I'm Dad. Folks, James Guttman, the host of HiPod I'm Dad, the dad behind Hiblog I'm Dad.com. And thank you for joining me here on another Friday. Appreciate it. I got Lucas running around in the background. My son, you might hear him, you know, hooting and hollering, as he often does. I wrote in the book, High World, I'm Dad, it came out last year. I wrote about the fact that nonverbal doesn't mean silent, right? I told a story about the cable guy asking me if I had birds based on Lucas in the background. So Lucas is in the background, he is in a good mood, he is screeching, he is hollering, and it is wonderful. And this is the type of thing that if I could go back in time, and I've talked about the time machine, I talked about it last week, and find myself when Lucas was younger, I would have an issue with. This is what happens, is how it goes. You have to fix that. You have to fix it. Fix is a word that comes up a lot when you have a boy like mine. People think that someone like him needs to be fixed, corrected, changed. And if you laugh at that, if you think it's the kind of thing that's like, of course not. Like if you have someone in your life, maybe that has autism, someone in your life that is non-verbal like Lucas, you know how ridiculous that sounds, but you would be surprised at how many people don't. People, many of which have someone like Lucas in their lives and can't figure it out, can't understand it. Fixing sounds like the right word. I knew this when I wrote my article for the Huffington Post. I had talked about not wanting a cure for my son with autism, which I don't. Um, and I made a very real case. If you read it, it's not some feel goodery. It's the kind of thing that if you go past the headline and you read what I said, I talked about how I wouldn't want to cure for autism because autism is a huge part of who he is. I don't think it's possible to cure autism. I think that uh it's a catch-all for a lot of different people. I think there is definitely uh aspects that are universal throughout everyone on the spectrum, but at the end of the day, it is such a different thing for different people. You can't just cure it. That said, let's say there was something to cure about Lucas at 14 years old, 15 years old. To take that away from him would be to take away a big part of his personality. I don't want to cure that. Uh, just like if your kid was fixated, I always say, on baseball or, you know, some sort of sports, or your kid is fixated on anime, whatever it is. You don't get it, you don't understand it. Would you want to change who your kid is? No. That's who they are. You want them to be themselves. Unfortunate, right? My son uh isn't aware of a lot of the limitations that come with being nonverbal. He doesn't live that life, he lives his life to the fullest. So I wrote that. I wrote that for the Huffington Post. Now, of course, Huffington Post, it's not like a blog. People who are checking it out, there's a lot of political opinions, there's a lot of people on both sides, some people who are not even on the political side of the Huffington Post. If they see a headline on Huffington Post, they hear, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr., whatever, they react and people reacted. Um, and 99% of the feedback was fantastic. But I did hear from, you know, literally three people. That's it, three people. Uh, but it's enough to really stick with you that were telling me it was dangerous. How could you think that? People like you, uh, you're the ones that it's the whole idea of there was something wrong with me for not wanting to change my son. And it offended me. And I don't get offended easily. It offended me because everybody in the world gets to love their kid unconditionally, but for some reason, as the father to a boy who is non-verbal with autism, I'm supposed to want to change him, to get a new kid, to fix him. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to change him. I don't want to cure him. I'm doing air quotes, but you can't see me. I don't want to fix him. I want to know who he is. And on Monday I wrote about that. I said, My child doesn't need fixing, he needs to be accepted. And I think if you start to really look at what the word fix implies, you'll see where I'm coming from. Right? My son isn't broken. My son when he wants to do something, he does it. And I I went into it in this in this blog. The idea that there are times where I show him how to do something, and he'll pick it up right away because he wants to learn how to do it. Lucas, this is how you wash your hands. Watch. Water on, soap. To this day, he does it. He doesn't do it great. He might be rushed, he might be in a hurry, but he picked it up very easily and very early. He watched, he did it, he wanted to do it. I sat with him countless times before getting to that acceptance point and tried to correct the way he played with toys. Right? Now, the big story for us, the big connecting moment that I had with Lucas was the first time I sat next to him with this toy phone and I watched how he was pulling it in and out from under a chair and looking in the mirror, and I did the same thing. And he was so taken aback by the fact that someone was doing it his way that he and I just instantly bonded at that age. He was like two, and he just became my buddy from that point on. He knew that I wasn't gonna judge him, however, he viewed it, he knew that I was somebody who saw what he was doing and accepted it. And it really built our relationship. But before that, I can't tell you how many times that Lucas, we don't do it like this. It's a phone. Hello, look, ring ring, hello, I'm on the phone. And he would