I'm dad. Folks, it's James Guttman. It's Hi Pod I'm Dad. I am the author of HiBlogIm Dad.com. I'm the host of HiPod I'm Dad. And I thank you once again for finding us wherever you found us. Yeah, man. I uh I was excited about doing this podcast because it's rare that in real time I'll come to kind of an epiphany, an understanding of something that's happening in that moment as it relates to, especially raising my son. Um Lucas 14, he's nonverbal and he has autism. And at this point, I know a lot of parents they kind of think they have it all figured out. You know, uh we reach that point where we're kind of rigid in our beliefs. This is who my kid is, this is what he does. And we sometimes forget to say evolve our thinking, but really analyze how we see things. And we had a moment that past week, and I talked about it in the blog. And the idea was that understanding why my son does things is not as important as understanding that he does things. Let me explain. Had an issue, wrote about it in the blog. There was ice on the steps out front of my house. I have split custody with Lucas' mom. When she comes to get him, she gets him in the front. He waits for her, we sit in the front room, I open the window, he looks out the window, he has his backpack, he has his jacket, he's ready. Same town, it's a quick ride. But that's what we do, that's how we prepare for it. Seeing the ice, I thought to myself, I should walk him through the garage. The garage is how we get into the house when he and I go out. We leave for school through the garage, we come home through the garage. Nine times out of ten, we're going through the garage. So I thought to myself, I should bring this kid through the garage. It'll just be easier. But as I was thinking about it, I realized, hey, my son has problems with transitions. He always has. Most of the time, if he's going to have an issue at school, it's going from class to like music class, it's leaving for recess, it's going back inside. Even when he was younger, before we built that trust, he would get upset if we were going into a building he didn't know, a bowling alley, a birthday party. And it finally took him understanding that I was bringing him to positive places to not do that. So when I thought about bringing him through the garage, I immediately realized, hey, if I bring him through here, there is a good chance that this is going to in the least upset him, right? Not even having like a meltdown. Maybe he wouldn't, maybe he trusts me, whatever, but I know it's going to cause him a level of anxiety. Why would it cause him anxiety? I have no idea. Why are transitions difficult for him? I have no idea. I can't tell you if you ask me, why does he do that? I don't know. But I know that he does those things. And as his dad, it's my job to get ahead of those things, not put him in situations where he's going to be upset for no reason or he's going to have to deal with something that he doesn't want to deal with. And in that moment, getting ahead of it and realizing that I'm going to protect him from having this upset feeling. I was proud of myself. And I was proud of what I've built with him. Because again, when you have a child who's nonverbal, especially when they're little, you can't fathom having a bond, having a relationship, or even understanding anything that he does. Lucas would do things when he was little that I couldn't figure out. And I'm proud to say that a lot of those things I have figured out through the years. Again, I don't know why, but I know what they are. For example, Lucas has an iPad and he starts and stops YouTube videos all day. Start, stop, start, stop. To anybody else, it looks like a stim. And the assumption is stimming, which is kind of just self-soothing behavior, is just done randomly because we don't get it. So we go, oh, this kid's just starting this. He likes to start and stop things. It's not true. It was when I really sit down next to him and I wonder, why is he starting this? Why is he stopping it? And I always tell the story about the first time that I figured one of them out. He had been watching the Sesame Street video, kid's favorite songs. There's like seven Sesame Street videos that he loves. Every other Sesame Street can go to hell, according to this kid. Like he won't watch. If you put on a Sesame Street that he doesn't have on his approved list in his head, you might as well put on like CNN. He doesn't care, he'll leave the room, he'll get upset. So he watches this video and he kept pausing it and unpausing it. And I sat and I looked over his shoulder and I realized what he was doing. There was a star swipe. And you guys who know transitions between um scenes in a movie or a TV show, and it'd go like that, a star would wipe over the screen. And he liked it. And I guess he figured out that if he paused the video, it would rewind half a second and play again if he unpaused it. So he figured out exactly how to pause it so he could watch that star swipe over and over again. And I was like, oh, okay, that's that's why he does it. Same thing with glares. Like Lucas has been infatuated with glares and reflections since he was a baby. I think it would have happened no matter what. We used to have a lot of mirrors in the house where he grew up. He would always look in the mirror. I have a video on Instagram of him as a toddler looking in the mirror. He loves it. He loves, I have a big mirror in his room. I got it for his birthday. It's a little stick-on mirror. He's got so many different ones. And he spends most of his time getting up and running to it against the wall and kind of looking at himself. He loves it. And knowing that, I know that if I bring him somewhere and there's a giant window in the front, he's going to be distracted. We went in through this at one of these sensory gyms. We couldn't even get inside because there was this big plate glass window right in the front when you walked in and he wouldn't stop walking past it, clapping, looking from the side of his face to see his reflection in the window. We went for Easter to one of these pop-up things that they do. And it was one of those things where I'm trying to explain it to you. There were speakers around the room in a circle. You may have seen these. And each speaker played a different instrument. So you heard a symphony, but each speaker played a different part of the symphony in conjunction. So if you walked around the room, it was like almost being there. It was, it was impressive. It was cool. I mean, it got a little old quick, but it was it was soothing. And it was me, him, and his sister. And he's sitting there and he's looking her in the eyes so deeply. And she's like, what? And was if you saw it from afar, you would be like, this boy is really making eye contact. And he always makes eye contact. That's never been an issue for Lucas. But it was like intense eye contact. And so we figured out, oh, he sees the glare of the lights behind him in her eyes, and he's watching it. So that's something we figured out. Again, though, if you ask me why does he like glare? So I don't know. You know, why does he like watching a particular part of a video? I don't know. I know that in my life I've had stimming things that I've done. I think we all do. When I was a kid, it was like five years old. I always talk about the first time I learned the word metamorphosis, and I couldn't stop saying it for like, it felt like forever. It might have been less time, but it was like metamorphosis constantly. So we all do things that we like to do and to feel, and you don't have to understand why. Now, let's say you're listening to this and you're like, this all sounds a little weird. