Allen & Unwin

It would be like comparing a person’s blood type to their personality type

Right now, the one thing we can do for people who struggle with the impacts of serious cognitive and medical disability is to provide them comfort, care, and a good quality of life for all their lives.

long-promised transformative moment that would improve the quality of their children’s lives somehow never arrived.

The question that keeps me up at night,” he said, “is what will happen to our beloved daughter when we die?”

covered that many of the challenges they face daily are not “symptoms” of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness.

It is not true, however, that he wanted to remove himself entirely from the company of his peers; he just wanted to stand off to the side, soaking everything in.

shy and bashful to a degree bordering on disease.”

striking literalness and directness of mind, extreme single-mindedness, [and] passion for calculation and quantitative exactitude . . . coupled with a virtual incomprehension of social behaviors and human relationships”

Many of them struggled to acquire simple spoken language and rudimentary self-care skills and were prone to seizures and outbursts of self-injurious behavior

Rather, I want to play and talk with the child, all the while looking with open eyes both into the child and into myself, observing the emotions that arise in reaction to everything that occurs in the conversation between the two of us.”