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Emergency professionals are taught that the first person they must ensure is safe from harm at the scene of an emergency is themselves for the simple reason that if they are injured they are no longer in a position to help anyone else. The same holds true for parents for if they don’t protect their own wellbeing and collapse from the strain emotionally or if they drive themselves into financial ruin, they are no longer in a position to help their children with autism or to help their children who do not have autism.

Ever the most heroic emergency worker can be confronted by their personal limitations and, to be a good emergency worker, they must accept them so that “all is not lost” in the process of “trying to save everything.” For our families to survive, we parents of children with autism must also be realistic when facing our own personal limitations. No one else can face them for us.

Since most of the ways we diagnose autism are based on behavior, we can't rely on biological, structural, or chemical findings to determine if a treatment is working. We primarily measure success based on a patient's change, or lack thereof, in behavior.

The behavioral changes produced by the few effective treatments make life in social settings (including the home) possible, but we have no idea whether they have any effect on the underlying cause (or causes) of autism or whether they even make severely affected patients feel better.

One method intended to help, "facilitated communication," is based on the idea that a sensitive facilitator will hold the hand of a patient over a kind of Ouija board. She will then help the patient respond to questions by sensing his intention and helping guide his hand to spell out answers. Rigorous studies have shown that the spelled-out answers come from the unconscious (or, worse, the conscious) mind of the facilitator. Nonetheless, the practice is still in use, and I know parents who are utterly convinced that it is valid and useful. Frankly, something important did happen when facilitated communication was introduced to my patients: They improved, they brightened, they became more social and more interactive, and they seemed, somehow, happier, even though facilitated communication didn't actually translate their thoughts into words. I'll come back to "why" in a minute.

The Asperger Syndrome hyper-focusing trait can be helpful in a classroom setting when educators choose to use this extreme attention span as a tool.

If normal classroom learning procedures are not getting through to an AS child, try working with the theme that they are already working with. As an example, a few words about their chosen object mentioned during a history lesson, can perhaps make the entire history lesson memorable.

the Asperger Syndrome hyper-focus ability is a learning style. AS children have the ability to hyper-focus their way into learning traditional subjects.