How To Help Kids On The Autism Spectrum Build On Their Strengths & Interests

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about how parents and professionals can best support kids on the autism spectrum, specifically the mindsets that support positive outcomes for kids. Now we’re going to be talking about this from two different perspectives.

Dr. Temple Grandin is on the show today to share her perspective as an autistic adult, and Dr. Debra Moore is also with us to talk about her perspective as a psychologist who spent her career working with autistic kids and young adults. This combination of experiences and ideas is really unique and important, and I’m honored to have them both here with us today. Let me tell you a little bit more about them.

Dr. Temple Grandin is a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She had no language until age four, and good teachers and her mother helped her develop her strengths. She has a successful career as both a designer of livestock handling systems and as a scientific researcher. She also lectures widely on her experiences with autism. She has written many books, some of them include Emergence, Labeled Autistic, Thinking In Pictures, and The Autistic Brain.

Dr. Debra Moore is a psychologist with extensive experience helping children, teens, and adults on the autism spectrum. She practiced for over 30 years in the Greater Sacramento area. During that time, she served as president of the Sacramento Valley Psychology Association and Director of Fall Creek Counseling Associates. She co-authored The Loving Push: How Parents and Professionals Can Help Spectrum Kids Become Successful Adults with her co author Temple Grandin. Their second book together is out right now and it’s called Navigating Autism: Nine Mindsets For Helping Kids On the Spectrum, and we’re going to be diving into talking about that together today. Temple and Debra, welcome to the show. It’s so wonderful to have you both here.

Temple Grandin/Debra Moore:
Great to be here. Thank you. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
So I would love to start with just having each of you share a bit of your story for our audience, for people who aren’t aware of you and your work, and then we’re going to dive into talking about this topic today of how we can best support kids on the spectrum. So, Temple, I’d love to start with you and just have you share a bit about your experience and your story.

Temple Grandin:
Well, I’m Temple Brandon. I’m a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and when I was four, I had no speech. Fortunately, I got really good speech therapy, very young, so by the time I was four, I started to get speech. I had all the classical symptoms of autism. I later on got fully diagnosed as being autistic. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of early intervention. I was in speech therapy by age two and a half. Lots of emphasis on turn-taking games. These kids have to learn how to wait and take turns. I had great elementary school teachers. My ability in art was always encouraged by my mother. You want to take something the kid’s good at, work on building on that strength. I had a fabulous science teacher when I was in high school, because I was a bored student. He got me interested in studying because studying was a pathway to a goal. I’ve designed equipment for the livestock industry in all of the world. If you go out and have some beef, that’s a good chance it was handled in one of my systems.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I’ve heard you talk often about the important role that your mom played in having expectations for you and moving you forward. We’ll get into some of that and lots of other things about your experience. Debra, let’s talk a little bit about you and your background and what brings you to this work today.

Debra Moore:
Sure. I was a psychologist in Sacramento, California for 35 years. I am now retired from clinical practice and I’m devoting all of my time to writing about autism. I came to love the specialty of autism because I found that my clients and families who were struggling with this were really some of the strongest advocates that I’ve ever come across, and some of the most patient, courageous and tireless folks, so I have a great deal of admiration. I have always been someone who believes that differences are just part of a person, and if we understand each other, as Temple has said in many of her talks and in her book, it takes all kinds of minds.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
All kinds of minds, for sure. And I think there is more acknowledgement of that and we’re moving forward with that. Certainly, the field is much different than it was 25 years ago when I started doing work with these kinds of populations. So hopefully we’re continuing to move that way of thinking forward. I’d like to — actually, we’re going to get into the book that you have out now and mindsets, but I’m curious to hear from each of you what you think are some of the maybe common ways of thinking or myths, or maybe common things that are done that actually are not helpful to kids and to young adults or adults on the autism spectrum, things that maybe people are well-intentioned with, but actually ended up creating problems. Whoever wants to start, go ahead.