sit there and he would watch me and I would hand it back to him. And do you know how many times he did it back to me the same way I did it? Zero, zero times. He would watch me take it in, wait his turn, take it back, and roll it in and out from under the couch. That's not fixing something. That's not something that's broken. That's the way he sees the world. Someone once said, and I stuck on to this because I think it's one of the greatest ways to look at it. Autism is just a different operating system. It's like I'm a I'm a Windows PC and he's a Mac. Same stuff, same world, same ideas, same wants, same desires, same emotions. Just a different way of expressing it, a different way of seeing it. Lucas sees the world in ways that I can't even begin to understand, just like I see the world in ways he can't even begin to understand. I look at it like when he sits there and he watches a glare in a window that I didn't notice, and he's fixated on it, and he's walking back and forth, and he's looking at it from different directions, and he's making noises to hear the echo, to hear how it sounds different. All these things that Lucas does are things that I don't notice uh about the world around me. But he does. And he's been like that since he was born. He's almost 15 years old. Right? This is who my son is. He's grown into this, he's become this person. That's not something that needs to be fixed. That's not something that's broken. That's simply his personality. And that to me, I think, is one of the biggest disconnects that we have, not only as people who know people with autism, but sometimes parents, autism parents, who can't understand that this is just your kid, right? My son requires a lot of work. And there are a lot of missing pieces of his development that I'm gonna be honest with you, I think about. And as he gets older, you think about it more and more and more. I've talked about it on here. When you're three years old, your kid is three years old, 18 is 15 years away. When your kid is 15, 18 is three years away. It's a different thought process you go to. There's a different sense of worry that comes with it. And that's what I have with him sometimes. Totally admit that. Do I want him to get some of these life skills? Absolutely. So what do I do? I teach them. Can he understand them? Maybe not. Uh, will we try forever until he does? Yeah, we will. Like I use tying his shoes as kind of a catch-all. I always say that. Tying his shoes, um, but it implies so many life skills that he has to work on, right? So I try to teach Lucas how to tie his shoes. And maybe there's a part of him that can't understand it, doesn't understand the tying, can't get his fingers around it, doesn't, doesn't understand when his shoes need to be tied, doesn't understand all these basic parts of it. So I work with him to teach him how to do it. It's important, it's a part of life. It's a part of going out and being self-sufficient and being able to get up in the morning and do things. Not knowing how to tie your shoes is a skill that needs to be taught. Playing with a toy a certain way, liking to read books a certain way, enjoying certain videos a certain way, that's not something that needs to be corrected in order to live. That's his whole reason for living. That's what makes him happy. That's what makes him a person, that's what makes him complete. It would be like taking away your son's football. You know? This isn't we can't, we gotta fix this. Enough with the football. It's your kid, man. I love my son. And his life is hard, you know? A lot of times, and I'm talking about parents today, and I'm gonna keep going on this because I've and it's come up a few times in the last uh week or two. A lot of times parents, the kids with special needs of any kind tend to focus a lot on their own struggle. And dude, trust me, there's a struggle, right? It's hard, it's not easy. I don't harp on it, I try not to write too much about it. Um, because it's not really that dominant in my mind, but I've had days and I've had moments and I've had things that require so much work that I'm just like, oh my God, this is really hard. A lot of things that I should be done with by this age, I'm not, and I'm still working and I'm still helping him, I'm still figuring it out. But I'm not the one that should be focused on here. Lucas is. Lucas is the one that in my mind, I don't know, I always say I could never imagine knowing that my needs might not be met because the person I'm with might not understand what they are, right? And that's why, that's why Lucas is different with different people. With me, he's fantastic. Rarely melts down. Um, I mean I'll tell you never, never melts down with me. Uh, at most, he might like lay on the floor and not want to get up if he doesn't want to go out. We show up somewhere uh in my car and he'll lean back and make me kind of almost like goad him out of the car so that he can go to school or something like that. But there's no meltdowns, there's no classic ideas of like what is happening. And I think the reason why is I never allowed a meltdown to go by without trying to figure out what was happening. I always try to figure out what was happening, and because of that, I was able to learn to anticipate when they were coming. I I learned to be able to soothe him through it. And I figured out that if he had to trust me above all else, so if he wants to eat, I don't shoe him away and have him wonder, is this guy gonna feed me? He knows. And if I have to shoe him away because I'm making dinner or it's not time yet, I go through the explanation. And it took a while. The very first time I told him that food had to cook, it