TPP 091: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”

if you're listening to this podcast it's probably because a child you love and care for is differently wired are they also struggling in their current educational setting seen only for what they're doing wrong while longing for positive relationships with peers and others Invision a world where your child's unique abilities are not just recognized but celebrated a world where they can connect with others and their true potential is seen and appreciated the strength-based assessment lab's mission is to build a world for your child just like that through its innovative approach it aims to empower students families Educators and professionals to create positive effective and Collaborative Learning experiences be a part of shaping a brighter future for your child visit www.bgsu.edu I no longer think of neurodiversity as like a political stance or or even a movement I think of it as a living fact like biodiversity and we can pathologize it endlessly and say you know that all these variations are diseases or syndromes or whatever which was the approach for most of the 20th century or we can celebrate that diversity as a a gift to our society that requires us to be responsible and to provide people with whatever they need to achieve success in whatever form their success would be welcome to the Tilt parenting podcast a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring informing and supporting parents raising differently wired kids I'm your host debie Reber and today's conversation is one I am so excited to share with you my guest is Steve Silberman a science writer who authored the 2015 book neurotribes The Legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity a brilliant book that upends conventional thinking about autism and suggests a broader model for acceptance understanding and full participation in society for people who think differently Steve's articles have appeared in wired the New York Times the New Yorker the financial times the Boston Globe the MIT technology review nature Salon Shambala sun and many other Publications in April 2016 Steve gave the Keynote speech at the United Nations for World autism awareness day he's also given talks on the history of autism at Yale Harvard MIT Oxford the National Academy of Sciences Queen Mary University Apple Microsoft Google the 92nd Street Y and more his Ted Talk The Forgotten history of autism has been viewed more than a million times and translated into 25 languages having this conversation with Steve about neurod difference acceptance tolerance changing cultures systemic change and much more was such a thrill and honor Asher and my husband Darren can attest to the fact that I got off our interview feeling motivated and inspired about where we are going in this revolution to change the way difference is perceived and experienced in the world I can't wait to share it with you if you want to help me amplify these messages and spread our conversation far and wide I invite you to share this episode with your communities online and offline and if you aren't already signed up for my tilt parenting newsletter I would love for you to join me every Thursday I send out a short email including a quick note from me a link to that week's podcast and bonus after the show video and links to five mustre articles from the news that week that are relevant to parents like us just visit til parenting.com and sign up where it says join the Tilt Revolution and now without further Ado here's my conversation with [Music] Steve hey Steve welcome to the podcast hey Debbie I'm really honored to be here thank you for asking me to be on the show oh my goodness well the honor is mine I'm super excited to be bringing you to the Tilt parenting audience and I really wanted to introduce your work neurotribes I'm sure many people in my audience have read the book or are familiar with it and there are probably a lot of people who aren't who are new to this journey so maybe we could just start if you could tell us a little bit about neurotribes the book what your big goal was in writing it and who it's aimed at sure well the inspiration to write it was the fact that uh in 2001 I wrote an article about autism in high-tech communities like Silicon Valley uh it was an article called the geek syndrome that appeared in wired and um the article came out right after 911 so I figured that you know hardly anyone would have time to read it or care about it but instead what happened was I got email about the article for 10 years and that's very very unusual for a magazine article usually they're forgotten overnight and the emails many of which were from parents actually were about very basic problems in accessing services for their kids on the Spectrum uh I also got lots of emails from people around the Spectrum themselves who were unable to you ever find a job even if they had been told they were prodigies when they were young because they couldn't make it through a face-to-face interview and so these emails were very heart-wrenching and really had to do with very basic failure of society to provide reasonable support and accommodations for people on the spectrum and their families and it was causing a tremendous amount of you know just the sheer volume of human suffering that I read about practically every week for 10 years after uh My article came out meanwhile a funny thing was happening which was that the entire world was becoming obsessed with autism uh but they were what they were becoming obsessed with was the question uh as to whether or not vaccines cause autism and this too was also causing a tremendous amount of human suffering because in fact I remember reading on an antivaccine website uh this woman saying that you know basically the day that she ruined her her life and her