Temple Grandin:
I’d like to start on that. I think there’s a problem with some parents overprotecting, especially making a transfer from teenagers to full adulthood. We’re doing really well with the little kids but fall down with the teenagers. Not learning shopping, not learning handling money. Now a lot of the things that help is I was brought up in the fifties, and grownups corrected kids everywhere they went. Then we had sit down meals, and when I did something like stir my drink with my finger, mother didn’t scream “No”, she said “Use a spoon.” She gave the instruction. Kids had much more formal instruction in manners and things like this. On the jobs front, we’re really falling down because I have a lot of grandads who come up to me, and that granddad will tell me that he figured out he was autistic when the kids got diagnosed, and granddaddy had a paper route at age 11. I’d like to get that transfer to work finished before high school. Autism is so variable. You’re going from someone who never learns to speak that maybe can’t dress themselves to somebody actually working for a Silicon Valley company. There’s someone like Elon Musk who has come out on Saturday Night Live that he’s on the spectrum. So you’re going from Elon Musk to somebody who can’t dress themselves. And people tend to get too rocked into the labels. Now, one thing that helped Elon Musk was that he learned how to work at a really young age, he was out selling video games rather than playing them. He was being an entrepreneur. Exposed to lots of travel, exposed to the tools. You also learn how to work at a really young age.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I agree. I think that that issue of work and focusing on that and what the rest of a child’s life is going to be is so important, and I find so many parents who say that they just feel like the rug got pulled out from under them as soon as their child finished 12th grade or formal schooling, and now they don’t know where to turn. Their kids don’t have skills for what to do. Even kids who maybe graduated with a regular diploma. So I think that’s a really important point where we have a big gap in services and in what we’re focusing on and prioritizing for kids as they get older.

Temple Grandin:
The other thing we got to do is look for things in the neighborhood. I ask the parents of maybe a 15 year old or 16 year old, I want to get him in a volunteer job at age 11. That could be a church or a community center. I know COVID’s thrown a monkey wrench into some of this stuff, but they’ve got a lot of how to do a task on schedule outside the family. We’ve got to find substitutes for the old paper routes, getting jobs, let’s work on the backdoor. Half of all good jobs are backdoor. I say to parents “Who do you know that owns a shop?”, and they go, “Somebody’s got a little real estate office over here, and they could help out there”, or somebody can get them into the auto-parts store. It’s important to get into a job that does not have a lot of multitasking. I would not stick them on the takeout window at McDonald’s. That would not do.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, agreed. Okay. Debra, how about for you? Things that you have found are either common ways of thinking that are actually unhelpful, or myths, or just misguided things that we do as parents or professionals.

Debra Moore:
Well, I agree totally with everything that Temple said, and I think we tend to divide, artificially, adolescence, adulthood and childhood as these three groups of time. And we can’t wait, like you said, the parents feel like the rug is pulled out from underneath them. That happens when not only resources aren’t there, but it also happens when we’ve expected this end point and beginning point. If we can move away from that and see it as continual, and realize that if your child’s going to be able to work — or even if they’re not, if they’re going to maybe live in a residential facility, many, many of the skills are not technical skills. They’re daily life skills. And those start at the very beginning, in a step appropriate to the age. So if you’re going to be able to work, and maybe say you’re going to work in IT, well just as important as your IT knowledge is: Do you know how to take care of your hygiene? Do you know how to greet someone? Do you know how to ask for help? Do you know how to take turns?That starts with a toddler. Do you know how to accept criticism? Do you know how to make a mistake and keep going, or do you freeze and stop and get anxious? That’s a problem for a lot of our kids, being a perfectionist. So I think all of that preparation needs to be looked at through a filter of a continual journey, not these transitions so much, and that helps a lot. 

