Drawing on thirty years of work with autistic children at a center founded by the authors, this book strikes us as not merely interesting but genuinely useful.
The authors—he a physician, she an educator—describe autistic behaviors and use them to illuminate the child's difficulties, if not the condition itself (which no one has yet been able to fully explain). In a lengthy chapter on families and their struggles, they offer many practical suggestions.
The authors present various therapies and competing theories about this serious handicap with honest appraisal. Yet they place their faith primarily in proper, well-structured education:
- They stress the vital need for structured environment and regular routine—anchors that these children, so easily overwhelmed by anxiety, desperately require.
- They see value in helping the child acquire knowledge as "a means of reducing both the desire for unchanging sameness and the anxiety triggered by change".
- They ask educators for close, careful observation so they can spot the child's distress, which is often far deeper than it appears to us.
Alongside the rigor of their information and experience runs a gift: simple, clear language. Most striking of all is the evident love for these children and genuine respect and understanding for their parents, joined to real competence.
They never speak of miracles, only of progress that is always possible—though it demands sustained, skillful work. They sum this up in the book's closing words:
"Much can be accomplished with intelligence, with heart, and with a spirit unafraid to act".
—Nicole Schultes, 1984