Chris's Letter to Families

I am an adult with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, one of the disorders on the autism spectrum. This is my message to you children with autism.

All of us on the autism spectrum have different strengths and limitations. Growing up for everyone is a journey. Our journey is unlike the journey all other people take. No one has to "learn" to breathe. We all do this naturally, without thinking.

Other people can learn many things easily, effortlessly, and naturally. Others can learn to look at people’s faces, and to look them in the eye, and to pay attention to them, and to talk to them, and to tell them what they need and want.

Other people can have relaxed conversations with their family and new people they meet. This allows them to make friends. They seem to do this without any effort, just as easily as they breathe.

Other people’s parents seem able to make them feel better. And other people understand how to make their parents and brothers and sisters feel better. This is because other people have shared emotional and psychological needs. That is something you might not understand until you are older. This also means when others make a mistake, they know how to make things right.
But most of all, all these things mean that other people understand each other.

Very often, other people don’t understand us, and we don’t understand other people. This can change. This is changing today. But everyone still has a lot of very, very hard work to do. You have a lot of hard work to do too, even though you are still very young. We need to learn all the skills we can. We need to work hard in school to get a good education. We need to work hard to learn good work habits.

Why do we need to do this?

We need to do this because we might never be as good as other people are at making friends. But, we have a lot of other things we can learn to offer our family, and friends, and society. We can learn loyalty. Many of us can work longer and harder than other people can. Many of us can develop amazing skills that can help other people. Our skills, and talents, and education, and training can help us to contribute to society and to help other people.

We also need to work hard to learn to get along with other people. This is something we will always struggle with. It’s easier if we get help when we are young. It is much harder if we have to try to pick up these skills as adults. Some of us are never able to learn these skills, because we were not able to get the help we needed when we were children.

I hope that all of you are able to get the help you need, and that you are able to have the success and happiness in life that I now have. I hope you won’t have to work as hard as I did to get this happiness.

I want you to remember two names for me. One is Gordon Campbell. The other is Mary Polak. These people are deciding your future right now.

In the past, a very good program was created to help children who are on the autism spectrum. It is the best program there is for helping people like us. Now, these two people are about to take this program away.

Your parents and I are working very hard to convince these two people to keep this program. When you grow up you will know whether we succeeded or not. You will know whether these two people helped you or not, or whether they took away the best program there was to help you grow up and lead a happy, productive and meaningful life.


Chris McIntosh