Autism and the Questioning Child

At 84, I must use a cane. I was shopping at a grocery store, and a mother with her three-year-old daughter was ahead of me. I heard running steps behind me and which stopped when a slim eight-year-old boy approached from behind. He stopped and asked, "Why do you use a cane?" I answered that I needed to use it to keep me from falling because I had lost my sense of balance. He gave me a look, as if not quite believing that a slim adult, even an older adult, could not run as easily as he could.

Not waiting for a more complete response, he ran ahead of his mother and sister's cart, stopping occasionally to look at something on the shelf before continuing his store-wide exploration, occasionally squealing in delight when he apparently saw something he recognized.

Autism takes on many manifestations. The desire to know things and receive an instant correct reply is a frequent manifestation. With age, the child will learn that people, even their parents, tire of being constantly bombarded with questions. Particularly, when these questions cannot be resolved with a quick right or wrong answer. In the autistic child's mind, ambiguity should not exist. Ultimately, most will learn that uncertainty, doubt, incorrect information, chance, and new information can alter what was once considered to be a certain truth to be a lie at worst or mistaken at best.

When some autistic children grow into adults, they realize that knowledge is evolving and that they, while searching for a deeper truth, can discover it. This thrill of discovery can result in significant advances in science, business, and human relationships as the autistic individual feels driven towards his goal to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Managing such people as team members can be challenging to keep them focused on the problem at hand, while the autistic adult is more interested in investigating something totally unrelated to the problem. In some cases, perhaps most, it is best to let them run with their most immediate delightful investigation and continue to have them consider work a fun place to be, rather than cowering them down to force them to do what is demanded of them.

Best practice is to let your creative people create, rather than burden them with administrative tasks and force them to participate in work that has no interest to them.