was hell. I had to show him the food, I had to bring him over, look in the oven, he would come back every minute. Then pretty soon it just became a matter of pantomiming. Lucas, food, cooking, hand up, go over rainbow motions later, after I'm enunciating words, and he got it. Now I don't need to do that at all. Now I'm just like, buddy, just go. I'm gonna cook, I promise. Five minutes. Maybe I'll give him the the five fingers, five minutes, and he'll leave and come back. And no, my dad's preparing my food. I trust my dad. My dad has always tried to understand me, my dad has always been there for me. Kids like my son don't want to have meltdowns, they don't want to respond the ways that they do. They want to know that the person they're with gets it, understands where they're coming from. All kids are like Lucas. No. Meet one kid with autism, you met one kid with autism, meet one kid, you met one kid, it's the same thing. Like they're all different people, they're individuals, everybody's an individual. But I'm telling you, with my son, there's nothing about him that necessarily needs to be changed. There are things that need to be taught, there's things that I need to hopefully help him reach as he gets older. But in terms of who he is, the person that he is, and the way he treats the world, that's who he is. And the negative, the most negative aspects of his personality in many cases are due to him being concerned that he's not going to be heard. So as his dad, and it took a while, you know, 15 years, I have to show him that he's being heard. He's a main character in our family. The things that he wants and the things that he needs are on the same level as the things that my daughter wants and needs, the same things that I want and need. He's not dismissed just because he can't speak. If Lucas is agitated, I don't go, go up to your room. I don't do that. What's the matter, buddy? Sit with him, rub his back. If he gets worked up, take a deep breath. If I watch him getting too uh pulled into his iPad, which will happen, he'll get so into it, and it's it's such a subtle difference where the claps that he usually does when he's happy also exist when he gets frustrated. And I see this look on his face. He goes, And he's clapping, and his teeth are gritted. And I go, hey, come sit, sit, sit, shh, rub his back. I take his iPad, I always take his iPad away for a minute, I make him count down, and I give it back to him, take a deep breath, calm down. I would do this if he was neurotypical and he came home from school worked up over some kid that that fought with him on the playground. I'd be like, hey, sit down, buddy, relax, relax. Essentially, I use the same techniques that I would if he was verbal and he didn't have autism. Because he may be nonverbal, he may have autism, but he's also a you know a 15-year-old, I mean 15 ex mother, a 15-year-old boy. And it's my job to make sure that he knows that his dad has his back, that his dad's there for him, and his dad doesn't want to change him. His dad wants to understand him. The more I understand him, the better it is for our relationship and for his place, not only in our family, but really in the community. It's been uh, yeah, it's been a long road. It's been a great road, and it's brought us to exactly where we are now. So I try to tell everybody this. I think a lot of times people can't fathom it. You don't want to change him? I don't want to change him. I love him. And he's not missing anything. I think sometimes might maybe it'd be harder if he was a little more um higher functioning, as they say. Like if Lucas couldn't go to the prom and wanted to, I would feel bad. If Lucas wanted to play football and couldn't, I'd feel bad. Lucas doesn't care. Things like that, things from our world, these things that are important to me, as crazy as it is in my head to imagine, he doesn't care at all. He doesn't care about prom. He doesn't care about uh, you know, again, football, baseball, any of those things, they don't really affect him. He'll do it to appease me. But I don't know, man. I've always been one of these people. I don't need to live through my kids. I've done everything I want to do. I'm happy, I'm proud. My kids just need to be the best that they want to be. As long as Lucas tries, as long as he approaches the world uh in a way where he doesn't hurt other people, you know, even accidentally, I'll never be one of these, oh, he doesn't understand. No, you don't hurt people, Lucas. It's a big deal. And we'll harp on that and I'll teach him that. And he's learned that. Really, man. Lucas doesn't, he's not a bully, he's not violent. He's a sweet kid, and everybody says it. He hugs and he'll give you a kiss and he'll show you his iPad. And I'm so proud of him, and I'm proud of what we've done because I know as a parent how easy it is to go in the wrong direction with that. And we're fortunate we didn't. And I know someone's gonna turn around, they're gonna be like, well, well, that's just because your kid is good. Maybe great. Thank you. I appreciate that. Maybe it is. I'm not taking all the credit, I'm not telling you I did it on my own. Uh it might be his personality too. I don't know, maybe, maybe not. Um, all I know is I'm proud of the work that he and I have done together, uh, but I'm more proud of the work that he's done on his own. And somebody who has that type of pleasant personality, somebody who has that type of determination to better himself. How could you fix that? It's ridiculous. You can't. I will never change him. I don't need to fix him, and I love him. And that does it for me, guys. Until next week, this is James Guttman. Bye pod. I'm dad.