The other thing I would say is we’ve gotten much, much better, like you said, when you were in school, when I was in school, we weren’t taught about autism. We were told we would never encounter someone with autism, which is, as we know now, ridiculous. As we’ve gotten better with labels, sometimes we put too much emphasis on them. In my opinion, labels are wonderful. They’re necessary. We need to get them as soon as possible so that we can access resources, but a child is a child. A kid’s a kid. And that percentage of them that is just a kid is much bigger than their autism. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Hmm, I’m curious, Temple, what you think. One of the things that I see around this issue, and I think Debra just said it really well, of looking at it as a continuum of developing, not as this one transition point. One of the things that I have seen happen over the last 20 years is much more of an emphasis for parents and professionals on getting kids through the academics or the typical system of education, and often then, so much attention, I find, is put on what classes kids are in and getting them through those types of things, that it doesn’t leave time, energy, or any focus on these other really important skills that the two of you are talking about. I’m wondering, do you agree with that?

Temple Grandin:
I’m sorry to interrupt. This is one of my problems. I got a slow processing speed and I can’t time, and there’s still a problem that I have, and I think it’s a big problem. I see that all the time. And not learning life skills. The other thing I think is really bad, and it’s another reason why grandfather might — or  grandmother has a good job, is they’ve taken all the hands-on classes out of the schools. Art, sewing, woodworking, theater, auto shop, welding. Because when I was out in the construction sites and we were putting in equipment, I worked with talented, talented people that were either autistic, dyslexic or ADHD, and they’re not getting replaced. The other big problem is — I’m not saying everybody with autism should go into the skilled trades, but for some kids, it’s the way to go. High-end skilled trades. Now there are three kinds of thinking methods: There’s visual spatial, which is mathematical, then there’s object visualizer, which is me, thinking in pictures, can’t do algebra. That’s screening me out of a lot of things, and word, verbal thinkers. I know a lot of really good skilled trades people that can fix any mechanical thing. People who might have 25 patents. I’ve worked with these people, and they would be diagnosed as autistic today. So taking that stuff out has been really bad, but the other thing is just not learning working skills. They’re not the same skills as academic skills, because you can have a person that might — I know of a lady who has got a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, got her dream job and she quit it because she just didn’t like it. And I think the problem was that she hadn’t learned how to work. That even in the best jobs, there has got to be some grunt work you don’t really want to do, or something you’ve got to do that you think is stupid or something. Sometimes you just have to do it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, I think that’s so true. Sometimes we refer to those as soft skills, all of the things that both of you have talked about, that are not the technical “How to do the actual work,” but are all the other pieces that are necessary for success in the working world. I think that’s so true. Let’s shift gears a little bit because I know that both of you are very passionate about building on and focusing on strengths and interests that these kids have, and that that can be a real pathway towards helping them as they move forward in their lives. So I’d like for you to talk about how parents and secondarily teachers and others, how can parents really emphasize and focus on those strengths and those interests? What are some effective ways to do that?

Temple Grandin:
Well, let’s just take my case. My ability in art showed up when I was about seven or eight years old. Mother always encouraged that, and she encouraged me to do lots and lots of different kinds of art, otherwise I would have just done a horse head over and over again. And she encouraged me to broaden it. Now, I want to differentiate between an ability or a strength and an interest. Horses are an interest. Art is a strength. I’m seeing people mixing up those two things. And she encouraged drawing the whole horse, and then you could draw maybe a place you might ride to. Notice, take that interest and broaden it. For another kid, it might be math. Let’s say you like horses or cars, then you can do some mathematical things with horses or cars. You want to broaden, but knowing the difference between ability, which could be something like visual thinking or math or music or dancing is different from an interest, like I like cars, or I like to read about astronauts. Those would be interests.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. I think that that’s actually a really important distinction. I’m glad that you brought that up. Debra, your thoughts on that? 

Debra Moore:
One other thing that I think is important for parents is to realize — Some parents will say, “Well, my kid’s really not interested in anything at all.” Your kid can’t get interested in something if they’re not exposed to it. I have a lot of empathy for parents who are so busy and so tired. It’s really going to pay off to expose your kids to lots of different experiences, and it can be something very simple. It can be going down to the ice cream store in town and letting them see the machinery, letting them open a freezer, an industrial freezer and peek inside. People will let you do those sorts of things if you ask. Taking them to any and every museum, or even parks and learning a little bit about history to see if they’re interested in that, or taking them to a railroad and letting them talk to the conductor for five minutes, taking them on a factory tour, taking them to a cultural event, an arts performance. You don’t know what your kid might be interested in. It might not be something you’re interested in. So you have to think outside your own box as well.

