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From Their Point of View
Getting Inside the Head of a Child with Autism By Jenn Director Knudsen
Autism is a loaded word, says Marnell L. Hayes, professor emeritus of early childhood and special education at Texas Woman's University, where she taught for 25 years. Today she lives in Portland, Ore., and this fall will teach kindergartners typical and delayed at Portland Jewish Academy.
Originally defined in 1943 by Leo Kanner, autism then had "one overwhelming feature," Hayes says: The child with autism was very self-contained and would go to great lengths to avoid eye-contact let alone interaction with anyone. Along with that feature came the inability to communicate in any effective way; children diagnosed with autism rarely spoke, and if they did, their words seemingly were out of context, and they'd speak of themselves in the third person.
"These kids were sufficiently alone in their own world," says Hayes, who worked closely with about three dozen such children from the 1960s to 1990s. "They were totally autistically alone."
More than 60 years later, the "autism" label still is used but is pinned on numerous kids who demonstrate a spectrum of somewhat specific behaviors and cognitive, social and emotional delays. Despite today's diagnosis of ASD, it still includes the charged word autism, and so many still have a devil of a time communicating. But with key insights, you can get to the heart of what your child is trying to let you know.
"We are dealing with a whole person first ... [with] the added layer of the challenge in their lives called autism," Notbohm says. "They have dreams, fears, preferences and opinions just like you. We must be careful to recognize that in helping them, we don't 'part them out' or 'therapize' them to the extent that the message is always 'there's something wrong with you.' Learning is a whole-person experience."