daughter's life was the day that she brought her daughter for for a measles mums and rubella vaccine and so people were really suffering from these ideas that were constantly being argued about online while meanwhile no one was talking about what family and autistic people I.E the people really on the front lines of autism were having to deal with which didn't really have to do with vaccines or what causes autism or whatever but it had to do with a failure of society to support them you know it's like every article you read for for that Whole Decade practically even in very deeply reported newspapers like the New York Times would always say we don't really know why the number of autism diagnoses you know keeps going up and I thought really 10 years have passed we don't really know like why don't we know this and so as a science writer I took it upon myself to start going back through autism history to try to figure out where the concerns of the mainstream media which seem to be all about vaccines and the concerns of parents and autistic people which seem to be all about accessing services where those two interests diverged and what I discovered in the course of my research was that the history of autism as it had been uh sort of repeated over and over again in thousands of textbooks and Wikipedia was incorrect and that if you understood the correct timeline of autism's discovery that it was a lot easier to understand why the estimates of prevalence and number of diagnosed started to soar in the 1990s and so my book is basically the story of how societal attitudes and medical models and Disability Rights politics changed around autism over the course of 80 years in order to try to answer questions that were literally keeping parents up at night and preventing autistic people from having uh you know as productive and safe and secure Ure lives as they possibly could well it's a fascinating story and as you're saying that my son Asher who's 13 now was you know born in 2004 so I very much remember the Andrew Wakefield study and you know reading all about that and that was a discussion among many parents in my peer group about the vaccination connection and so it's really just interesting you know in those 13 years we've come along in terms of understanding the science better um and I know your Ted Talk specifically talks about that study when did you do your Ted talk about autism I did the Ted talk about I guess it was about three years ago it was several months before the book came out um it was sort of a lucky break in a sense that I got asked to do a TED talk because I had done a presentation uh for a sort of a live performance Group in San Francisco on the woman who invented the icons for the Macintosh Susan care and the people who saw that liked the presentation and then they were invited to give a series of talks at Ted three years ago and so they they said well you can talk about anything you want and I said well I have this book coming out in a few months you know do you want me to talk about that and the reason why I talked specifically about a very basic very simplified explanation of what's explained in much more detail in my book is that I felt like parents had been bombarded by misinformation and controversy and arguments and just so much anger on every side you know the antivaccine people were angry at Big Pharma and I had written about big Pharma for Wired I was a senior science writer for Wired for like 15 years I knew that big Pharma was very capable of doing terrible things but were they doing a terrible thing about vaccines and the more that I looked into that you know Andrew Wakefield is a liar let me just say that upfront but when I started my book I did not take that approach I thought that Andrew Wakefield might be a very uh sincere and Earnest scientist who tended to be sloppy because everyone knew that his study was badly run and and that there were ethical concerns and that you know it came out that he had a patent for an alternate vaccine formulation that he hoped would be adopted after the MMR was you know made the object of fear and Terror but the more that I studied the history of autism which Andrew Wayfield continually misrepresented it was very obvious to me after several years of research that what Andrew had done was I have I had him on tape saying I didn't know anything about autism before I did my study you know his famous study and so what he did was he really he read this book called the age of autism that was put together by the the biggest antivaxers on the web and he just appropriated their history which was wrong and how do I know that because I read the same papers that they did and they continuously misrepresented them so after a while I stopped thinking of Andrew Wakefield as a True Believer and just started to think of him as a fraud but the problem is that the antivaccine movement and Andrew Wakefield did something that was very useful for parents in a way in that everyone knew that for some set of unknown reasons until my book came out the number of diagnoses started to soar in the in the uh early 90s everyone knew that but no one knew why and so there was sort of a vacuum of in a sense storytelling about what had happened to produce that startling Spike and diagnosis and so what Wayfield and the antivaxers did was provide parents with a story and it was a story about the evils of big Pharma and you know corrupt journalists and all this and it was a very emotionally compelling story if you were a parent who was searching your three-year-old Daughter's Eyes for signs of eye contact you very well might believe the story there was only one problem with the story it was false but somebody had to figure out why it was false and what really happened and so that's what I spent uh five years of my life doing wow I was going to ask