Temple Grandin:
I totally agree with that because we look into the careers of a lot of people, maybe someone like Michelangelo, dropped out of school at age 12. He was exposed to art. Every cathedral was commissioned. He was also exposed to the tools for making stonework art. You can’t get interested in something you don’t get exposed to, and that’s another reason why I think taking out so many of the hands-on classes out of the schools is such a bad thing to do.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, I agree. I’m curious what you would say to parents whose response to this is, “Well, the only thing my kid is interested in is video games. That’s what he, or she just wants to do all the time. That’s what they are absorbed with, and that’s the only interest they have.” 

Temple Grandin:
Well, sometimes they just get addicted to that and go to work on replacing it with something else. I’ve talked to three different families where their young adult was addicted to video games, and they weaned them off the video games with car mechanics. I just think it’s interesting. For three of them, it was car mechanics. So they were probably my kind of mind. If the kid’s good at math, was a math kid or good at music, then I’d want to gradually replace the video game with music or with math, you have to replace it with something else. The other thing I want to do is not allow these addictions to get as bad. Now there are some kids that get socialization and friends, they have games where they talk to each other. I don’t want to take that away. But you can’t do that for eight hours a day, because what I’m saying is they’re not having good outcomes. They’re ending up on a disability check and not working, and then another kid, they get them out working to get them out doing things. Then the mom says, “Oh, I’m so happy. You got my kid out. You convinced me to get my kid out doing things. He’s got a job, he bought a house. I think he’s going to get married.” Wonderful. That’s a good outcome. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Debra thoughts on that? The whole video game interest obsessions sort of thing?

Debra Moore:
Oh yeah. I’m going to go out on a limb and put out a very strong, opinionated statement. And that is that probably 99% of the parents I talk to, in my opinion, underestimate how dangerous video games are. They are addicting. From a neurological standpoint, those designers put billions of dollars into making them addictive. The designers themselves, and we talk about this in our books, the designers don’t let their kids play. The Silicon Valley executives know how dangerous this is. We’ve had, in our previous book, The Loving Push, we talked to a mom whose son suicided. That came from an addiction to video games, where he was just getting more and more out of touch with reality and got a big disappointment and he couldn’t stand up to it. We know that the brain on video games — I’m not talking about an hour a day, but I’m talking about the kid who that becomes so important that they have a meltdown when you take it away. When they don’t have other interests, when they start avoiding the family. We know that their brains look like the brains of heavy drug addicts. It’s really, really important. You’ve got to replace the activity. You can’t go cold turkey, that’s really dangerous. Just like a drug, that’s really dangerous. You’ve got to get your kid out there and get them interested in something else. 

Temple Grandin:
Well, I got some other books, The Outdoor Scientist, right here. Get them outside, looking at the stars, studying animal behavior. I’ve been studying the crows in my neighborhood right now. And another book, Calling All Minds, my childhood project books. We’ve got kids today that have never made a paper snowflake like this. They’ve never made them. They’ve never made a paper airplane. And I was just shocked, when within the last few months I had a teacher ask me, “What’s going to happen to a kid’s self-esteem if he makes a paper snowflake and it falls apart?” I said, “You get another piece of paper out, you try again, and then maybe look it up on YouTube.” I’m going, you’ve got to be kidding! I think some of the problems today with kids being afraid to make a mistake go back to not doing any hands-on things. I did a book signing for Calling All Minds about three years ago, in a big auditorium, 20-30% of the elementary school kids there, and it was a whole bunch of them, never made a paper airplane.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, there’s been such a tremendous shift, just culturally, in terms of what kids time and attention is focused on in general, and then you add on top of it the challenges of kids with autism, kids with ADHD, kids with maybe brains that are more vulnerable to getting sucked into that, whether it’s as a coping tool or whatever it might be, but I’m seeing the same thing both of you are talking about, which is: Parents often don’t realize until their kids reach young adulthood, how problematic that has been for their child’s development, exposure, and then if people think it’s tough to deal with the video game challenges when their kid is five, that does not look any better at 25.

