Temple Grandin’s Advice for Parents of Children with Autism

Among the greatest fears shared by all parents in life is finding out that something is different about their child. Most babies begin to babble around four months, and start saying their first words as early as six months. Temple Grandin did not speak until she was three and a half years old. It took early speech therapy and behavioral therapy for Grandin to be able to participate in kindergarten.

Temple Grandin has autism, but the narrative of her life would challenge the notion that something was “wrong” with her. She is an author, inventor, engineer, and professor of animal science at Colorado State University. As of 2017, she has been inducted into both the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has won the World Organization’s Meritorious Achievement Award, and been named in the “Heroes” category of the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world.

Among the many achievements and contributions that she has made to the world—half of the US cattle population are handled in facilities that she designed—she is one of the first individuals on the autism spectrum to share with the world her personal insights and her everyday experiences of living with autism. Her works on autism, including Thinking in Pictures and The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, are pioneering works in understanding the gifts and challenges that come with autism.

Dr. Grandin recently hosted an “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit, in which users post questions and have them answered via live responses from the featured guest. The questions asked on the thread included everything from Dr. Grandin’s award-winning HBO documentary, to her life as an autistic individual. Here are some of the questions Dr. Grandin answered on raising a child with autism, from her own experiences and writings on parenting autistic children.

On raising children with autism

User gorkt asked Dr. Grandin what the most important piece of advice she had was for raising children with autism. She responded by saying: “If you have a 2 or 3-year-old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3-year-old is do nothing.” As someone who was fortunate enough to receive heavy speech and behavioral therapy at a young age, it is easy to see why Grandin chose this advice to give.

Autistic children do not develop the way that other children do, and leaving them to their own devices is the only way to ensure that they are socially ostracized and underdeveloped. The nature of autism overwhelms children with too much sensory data to process, leading most to developmental difficulties with structuring thoughts, self-locating, recognizing patterns, and even discerning distances and lights.

This different way of perceiving reality is not always detrimental, and Grandin argues that if properly fostered, it can actually lead a child to new and brilliant discoveries in fields of their interest. Intervention programs give autistic children the tools to understand the world the way that it has been socially and conventionally structured, but they will have a different fundamental perception of everyday life. Dr. Grandin highly recommends “20 to 30 hours a week of one to one teaching with an adult,” as well as “encouraging the child to engage socially with the teacher.”

Read on to learn more about the advice Temple Grandin has to offer.

Photo credit: TED 2010 Temple Grandin by Red Maxwell