The Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children

"The Real Experts is another book that couldn’t have existed 25 years ago. It’s a collection of advice for parents of autistic children, written by autistic adults, and published by an autistic-run publishing imprint called Autonomous Press . Why is this important? For a long time, parents were told by clinicians that having an autistic child was a fate worse than death. They allegedly had no chance of ever living independently, of developing new skills and making meaningful contributions to society, of having intimate relationships, and, perhaps most devastatingly of all, of even feeling love for their own parents. Many of these dire predictions were based on the behavior of autistic people in institutions, because that was the default “treatment” recommended by alleged experts through the 1980s. The Real Experts is a much-needed antidote to the poisonous misconceptions that have caused autistic people and their families untold grief for decades, and offers parents of young people on the spectrum something they never had in the past: role models of successful, empowered autistic lives."