Debra Moore:
Another thing I would say is we’ve become accustomed to, almost without thinking about it, just handing a child — even a baby, a screen in order to soothe them. And it’s understandable, because it is very — That’s the whole point of it being addicting, it’s very compulsive to look at that screen. We all know that. We all spend too much time, waste time on the computer. If kids don’t have the brakes that we have, they’re going to go down that path, most of them. So when you hand a toddler a screen, make sure that you’re not doing it as a substitute for good self-soothing, self-regulating skills. Those need to be taught explicitly to every child, but especially to autistic children who have greater sensory sensitivity, greater anxiety. They’re struggling with self-regulation pretty much every day. They need skills. It can look like the screen provides that — it doesn’t. It adds one more problem.

Temple Grandin:
With me, when I was a little kid, we did a lot of board games. Now, if you did something with a game on a phone and you passed the phone around physically, I mean physically passed the phone around, then you would be turning it into an interactive thing with other people, but these little autistic kids, they need to be doing stuff with people. I know we’ve got busy parents, but I’m not seeing good results because, and I’m talking here on the fully verbal end of the space, when they get into their early twenties, there are two paths: They are working and then get out and have a life. But I’ve had parents say to me, “Oh, he got a job at an ice cream parlor and he just loves it.” Ice cream parlors are good because you make one ice cream cone or one shake at a time. You don’t have much smaller tasks. There’s been some really good success there, and then the other one that talked very sheepishly to me and said ”What do I do with a 22 year old who’s playing video games 10 hours a day?” And the one bright spot I saw was the weaning off with car mechanics, because I think my kind of mind gets addicted. I don’t have any of this stuff. When I review the latest video games, just to see what they are, I’d look at YouTube videos of them. I won’t have the stuff on my computer because one time I played a video game, and I thought I played it for 30 minutes, I had played it for 4 hours, and I thought, “This stuff will not be on my computer or my phone, because I don’t want to get addicted to it. “ I’ll look at the game on YouTube, where it shows the movie trailer of a game, where I get an idea of what a game is about for parents. That I’ll do. But let’s look at some other things we can do. Minecraft is a big game. One mom had this brilliant idea of going to the lumberyard and cutting up, having them cut up some 2×4’s, and have the kids sand them and paint them for Minecraft blocks in the driveway. [inaudible 0:26:08.7] How about getting all the Amazon boxes in the neighborhood and tape them up and paint them and have gigantic Minecraft blocks? And that’s just stuff that’s not going to cost you anything. A little bit of paint and some tape. You see now, I as a visual thinker, when I think about this, I see it. These are things that we can do. All the projects in my books are cheap, inexpensive things, like paper snowflakes, making sandcastles if you go on the beach. Studying leaves, studying plants budding. Birdwatching, what some of the crows are doing, they’ll drink water on the side of the road, but they won’t drink the pothole water. I talk about it, I see the crows. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. And it strikes me what you’re really talking about, and I think what is really at the heart of this message is that parents and professionals, we need to be focused on engaging kids in real life, in the real world, in the world around them, helping them truly engage and develop resilience and skills around that. I mean, that’s really at the heart of what I hear you talking about, get them doing real things and immersed in activities.