how long it took you to write the book I mean it's so comprehensive it's an incredible history of autism you know and how it was understood in different ways and the people who were the first to bring it into the Forefront so yeah five years so yeah I I mean I'll tell you a funny story you know now I can laugh about it because it's over but you know basically what happened was you know wrote a book proposal and my agent sold it to a publisher and the publisher expected that the book would take a year and a half to write that was my original deadline and would be maybe 200 Pages well a year and a half in I had written maybe three4 of the introduction and half of the first chapter and because I was a journalist who was used to you know really having to be very very diligent about meeting deadlines I felt like a total failure and eventually what happened was the book took five years to write it ended up I ended up handing in an 800 page manuscript and my publisher was very nice but she was like heasty you know I mean it's like if we publish this at 800 Pages the people who most need to read it will never read it and and they were so right I you know I mean this is embarrassing to admit but I didn't use any Hightech you know software or anything to write the book it was a word file for five years it was a single word file and so I didn't even really like this is a secret I haven't even really said this in public but I didn't even really know how long it was until I got an advanced reading copy and I was like oh my God it looks like a phone book no wonder I've been sitting here for five years we'll be right back after this quick break Darren and I are prepping for a big move at the moment so we are fully leaning into any and everything that simplifies things and that absolutely includes meal times at a time when my executive functioning skills are being pushed to the limit even planning and executing dinner for our family these days can feel like a really big lift that's why I'm especially grateful for green Chef a meal service that offers pre-measured and prepped ingredients to my door each box is packed with foods you can feel good about like whole fruits and vegetables plus lean protein and whole green options in fact one of the things I love most about green Chef is that they offer options that prioritize gut and brain health with science backed recipes that feature ingredients like fiber antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids during this time of lots of stress it feels really grounding to know we're supporting ourselves nutritionally I will take all the support I can get and green Chef doesn't just cover dinner recipes I can add high quality breakfasts lunches and snacks to my weekly box from Green Market greenchef has a special offer for tilt listeners go to greenchef.com tt50 and use coat tilt 50 to get 50% off plus 20% off your next 2 months that's 50% off plus 20% off your next 2 months when you use the code tilt 50 at greenchef.com tt50 greenchef the number one meal kit for eating well maybe I've watched too many seasons of The Amazing Race but every time I have to go somewhere on the subway I treat it like a competition it's all about making the right gut decisions about which route will get me there the fastest some 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symbiotic plus and ritual are here to celebrate not hide your insides get 25 5% off your first month for limited time at ritual.com tilt start ritual or add symbiotic plus your subscription today that's ritual.com tilt for 25% off oh my goodness well it is I mean and I'm I'm an author as well and I slave over my books and you know each one feels like giving birth to a a child I I can't even imagine 5 years on the same project and the level you know just the the depth that you go into it's it's really an incredible work so I guess congratulations three years after it came out but it's really phenomenal book well thank you I wanted to ask you a question when you started to notice that Asher was different do you ever feel like you were kind of bombarded with negative messaging about what could be happening to him and what his potential was that's such a good question I've never been asked that um I was so much in kind of damage control and focused on the behavioral issues and it was he's a very complicated person he has multi multiple diagnoses as many differently wired people do and there was such a lack of clarity about what might be going on so I think I was just so caught up in you know making sure that things on the playground went okay or managing damage control with the the big meltdowns and things that were happening so I would say no and as soon as I got that diagnosis uh you know first it was PDD NOS when he was I think six or five and then autism spectrum disorder right before he turned nine I was already in kind of immersed in the the research and feeling I guess inspired and motivated about his potential so yeah I mean there was a you know one of the things that I wrote about in the book is that there were really a couple of generations of parents that heard nothing but bad news you know about their kids potential life doctors would say I mean I literally I think I have a quote in the book this is a fate worse than death but you must learn to Bear it and it came along with all kinds of parent blaming because the prevailing Theory among psychoan analysts uh for most of the 20th century was that autism was caused by you know so-called refrigerator parenting and so for a couple of generations not only did you have to deal with your child's difficult Behavior but you had to deal with scorn and and guilt from the rest of society because the leading authorities in Psychiatry were saying that you caused your child's condition so I have to say that as I've you know gone