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do you one better. Let's pretend you had a neurotypical kid, and that neurotypical kid is obsessed with baseball. Obsessed with baseball. You don't know why. You don't like baseball. Doesn't seem all that exciting to you. Where'd he get it from? Who likes baseball this much? This kid, it's all he does. He wears the hats and he talks about the players and he won't stop. It's so, I don't get it. I don't get it. You don't have to get it. But you should still buy him baseball things for his birthday. You should still support the fact that he likes baseball. And that is exactly what I do with my son. I don't know why he does the things that he does, but I acknowledge it, I respect it, and I make it a part of how I interact with him. I know this, you know. So just like you would get your kid tickets to a baseball game for Christmas, knowing that, I mean, not Christmas, it's over by then, right? So uh Easter or whatever, you would buy them tickets for these holidays as something that they like, I do the same thing with my son. I get ahead of these things that are gonna upset him. I try to do things that he's going to enjoy. I buy him presents that, you know, maybe there's like music to it or glares, things that he could stim on. I do it for him because I don't need to know why. I just need to know what will, you know, be right for him. And when it came to this, when it came to the, you know, the pickup and going through the garage and not not going through the garage and rather going through the front door, I had no guarantee that he was gonna have a meltdown. I didn't know. And in fact, I can tell you, he probably wouldn't have. Lucas doesn't really have a meltdown, he would have dealt with it, but why make him deal with it? He has autism. This isn't the kind of thing where I'm just like, he's gonna learn. No, man. Why? He doesn't have to learn. This is who he is. I get it. Maybe one day it won't bother him, and that'd be great, and we could deal with it then, but right now it might. And I don't want to give him needless stress over something that really wasn't that big of a deal. I went outside, I poured hot water on this ice, I swept it off, and we went through the front door like we were supposed to do. And I do that for him, and I do that for him because he does it for me. There's things that I ask of him that he probably doesn't understand. The example I use in the blog, I'll use it here too. Clearing the plate after dinner. Lucas brings his plate to me. I tell him, I go, hey, plate. I do like a little, it almost looks like uh like a puppet motion with my hands, a puppet talking. I go, hey, plate. And he'll bring his plate over, he'll hand me his plate to put it in the sink. He doesn't know why. I don't think he understands. Like, oh, if we keep using dirty plates, we're gonna all, you know, get mono or whatever. No, he just knows that his dad asks him to do it. And this has been something I wrote about last week, too, about 4:30 in the morning. Uh, him going back to bed because his dad told him to do it. He listens to what I say without needing to know specifically why. And if he could do that for me, why can't I do that for him? Right? I should do that for him. It's important. And it's a part of what builds this trust with my son. It's a part of what lets him know dad has your back. Dad's going to be there for you. So when your dad asks you to do something, you do it for him. That's how this family works. I do it with my daughter too. There's things that she does for us, there's things that we do for her. That's how a family works. And just because my son has, you know, severe autism, as they say, he's nonverbal. Just because all that stuff exists doesn't mean that he doesn't follow the rules of this family. It doesn't mean he's not a part of this family. He's a main character in our lives. So I want him to understand the basics of how we interact with each other. That's important to me. And I'm I'm so proud of it. I think about it, and I don't know. I gave like a time, but I'm not really sure if it's two years ago, three years. I don't know how long ago it had to be, but there would have been a time where I would have sent him through the garage and he would have thrown himself on the ground and he would have been under my car and he would have been like, and I would have sat there wringing my hands. I don't get it. I don't know why he does this. And I was so proud that that didn't happen. And I saw it visually in my brain. I saw that happening, that unfolding. And I'm remembering a time when he was younger, not getting, come on, look, oh my God. And it's one of those things where I immediately thought, I want to go, I want to write about this, I want to do a podcast about this. Because if somebody else is dealing with that right now, they can listen to this and get it a little bit. And maybe kind of jumpstart and leapfrog over some of the lessons I had to go through before we got to this. But this is important so much. And that's why you guys may have noticed the blog, the podcast. We deal so much with trust as it relates to raising a kid with autism like my son, because it's the most important thing we have. If you have trust with your kid, it changes everything, it changes his behavior. Uh, it changes what he's able to learn, changes what he wants to do. It's the most important thing by far. And Lucas trusts me. He knows that I trust him, he loves me, he knows that I love him, and he knows that he's a part of this family. And to me, as a dad, that's all that matters. That does it for me. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Um, I'll be back next Friday. Available everywhere, you know, Spotify, blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Until then, James Gutman saying, be well. Byepod. I'm dad.