Temple Grandin:
Well that’s right. Now, let’s talk a few little things about sensory stuff. Let’s say my kid has a meltdown every time we go to Walmart. Well, one of the ways to help work on that is to give them control where we’ll go into Walmart when it’s not so busy. Or my kid hates automatic doors, well that’s a visual sensitivity. Well, then go there when it’s not so busy and let the kid approach the door and control it. You can also do this with loud noises like hairdryers and vacuum cleaners, where you let the child turn them on and off, let the kid play with them, where they control the dreaded noise. And that can sometimes help desensitize some of those things. My mother used to take me shopping. We called it marketing in the 50’s. She’d had me go pick things out and put them in the basket. And you can also just work using speech and say, “Daddy likes the corn flakes. Can you get the corn flakes and put them in the basket?” Making shopping an interactive experience. Learning how to talk to the clerks. I was buying things by myself when I was seven and eight years old, I had an allowance and I was taught to save money. 50 cents bought a lot in the fifties. I could get 5 comics, 10 candy bars. But if I wanted a 69 cent airplane, I had to save for two weeks. That’s a really important lesson that I was learning as a very, very young child, and now it’s only $5 at the dollar store, but it’s the same idea. And these are not expensive or difficult things to do.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Agreed. Let’s go into some of the mindsets that you talk about. You have your new book out about 9 Mindsets For Helping Kids On the Spectrum, and I would love for each of you to maybe just touch on one or two that you think are particularly important for parents to understand.

Debra Moore:
Well, we talk about — The first mindset is seeing your child as a whole person, and that really is a thread that goes through all of the mindsets. We give some very specific ways to help fight against putting the autism under too much emphasis, because we do it without meaning to, sometimes — professionals as well as parents.

We give lots of examples of what it looks like in a family where you’re putting the autism first and where you put the child first, so that people can really visualize it. One of the mindsets, and Temple probably can talk more about this, is preparing the child for the adult world, and we’ve touched on that a little bit. We also talk about what an evaluation is for a child, if you regard that child as a whole child evaluation. It’s different from some of the evaluations you get. It’s much broader. The reports are different. They’re geared towards not just a diagnosis. That’s a given, but they’re geared towards actionable results that parents can actually use, and that the whole team can actually use. We talk about how to make a team that works together, because so many times, parents feel as though, “Well, I’ve got one therapist over here. I’ve got the teacher over here. I’ve got my mother-in-law over here telling me what to do.” How do you pool all of these people: family, neighbors, community members, professionals together, so that you’re on the same page and you base interventions on a true deep knowledge of that unique child? 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Wonderful. Temple, thoughts on a mindset or two that you cover in the book that you think are particularly important.

Temple Grandin:
Well, I think developing strengths is something that’s really important, and what a lot of people don’t realize is that I’m saying a lot of these brilliant kids getting screened out because they can’t do algebra or some other thing. We need the skills. We’re actually losing some manufacturing skills. We need these different kinds of diverse minds, and they have complimentary skills when you’re building something like a large food processing plant, my kind of mind does clever engineering then lays out the whole factory, and the mathematicians have to design stuff like boilers and refrigeration. The different minds are complimentary, and to get the project done, you need all of them working together. Another thing that really helped me is my mother and a local elementary school worked together as a team. The rules were the same at home and school. If I had a tantrum, it was called a tantrum in the 50’s, the rule was no television for one night, and I was only allowed an hour of TV a day. That’s all I was allowed for video games. An hour a day. It was very objective, and they waited until I calmed down. The rules were really, really clear, and that was really helpful. Too often, I hear a parent say, “Well, my kids are wonderful at home and horrible at school,” or I hear “He behaves really well at school and terrible at home.” Well, in this situation, the teachers and the parents are not on the same page. You need to find out what the school’s doing. Well, the school needs to find out what the parents are doing, and start doing the thing that works. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I think that idea of a team approach is so important because so many of these kids do have a lot of professionals or adults involved in some way in their lives, and as you said, Debra, you really empathize with parents who feel like they’re pulled in so many different directions with different opinions. I also empathize with how that must feel to kids who are trying to navigate so many different approaches or ways that the adults in their world are handling things, and so this idea of really having a collaborative team effort, I think, is so important.