on book tour and stuff there there were times when I get to meet these really older parents whose kids were diagnosed in the you know even in the 50s uh and I am so in awe of their ability to not only take care of their kids but to fight to change laws so that all disabled kids not even just kids with autism but so that all disabled kids would have ACC equal access to education it's really like one of the things I that I became really sad about in the course of writing the book was that by the time I started writing neurotribes the parents movement had really sort of crystallized around the antivaccine thing and if you were not antivaccine you were anti-parent you know I would read a lot in online forums and comment threads but that was not how the parent movement started the parent movement was originally very motivated to change the world so that their kids would have a better life in the future and the kids like theirs would have a better life in the future right I I sort of feel like one virtue of I mean this is a whole other subject but one virtue of the neurodiversity movement which we can explain and talk about in a minute but is that it's moved parents more towards the original Mission of the parents movement in autism which was to change the world so it was a better place for the kids that's great to hear I mean that's why I started tilt parenting that's what I'm all about because I don't believe anybody's broken here I believe this is a modern Evolution and that our kids shouldn't have to try to fit into any sort of box that wasn't designed for them yeah for sure and those boxes you know you mentioned that Asher got you know multiple diagnoses and that the diagnoses perhaps even changed over time or whatever it's like all these all these diagnostic boxes I feel like they're just these very narrow and sort of contingent lenses through which we're looking at living thing which is the diversity of human minds and that's just a biological fact people say to me you know well do you support neurodiversity I don't it exists whether I support it or not it's I don't I no longer think of neurodiversity as like a political stance or or even a movement I think of it as a living fact like biodiversity and we can pathologize it endlessly and say you know that all the variations or diseases or syndromes or whatever which was the approach for most of the 20th century or we can celebrate that diversity as a a gift to our society that requires us to be respons and to provide people with whatever they need to achieve success in whatever form their success would be absolutely you yes just I'm just loving hearing this all from you you're totally echoing you know my belief system and I know that of so many of our listeners here as you were um sharing that I was reminded of a conversation I had with Asher we were having a picnic in um vondo Park which is just down the street from us I love Park I know it's a great little spot but I I was telling Asher and my husband about this article I had read and it I think I and pulled it up on my phone and the headline was something associating the risks of being autistic with I think it was maybe pin I don't know it was something in childbirth and he cut me off and he's like the risks what do you mean the risks what do they think it is a disease and like yeah good point ash good point you know and all that language you know as soon as I see that word epidemic or any of that kind of language I'm instantly they've lost me um I think that it's harmful oh I know and I have to tell you this is something that I I think I left out of the book but it was very interesting there's a group in America called Autism Speaks and they were basically the biggest game in town for autism fundraising and uh you know charity walks and all that uh for a long time because their Founders were very very well connected in both Hollywood and and media and government and I remember that when the CDC revised up its estimate of autism prevalence uh several years ago while I was writing the book they had a teleconference and the head of the CDC this guy Thomas freden you know said well you know we're Uprising our estimate but it doesn't mean that there's been a true increase in the incidents of autism you know we're we're thinking that it's probably because of Better Community awareness and the president of Autism Speaks at that that time came out uh to the microphone and read from a Miriam Webster dictionary the definition of the word epidemic and he said autism is now officially an epidemic in the United States nobody else on the panel had said anything like that in fact they had said the opposite and so finally I I found out that the person who told them to go out there was the former Chief science officer of Autism Speaks and won't say her name because I'm not here to humiliate anyone but I ended up interviewing her and I said why did you use the word epidemic it's such an inflammatory word and she said well that wasn't for parents to hear that was for policy makers to hear if you say something like well there seems to be an increase in prevalence but that may be because of community nobody listens but if you say the word epidemic that gets their attention you know and so she had said that word on every major national news show that night and who's listening you know is it Congressman sure a couple probably but millions of parents are listening and they're terrified oh my goodness yeah I mean it's the parents who are terrified that that might happen to their child it's the parents of neurotypical kids who are so grateful it didn't happen to their child and it perpetuates this idea that it's a negative thing and and then it's autistic people themselves who feel marginalized every time it's used that's really upsetting to hear and not surprising at the same time yeah