A Candid Conversation About Autism
With Jill Escher and Christina Buttons
Christina Buttons and I had a fascinating conversation with Jill Escher about autism. Hearing about her experiences with her two autistic children, especially with her son who engages in destructive behavior, was eye-opening.
I strive to ask questions directly and genuinely, without filtering them through a politically correct lens or other bias. Jill graciously answered my candid inquiries, offering thoughtful perspectives and helpful advice. She's actively trying to understand the broader issues surrounding autism—potential solutions, causes, and how society interacts with autistic individuals and their families. It was an engaging conversation, and I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.
Fascinating discussion. My major in college was speech pathology and audiology and in one of the first courses I took on speech and language our professor told us about a close friend of her whose son had severe autism and that he was writing a book about it. That was “A Child Called Noah” by Josh Greenfeld. The book came out in 1972, just a couple of years after I took the course. It was my first exposure to the world of autism. That was over 50 years ago! And the incidence, study, and theories of causation have all exploded in what feels like a dozen or more directions.
Fast forward to my work at Teachers College, Columbia University, as a senior fundraiser specializing in foundation funding. I worked closely with faculty across the institution to help them find seed funding for research as well as to fund program design that would help them get larger government grants. One professor I worked closely with was a specialist in language development in young children with a focus on autism as a language/communication disorder of the brain. His hypothesis was that the earlier a child can be diagnosed with autism, the sooner you can help them attain the normative linguistic development milestones. He hypothesized that for such children on the spectrum the long term communications problems multiply because they have already missed achieving the language/communication milestones when they were optimal along the developmental path. What he considered among the necessary milestones were things like eye contact while listening and speaking, reading facial expressions of those they were communicating with (enhancing empathy), and similar things.
It’s been nearly 10 years since I worked with him so I hope I explained this accurately. In any case, have some background myself in neuroscience, chid development, cognitive development it seemed intriguing and a novel way to approach a treatment modality. We developed a solid proposal and pitched it to Autism Speaks, but were not funded. Then I left for retirement and I believe the professor passed away!
But watching your truly inspiring discussion reminded me of this. My husband and I actually have two couples who are our contemporaries who have autistic sons close in age in the Berkeley/Oakland community. I know that both families were very active in the autism community there. Both sons are full adults now. One I have met numerous times. He was able to finish college in 5 years and though he works, he still needs to reside at home. He has trouble discerning genuine friendship from the exploitative kind. He’s got a high IQ but as is typical fixates on subjects, speaks fast without ever making eye contact with the person he is speaking too, and gets annoyed if he is interrupted or the other person tries to bring the conversation back to the original content.
I never met the son of the other couple as he had a much more complex set of co-morbidities, including OCD, sensitivities to light (he kept his room dark), would refuse to bathe for months at a time, and was often so oppositional that his parents couldn’t control him. Both of them are successful clinical psychologists, btw. When he aged out of Berkeley’s system they wound up having to send him to a special residential program halfway across the country and were only allowed to visit after a time. The son is not back in California but living in a support community somewhere near Livermore. But when we most recently visited with the parents (two months ago) they said he was doing much better. He’s well into his 30s at this point.
The one thing these and several other sets of parents of autistic children that we know is that they, particularly the husbands, were all quite old for first time parents when their kids were born. And they were all high IQ professionally successful. That, of course, just might describe the people in my general circle!
I’ve also worked closely with adults who were in responsible professional positions and were part of the teams with whom I worked who as soon as I met them I could tell were “on the spectrum”. Smart, capable, expert at the jobs they did, but it was always clear to me.
If you read this far, thanks for your patience. This is a fascinating subject, heartbreaking when you are close to both the parents and the autistic individuals. You wish you could help them but of course the only thing is understanding and emotion support when you are not a professional.
I found the answers and comments by both Jill Escher and Christina Buttons interesting. I also like the candid conversation approach to a certain level, but I thought a bit more of autism-related background reading from Peter would have made for a more informative talk because he probably would have had more interesting questions to make.