Debra Moore:
Yeah, that’s a really good point about how it affects the child as well. Maybe for your listeners, it would be helpful to know that one of the ways that the book is kind of set up is that it has three components: One, we give you information, but then we also give you lots of checklists and questionnaires to help you assess, that you can just go down. And you can also give those to teachers or to therapists so that everybody sees everybody’s feedback. Then we have examples. Some of them are real, with names changed, and some of them are common hypothetical examples, so that you can really picture how a family would go about doing this one way, and then we compare it to doing it another way that might not be as helpful.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I think those practical examples are really beneficial for parents, especially, to get an idea in their head of what this looks like in practice. I think that’s really helpful. This issue that you raised about parents having the mindset of seeing the child as a child, as a whole child, and not overemphasizing the label or the diagnosis, I’m curious what either of you or both of you say to people who — maybe I’m seeing this more in the neurodiversity movement, this idea of very much, some people, some autistic people, some people with other diagnoses saying, “No, this label does define me. This is who I am”, and who might say, when you’re talking about viewing the whole child, that’s discounting their autism or their label. I’m curious if you run into people who raise that with you and what your thoughts are on that.

Temple Grandin:
Yes I have. And to me, autism’s an important part of who I am, but a profession comes first, because what’s giving me a satisfying life is having interesting work to do. And some of the work I’ve been able to do, autism helped me do it, because I’m an extreme visual thinker. That really helped me with animal behavior because people that are highly verbal have a hard time kind of understanding animals, that’s what I talk about in my book, Animals In Translation. I discuss how that, being a visual thinker, helped me. What I want to see is people be successful. So there are some things you’ve got to do to join the world. Like you can’t be a rude, filthy, dirty, slop. That’s one. You’ve got to clean it up. Now I have problems with wearing certain clothes, so I wear work clothes and good clothes that feel the same. I still have problems with multitasking. I have no working memory. When I learned math and borrowing and subtraction in third grade, if I’d been forced to do that in my head, I couldn’t do it. If I hadn’t been allowed to mark the paper, I would not fail to do it. I had some problems. We had a meeting yesterday and we had a lot of people at different tables talking, and I have trouble just hearing all those in the background. I still have those kinds of problems. So there’s some stuff you have to do, some accommodations, but on the other hand, I’m not going to be the social butterfly, because one problem I have is I simply cannot follow those  rapid conversations, because of my attention shifting so slowly. Now, professionally, working memory doesn’t matter, because all I use is long-term memory when I do design work. That doesn’t load working memory, but I’ve always — My first book that I did back in the mid 80’s, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, I used that label from the beginning and then my book where I talk about that, [inaudible 0:37:56.9] I call it the Autistic Brain. So I tended to go towards identity first language when I didn’t even know that word, identity first. And then the professionals who are pushing against you saying “person with autism”. So what I’ve done on some of the stuff I write now is I just mix and match because it’s good. I’ve learned in writing that you want to not just keep using the same word all the time. It’s bad writing. Okay. So I might say something’s beautiful. And then somewhere else, I’ll say it’s lovely. I won’t use the word beautiful again, because I’ve learned that that’s not good writing.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Debra. How about you? Your thoughts on that, or if you’ve encountered people sort of challenging this idea of the whole child versus the label.

