Temple Grandin’s Advice for Parents of Children with Autism

User fodash asked Dr. Grandin for advice on helping high functioning autistic teens or young adults who face or might face bullying, isolation, ostracizing, loneliness, and depression. Dr. Grandin chose to focus her response more on what she was able to do to avoid the inevitability of being treated poorly because she was different, noting that most of her early experiences in elementary school were positive because of her artistic skills.

Once she found herself at an age where other students began to consider her “weird,” she leaned even harder into her gifts and abilities to find social acceptance. She admitted in another question that she was bullied and teased in high school, and says: “my refuges from bullying were specialized interest groups, such as horse riding, electronics, and model rocket group.” Though the bullying did not stop entirely, she found that the further she could get away from generic, mainstream social identity groups, the better.