so I'm curious actually then about the response among the autism Community I I told you and when I first invited you on the podcast that when the book arrived my son I opened the Amazon package and he stole it from me before I had a chance to start reading it and um he loved the book and you know was really insightful it was super inspiring and parts of it were really difficult for him to kind of grapple with as he learned more about his tribe and the history um of autistic people and how they've been treated but how as The autism Community as a whole responded to both your book and then you was an advocate for the community well uh let's start by saying there is no such thing as the autism Community as a whole good point good point they're autistic individuals you know yes um the good news is that the vast majority of autistic feedback that I've gotten for the book has been uh incredibly positive if not sort of ecstatically thankful so I'm incredibly touched and grateful and humble for that feedback it's been wonderful to see and it's been great because autistic people will give the book to their parents so that they you know feel better understood in their families and autistic people were definitely one of the groups that I was trying to write for um I was actually I actually had three groups in mind when I was writing the book one was autistic people themselves one was parents particularly parents who were sort of on the fence about vaccines and whether or not there was an Autism epidemic and the other was re clinicians and researchers because I knew that even people who had been in the field for 40 or 50 years did not know the details of for instance how Hans asger you know ran this clinic in the midst of a country that was being taken over by the Nazis and you know without getting into contemporary politics too much let's just say that I had no idea that the Nazi passages in my book would become so relevant virtually overnight again and that's a frightening thing but in any in any case what was hard was that if you think about it those three groups all have very different agendas you know the clinicians and researchers are interested in improving their medical understanding of autism you know but that can lead to stuff like words like Risk and you know causation theories and whatnot um parents want to build a better world for their children and you know just want their kids to be happy and have good lives but that that doesn't always mean that they are always in line with what autistic self Advocates want and autistic self- Advocates and neurodiversity activists can sometimes be very angry at parents because they see parents as trying to speak for them you know with groups like Autism Speaks so it wasn't just that there were three groups with three very different agendas you know the dark secret is that they were all kind of at each other's throats in a way like the you know the autistic self- Advocates really didn't trust the researchers and clinicians because they were aware of this long history of abuse and bogus theories and you know all that so it was what took me five years really was trying to come up with a book that would speak to all of those groups we'll be right back after this quick break hey there it's Debbie I love making this show and sharing conversations about how to support our awesome neurode diverent kids I've seen how even one little insight from an interview can spark a big shift in daily life but I know that raising complex kids can be messy and lonely and just when we think we figured it out something comes up that boots us right back to feeling overwhelmed and stuck that's why I've poured everything into creative a way for parents like us navigating complex parenting Journeys to join together and chart a path that feels positive hopeful and doable it's the brand new differently wired Club experience in the club you'll get personal support from me and other seasoned parent coaches six live calls every month where you can connect and get your personal questions answered the opportunity to learn directly from authors and experts like I have on this show monthly themes for getting specific and tactical and exclusive private podcast feed and the best most generous community of parents seriously these folks show up for themselves and each other and that right there is really everything because it's a daily reminder that we're not alone our kids aren't broken and we have totally got this the recently rebooted differently wired clubs on a brand new platform with its very own IOS and Android app it is such a great space however you learn whatever your style no matter the ages genders and neurod diverent profile of your children the differently wired Club can help you cultivate the positive shifts you're hoping for join us today by going to tilt parenting.com Club that's tilp parenting.com Club I hope to see you on the inside if you like this show there's a decent chance you'll also enjoy the Shameless mom Academy hi I'm Sarah Dean the founder and host of the Shameless mom Academy the Shameless mom Academy is a podcast for moms that centers moms more than It Centers your kids I'm not going to teach you how to make baby food or to make your 3-year-old or 13-year-old stop having Tantrums instead I'm going to bring you back to yourself for the last 20 years I've been helping moms through growth and transformation inside the Shameless mom Academy I help you identify who you are and who you are becoming look motherhood is hard it brought me to my knees many times and sometimes still does returning to who I am and who I am becoming allows me to decide how to show up in all those sticky motherhood moments but also in all my other relationships and all the ways I show up in my various communities so come check out the Shameless mom Academy wherever you