Abbey's Mom
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Abbey's Mom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was very cool of them to let her do what she wanted to do, which they've done the whole time. They very much let Abby, when they're shooting, just do her own thing. And they're very non-invasive. It's like, you hardly know they're there.
That was the main thing I took away from that, which is to advocate for teachers who may not be familiar with alternative learners because they're older or they're... You know, there's a lot of new stuff we're finding out about neurodiversity and learning. And I say, wow, you know, sit on a beanbag, sit on a rolling chair, give sensory breaks, let people move around.
Teach in a way that's high affect. High affect means you're doing something. You're physically doing something to learn that lesson. You're not just sitting there reading off the blackboard and writing it down. Like the idea of that sort of quiet, isolative, sit down, be quiet. I'm not a fan of that anymore. Yeah.
I mean, if you've been officially diagnosed and you're between the ages of, say, two and five, That's a very hard chunk to be in of time with understanding what to do because there's no clear cut path. My personal opinion is that autism is such a big word and it means a million different things. And even 20 years ago when I was doing this with her, I would say don't panic. Don't cry.
Be a detective. See what they're doing. Put your ego in the toilet and flush it because that's, you know, no ego on this. Because some parents, I think, think you don't have to ask me for that. Just you can do whatever you need. Okay, good idea. It's a daunting thing. And when I sat in the chair and they said autism spectrum disorder, everything went black in my head.
Everything went into slow motion. I remember the woman, it was like in my face going, you're going to have a lot of work ahead of you. You're going to have to be spending hours in therapy rooms and clinics. And I remember feeling that I was going invisible like that.
no i don't want to do this i don't want to do this yeah like i waited to the last second to have kids you know what i mean yeah and so it's a lot better now than it was in um 20 years ago in terms of information accommodations and understanding i think people have changed their ways of understanding and embracing so that's a plus we didn't have that so much
There was a lot of judgment, a lot of dirty looks, a lot of people. I had people come up to me in this grocery store when she was struggling and just say, you should take care of your child. You know, that kind of stuff.
And I had those moments of one time one woman in a grocery store said, you should control your daughter. And I went, my daughter has severe autism, which was a bit of an exaggeration compared to what some people go through. And I said, and she's struggling with sensory issues. Would you like to take her for the weekend? Because I would love a break.
But the hardest part right now is that, and here's my pitch.
everybody on the spectrum deserves services and support from the lowest support needs to the highest support needs so hear me when i say that because some people feel like i don't hear the low support needs what i'm saying is low support needs which is the terminology we use today is different than the abby support needs and abby's different than the non-verbal or non-speaking
They're all different needs, but we don't have sort of like a protocol because we don't call it anything but autism spectrum. I'm on the spectrum. That's to me a vague term. And if we could get better language, I would say Abby has autism communication disorder. Some people have autism, high intelligence, non-speaking.
I'm reading a book right now called Underestimated about a young man named Jamie who at 17 gets a letter board. The father doesn't know the kid at all. He's banging and he's very, you know, troubled in expressing himself. They get him a letter board. He goes into a therapy. This is from, I think it was written in like 2010 or something. And all this language comes out on a letter board.
And that kid knew everything that was going on from the beginning. So there's that population of high intelligence that's non-speaking. And then you've got others that might have some cognitive impairment where it's a bit more of a struggle. So there's all these different things. So if you're newly diagnosed and you're a parent...
is to find a community where you see other parents that have kids with the same struggles as your kid. That way you're in the commonality of a therapy that might make sense. And that's even what I did. I'd go to conferences and I'd go, but my kid doesn't do that. Like I went to an Asperger conference, that's what we called it before 2013, so I can say that. 2011, I went to an Asperger.
It's politically incorrect. Really? Because Hans Asperger, the doctor who discovered... Can you move over just a hair, honey? who discovered Asperger's. He was connected to the Nazi party, I believe. There's something that came up in his past. Got it. And that's fine. Come up with a different word because that population is very different than the Abbey population.
Sorry for... Any more questions for me? Oh, of course.
I was just finishing up talking about a little bit about... All right. Finish the questions. For new parents. Is that okay?
Well, they got rid of the term Asperger's, but it was also because people with Asperger's were not getting the same services as people with autism. This is my understanding, by the way.
And so to make it a level playing field, at the time, the people in the boardroom at the American Psychiatric Association who creates the manual that people use to diagnose said, you know, let's just make it a level playing field. Everyone's on the spectrum. And I understand why they did that, but I think today we could say it's really not working.
Showing 61–80 of 177 · page 4 of 9
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