Myths about Autism

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Children with autism can’t show affection. This is one of the most devastating myths. Autistic children express their love and feelings differently.
Children with autism are actually geniuses. Only one in ten people with autism have what are termed “Islets of ability or intelligence”. Like other children, the IQ’s of children with autism range throughout the scale.
Children with autism don’t speak. Many autistics develop good functional language while most others learn to communicate through sign language, pictures, computers or electronic devices.
Children with autism choose to live in their own world. Autistic behaviors arise from the different wiring inherent to the disorder. Some are hypersensitive to sounds, light, touch.Howe ever with regular intervention and therapies this is necessarily not the case.
Children with autism are spoiled kids.  This myth brings the curse of autism back to the parents’ door.

In their own words
“there are still many parents and, yes, professional, too, who believe that ‘once autistic, always autistic’. This dictum has meant sad and sorry lives for many children diagnosed, as I was in early life, as autistic. To these people it is incomprehensible that the characteristics of autism can be modified and controlled…I am living proof that they can.”-Temple Grandin, Ph.D., Co author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic.

Adapted from The Natural Medicine Guide to Autism Stephanie Marohn

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