listen to podcasts I'm willing to bet you'll leave feeling a little inspired and maybe even completely fired up and you'll probably laugh a few times because I promise we never take ourselves too seriously over here with 700 episodes to choose from you're likely going to find something that Sparks and speaks to you inside the Shameless mom Academy now within the autistic Community specifically as I say the vast major majority of the feedback has been tremendously positive there is a small but loud minority of autistic people and I mean really small but sometimes really loud who think I shouldn't have written the book because I'm not autistic myself I'm neurotypical and I think they have a valid point you know imagine if a guy came along and said I'm gonna write the definitive history of feminism you know white guy wrote the you know the big book on the civil rights movement and I'm gay you know and so if I heard oh there's this new book that everyone's reading about gayness that was written by a straight guy I'd be like really I mean I'd read it I wouldn't dismiss it you know but uh in any case I can't help that I came I was born this way I can't change you know I came to autism because I was a a very wellestablished science writer at fired so I did not come to autism through a personal or family connection and one thing that I think is really interesting is that one of the most frequent reactions that I get from everyone pretty much when I tell them I wrote a book about autism they say oh do you have a child on the Spectrum and I don't and what's weird about that is that if you think about it I mean autism is a huge thing Society has been in mesed in controversies about autism for at least 20 years and in fact much longer autism is also very common you know lots of people are on the Spectrum so why wouldn't a science writer write about it and I think the reason that people ask me that is because of a sort of holdover belief that autism is rare and so that you wouldn't write about it unless you in a sense were forced to by your fate and I wrote about it by choice because I thought that families and autistic people were suffering much more than uh they should so in terms of me being neurotypical yes I'm sorry but I hope that in both my books and my talks that I have tried to be as good an ally uh to the autism Rights Movement as I could and I often when people ask me to do talks or whatever I often say well could we do a panel where I talk to autistic self- Advocates and I try to you know in a sense deflect the spotlight onto autistic voices as much as I can that's great I was curious about that and um I know there is a very active actually autistic community that I follow on Twitter and um but in many ways I think you're exactly right it isn't a rare thing you're a science writer you're kind of the perfect person to write this book and I think you know a parent who has a child on the Spectrum or someone on the Spectrum this would have been a different book not to say a less valuable book but a different book yeah and and also I mean I don't want to dwell on those negative reactions and they have every right to them but a a couple of people have said like well an autistic person should have written this book you know why why did this guy do this and it's like I did the historical work it's not like I cop stuff you know from the neurodiversity movement or the autism Rights Movement it's true that the last part of the book is about the autism Rights Movement but it's not like the whole book you know was just laying out there on people's blogs you know waiting for me to come along and scoop it up you know I had to do unbelievable obsessive dare I say even autistic like deep dives into uh historical archives and uh you know I've never read so many case histories in my life and I also and in fact this I want to tell you this quick Story one of the first things that I did for the book that turned out to be one of the most important things that I ever did for the book was that I went to a an artistic retreat called arreat so it was a retreat run by artistic people for artistic people I had to get an exemption actually as a neurotypical Observer because normally it was just for autistic people so I spent a week with a bunch of great autistic adults uh and there were some kids there but mostly it was people in their 20s and 30s and 40s and it was one of the most liberating stressfree delightful bluntly honest you know environments I've ever been in and other words I was immersed in autistic culture and when I came back from that for one thing the neurotypical world the so-called real world you know uh seemed awful it was like you know everyone was constantly pushing you know their own ego trips and lying slightly for social greas you know and kind in fact I remember this hilarious moment at autre when I had met this guy the night before and so I saw him the next morning and so I did the neurotypical thing and I went up to him and I said hey buddy how did you sleep and he said why and it really good question you know why was I making this you know small talk so it was challenging in a good way and when I got back to my desk where I'm sitting right now to really you know tackle writing neurot drives I you know I start writing a description of what autism is and you know was sort of a distillation of a thousand textbooks I'd read and I I st literally stopped myself and I said Steve what are you doing these people are not like this you were just with them for a week you know they're full human beings you can't say that well autistic people don't get humor and irony are you kidding like they were incredibly witty and ironic cut cuttingly witty and ironic you know at times so the experience of being immersed in autistic culture just for a week was like a bath that washed away my