Sharing and Fighting: The Issue of Communication and Education

Abstract

How does a parent describe his or her experiences with autism to others? How does sharing those experiences affect and order their lives, the lives of their children, and the lives of others around them? Parents in APSG called themselves “autism parents” and “autism warriors,” and to understand what it means to become and identify as a warrior, one must look closely not only at the activities parents engage in, as I have in the previous chapters, but also at how they talk about those activities with other people, how they present themselves to others. This presentation of self is an issue of communication and, I would argue, it is also fundamentally an issue of education.