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[quote=Anonymous][quote]While he seems like a fairly typical geeky teenager now, it took years of hard work to get here. Just before he turned 3, he received a diagnosis of medium to severe autism. He showed no apparent interest in those around him and seemed to understand few words. He threw stunning tantrums. And even when he didn’t seem angry, he would run headlong into walls and fall over, then get up and do it again, like a robot programmed to repeat the same pattern eternally, seemingly impervious to pain despite the bruises spreading across his forehead.

Mark’s parents, Cynthia and Kevin, sent him to their district’s preschool for developmentally delayed children, where he was placed in the highest-functioning class. But he only got worse, having more fits and losing even more language. Within a few months, he was moved to the lowest-functioning class. Cynthia said a neurologist told her to be prepared to someday institutionalize her only child.

In desperation, the Macluskies pulled Mark from school. They took out a $100,000 second mortgage so Cynthia could quit her job in human resources to work full time with Mark, even though she was the primary breadwinner. She scoured the Internet for guidance and vowed to try whatever might possibly work, as long as it didn’t sound dangerous. She gave her son shots of vitamin B-12 and started him on a dairy-free, gluten-free and soy-free diet. She read books on various behavioral therapies, choosing what she liked and then training herself, because the family couldn’t afford to hire professionals. In the end, Cynthia cobbled together a 40-hour-per-week behavioral program, on top of the five hours a week of speech and occupational therapy that the state provided.

They were difficult years. Early on, Mark would hurl eggs at the wall and pour milk on the floor, so the Macluskies padlocked the refrigerator with a heavy chain. They emptied their living room of furniture, replacing it with an inflatable trampoline encircled by rubber walls so that Mark could whap against them to get the sensory input he seemed to need without hurting himself. They made clear to Mark that if he wanted something to eat or drink, he would get it only if he conveyed his desires by using words or sign language or pointing to the relevant flashcard.

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Cynthia decided to keep home-schooling Mark, having concluded that traditional school wouldn’t sufficiently address his weaknesses or recognize his strengths. By the time he turned 8, his speech and behavior were on par with peers, but his social thinking remained classically autistic. “I sort of knew there were rules, but I just couldn’t remember what those rules were,” he told me recently by video chat. “It was hard to remember what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do when you’re interacting with people.” He rarely noticed social cues, and he couldn’t interpret them when he did. He was too rough, too tactile, too quick to intrude into other people’s personal space.

Cynthia set out to address his social delays. She watched DVR recordings of “Leave It to Beaver” with Mark, stopping every few minutes to ask him to predict what might happen next, or what he thought Beaver was thinking, or why June reacted the way she did. When they had watched every episode, they moved on to “Little House on the Prairie” so Mark could practice reading facial expressions. “I remember it being hard to answer my mom’s questions and being confused when I watched those shows. I knew she was doing all those things for a reason,” he said appreciatively. “I just didn’t know how it was going to help.”

At parks and restaurants, they watched the faces of passers-by and played social detective, with Cynthia asking Mark to find clues to people’s relationships or emotions. “He didn’t seem to learn that stuff through osmosis like other kids do, so I’d have to walk him through it each time till he got it.”

Around that time, his parents gave him a robot kit for Christmas, and he fell madly in love with it. Eager to find opportunities for Mark to practice socializing, Cynthia formed a robot club: Mark and four typically developing children, meeting in the Macluskies’ living room two afternoons a week. At first they just built robots, but soon the five children began writing programming code and entering competitions. Two years ago, Mark made it to the robotics world competition. There he was partnered randomly with teenagers from Singapore and had to strategize with them on the fly. They won several rounds. By then, it had been three years since a specialist concluded that despite some lingering social deficits, Mark no longer met the criteria for autism. As Cynthia watched how well Mark worked with his teammates at that competition, she began sobbing so hard that she had to leave the auditorium.[/quote]

The parents (especially Mom) of Mark seem like they worked with him very very very intensively, for years.   Just because he seems to not be autistic now, is no reason to say that he never was!  What was all that work for, if not to help him recover?[/quote]

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