TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
41 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 6 hours ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What inspired Steve Silberman to write NeuroTribes and who is the book for?
Hey there, it's Debbie and welcome to Playback Friday. Every Friday, I'll re-release one of my favorite conversations from the archives. Unless you're a longtime listener of the show, there's a good chance you haven't heard this one yet. And even if you have, you just may get something completely different listening to it this time around.
I no longer think of neurodiversity as like a political stance or even a movement. I think of it as a living fact, like biodiversity. and we can pathologize it endlessly and say 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 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, Debbie 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, Shambhala 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 neurodifference, 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. Just visit TiltParenting.com and sign up where it says join the Tilt Revolution. And now without further ado, here's my conversation with 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 in 2001, I wrote an article about autism in high-tech communities like Silicon Valley. It was an article called The Geek Syndrome that appeared in Wired. And the article came out right after 9-11. So I figured that hardly anyone would have time to read it or care about it. But instead, what happened was I got an 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 who are on the spectrum themselves,
who were unable to 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.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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