their partners and from their children. By Nils Skudra This week I had the opportunity to watch Maya Forbes’ 2014 p…

By Kris McElroy If someone would have asked me to rate my anxiety and excitement on a scale of 1-10 when I found out I was going to be a dad in May of 2020, I would have said, “are you kidding me? I’m like a 25 on excitement and a 50 on anxiety”. Before then I never believed I could be a parent beca…

By Danyale Sturdivant When my son Joshua was born, I cannot begin to tell you how happy I was! I had watched video’s and read books and was so “prepared”! I had everything down and was excited to take on this new venture. As life would have it, he was diagnosed with Autism at 2 ½ and that is when o…

By Kris McElroy I found out I was autistic when I was 30 years old after over two decades of misdiagnoses, misunderstandings, and maltreatment. The diagnosis helped make so much more sense to me about myself and the world around me. It helped me understand I was having meltdowns because I was overlo…

By Ron Sandison Father’s Day is especially meaningful to me as a dad with autism, I try not to take the responsibility for granted with my hectic schedule of writing and speaking. When I was diagnosed with autism at age seven the experts informed my parents I would probably never get married and ha…

4th in the Happy Sawyer series By Nikki Mann  I suppose I don’t think of Sawyer as autistic any more frequently than I consciously acknowledge that he has blue eyes, or that his 3 year old sister whinges for most of the livelong day. So when I put his school bags on the same cushion of th…

Since autism has no physical manifestation it’s hard to know that this child in the middle of a meltdown is autistic. By Tulika Prasad A few days back while I was browsing the aisles of a store my nine-year-old son brushed against another customer. I was hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal but sh…

An interview with Karla Akins, Author of A Pair of Miracles: A Story of Autism, Faith, and Determined Parenting By Ron Sandison 1. What were the first signs your twin boys had autism? The twins cried and screamed constantly. They bit one another mercilessly from the time they could crawl. They were…

2nd in the new monthly series of ‘Happy Sawyer’ By Nikki Mann I don’t think I’d realised how much Sawyer’s first 2 or 3 years had affected me emotionally until I started writing it all down, and I don’t think I’d realised until now how much my life has been changed by them. I have so many stories to…

1st in the new monthly Art of Autism series of ‘Happy Sawyer’ By Nikki Mann My son is sitting next to me as I type this. He is wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine top, holding his favourite Thomas the Tank Engine toy, whilst watching Thomas the Tank Engine tutorials on YouTube. For those of you unfami…