Debra Moore:
I have. Recently, I had a post and it was a reprint of an article. I don’t even remember what it was about, but it used the term “children with autism” and someone on social media took great offense at that. And I get that. I think part of that comes from a fear that there’s that stigma, which has been with us for so long, is going to persist, and that the strengths, like Temple talked about, parts of her autism are what has made her stand out in her profession. It’s a strength, it’s a plus. But when we have a DSM that emphasizes deficits, it’s a deficit model. It’s good to be cautious and wary that we don’t fall into deficit thinking. And I think folks who point that out to us, that’s part of what their message is, and I respect that greatly. At the same time, this person who pointed that out was obviously angry about it, and I thought it’s too bad, I don’t think they even read the article. And it was a wonderful article that talked about how to help children. So I think we can realize that the autism is something we need to have a great deal of consideration and carefulness about, but we don’t want, to use an idiom, which is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Temple Grandin:
Well, the other thing is, things are false. I’ve written my first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic came out in the mid 80’s, so I’ve been writing for a long time, and the mistake I made early on was talking about that I was cured. I realized that’s a mistake. I would never write that now because I’m still very autistic. I still have problems with multitasking, I still have some problems with sound sensitivity, social chit chat conversations go by too fast. We were in a meeting yesterday with a bunch of other people and we were doing chit-chat, interesting chit-chat conversations at tables about trips we’d been on. I couldn’t hear the other people talking. And that is something that’s still a problem. So those kinds of activities are not that fun for me. I can’t hear them. And you see, then people have talked about masking. Well, you might be in a situation where you’re sensory overloaded. I fidget with my hands. I was taking a pen at this meeting and I was doing some things with the pen like this, but I wasn’t knocking it on the table when people would hear it. Do a fidget thing that doesn’t bother people. In fact, it’s interesting. All the fidget toys you can get now, you can get the truck I learned to drive on, you can get oil field equipment. It’s amazing what you can get as fidget toys, because everybody seems to like to have them, well you didn’t have that, mess with it under the table. Obviously I’ll find something because we had a day long, big faculty meeting yesterday, it was a really good in-person faculty meeting, and I was fidgeting with the pen, but I made sure I didn’t make any noise with it. That’s where you try to do something that doesn’t bother other people. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
But still meets your needs.

Temple Grandin:
Yeah. And I cannot multitask. There are certain jobs I am just not going to do. There’s plenty of other jobs I can do super well, like design work.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you raising that point that in your writings and in your own evolution as a person that you, as time has gone on, that you’ve been able to shift some of your ways of thinking about that. Like you said, you wouldn’t write “cured” now. 

Temple Grandin:
Oh, I would never. The other mistake I made when I wrote the original version of Thinking In Pictures, I did this back in 1995, is I made the mistake of saying that everybody with autism was a visual thinker like me. That’s wrong. When I did The Autistic Brain in 2013, I said I was wrong and I’ve read some reviews of my book, and it was wrong. Now the thing that tends to be true is that thinking tends to be more specialized, good at one thing, really bad at something else, where most people are more mixtures, but it was just wrong, and I didn’t know that. And I’ve changed that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Which is really the mark of growth as a human being. That’s the journey we all should be on, right? That as we learn more and know better, then we change and we do better. And I think that’s an important message for all of the parents and professionals listening, that we all do the best we can with what we know at the time, and then as we have new information, new understanding we can shift and do better. And that that’s okay. That’s part of the process. We can’t be expected to know it all and get it all right immediately, but we should be committed to continuing our own learning and growth. And that’s why I really appreciate people like the two of you who take the time to write about your experiences and provide learning opportunities for parents and for professionals. So as we’re wrapping up, I would love for you to share the title of the book, where people can get the book, and any parting thoughts around the message of the book.

Temple Grandin:
Debra, why don’t you talk?

Debra Moore:
Sure. The book is called Navigating Autism: 9 Mindsets For Helping Kids On The Spectrum, and it’s published by Norton Publishers. You can get it directly from the publisher. Most people are going to just go on Amazon and get it, but you can order it from any bookstore. Some libraries will get it, but if yours doesn’t, you can always ask your librarian to order it for you as well. Most of the time they will. And it will hopefully give you some new ways of looking at things and make life a little bit smoother for you and for your child. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Wonderful. Is there a website, Debra, where people can go to learn more about you or your work? Or Temple, for you, is there a website? Because I know that people are thinking, “Where can I go to learn more about you and your previous books and what you’re doing?”

Temple Grandin:
Well, there’s templegrandin.com, that’s my autism site. There’s a lot of free information on that and links to books, and then if you’re interested in livestock, I have my livestock website, grandin.com.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Wonderful. Thank you so much to both of you for being here today, for sharing all of this wonderful wisdom and these strategies and techniques that we all can use. Really appreciate your time and want to encourage all of you who are listening to get this new book, learn some new things, put some of these things in practice with your own children, with the children and the adults that you work with., and thanks to all of you for being here. We’ll catch you back here next time.