stereotypes before I writing that's awesome thanks for sharing that story I love it so all right I have one more question before we end this conversation which I wish could just go on and on but one of my biggest goals is to help parents like me and you know tilt serves parents with differently wired kids of all kinds of neurodiversity and I really believe that we as parents of these kids are in the best possible position to try to push the needle forward in terms of how our kids and neurodiverse people in general are treated in the educational system and society and so forth I'm curious to know what thoughts you have on how maybe where you see the neurodiversity movement going or how we as a community of engaged parents can play a role in pushing that forward well one thing I like are parents organizations or blogs and whatnot that are open to listening to the voices of autistic adults because I think it's really important I think the future well even the present but also the future of the neurodiversity movement is in neurodivergent individuals joining together with parents rather than seeing them as the enemy you know some parents are the enemy and you know some neurodiversity activists are really rough to work with but in general I think if a bridge of allies ship could be built between those two communities that it can be so powerful that it can change the world in a single generation and I'll give you actually two concrete examples there's a website called The Thinking Person's Guide to autism I believe it's thinking autism.com and it's you know was started by two parents one of whom is autistic herself as well as having a significantly disabled autistic son and in fact even the neurotypical parent and Rosa who I write about at Great length in neurotribes um her son is significantly disabled so when people say oh this neurodiversity stuff it's just for the quote unquote high functioning chatty aspies or whatever that's wrong the neurodiversity movement is an outgrowth of the disability rights movement and the disability rights movement did not get started by people leaving the people in wheelchairs behind you know it's a movement for for everyone in society in a sense and certainly for all kinds of disabled people so thinking autism.com I think is I'm pretty sure that's the URL is a great model of a Blog you know that is read by a lot of parents that is staffed by parents but that also includes the voices of autistic adults some of whom are also parents so I think that's a paradigm for an institution that's the future another thing that I would recommend to your audience is a different book than mine uniquely Human by Barry presentant yes it is I'm trying to get him on the show oh I can put in a good word for him oh awesome he is wonderful and you know if your child has difficult Behavior Uh reading uniquely human uh will give you ways of thinking about it you know it's not a it's there's not much overlap with my book but the two books came out uh virtually the same month I think and both Barry and I immediately recognized that they were like sister books in a way my book was the history and his book was the lessons of the applied history in a sense and one of the reasons why Barry's book is so good is because he's he's listened to autistic people both his clients and and other autistic people for for decades now so it's informed by autistic experience but it's a book that's really written for for parents so you know that's a good book there's another book out there called the real experts that was written by autistic people um that is has some very hopeful and inspiring messages from autistic people to Young autistic people and you know I think autistic peer mentoring is really important I've seen the magic that can happen when even a non-verbal kid hangs out with an autistic adult who is verbal you know and there's so many times these days you hear well you know low quote unquote low functioning people and high functioning people they don't even have the same condition well if you put a a non-verbal child with a an autistic adult who can talk you often see that they relate to one another and Temple grandon talks about this too from personal experience that there's a kind of you know vibe that they can get on that is good for both of them and so I think autistic peer mentor ing is going to be a really big thing in the future and so those are the the directions that I see us going that's great thank you and thank you for sharing those resources and I will make sure they're all on the show notes pages so listeners you can check out the yes the thinking Person's Guide autism and all the books that Steve has recommended and Steve I again I wish we could go on but I um I'm going to let you get on with your day and I just want to say thank you so much this has been such a fascinating conversation and I'm grateful just for your Insight and your perspective and your stories and your apparently were the first to find out a few inside Scoops about your book so that's kind of cool too so thank you so much thanks so much I really appreciate it and it's been a delight you've been listening to the Tilt parenting podcast for the show notes for this episode including links to Steve's website his book neurotribes and the other resources we discussed visit tilt parenting.com session 91 and don't forget to check out my after the show short video where I share my top takeaways from my conversation with Steve you'll find a link on the show notes page or you can go straight to tilt parenting.com afterthe show if you enjoy the Tilt podcast and would like to help me cover the costs of producing it please consider signing up for my patreon campaign patreon is a simple membership platform that allows people to make a small monthly 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