The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (26 page)

Just keep your eyes open for opportunities, and don’t be afraid to be creative. At the grocery store the other day, I saw a magazine devoted to chickens. I started flipping through it, and I read an article about how to raise chickens in your backyard.
Now that,
I thought,
is a great opportunity for a parent.
You buy a few chickens, and suddenly a child has a “job”—or at least the opportunity to learn all sorts of skills that will be useful throughout life. You can read about chickens together, learn how to take care of them, feed them, clean up after them. The kid can even start a business—gathering the eggs, delivering them to neighbors, collecting the payments.

Of course, if you can find an opportunity that matches the child’s way of thinking and that prepares the child to eventually enter the work force doing what she does best, all the better. Ideally, you want to prepare the child for employment that is not only productive but also a source of energy and joy (see sidebar at the end of this chapter).

Word-fact thinkers,
for instance, would do well with writing assignments. They can contribute to the church newsletter. They can start a neighborhood blog. Maybe they can write for the local paper. After all,
somebody
has to report on how many stray dogs have been picked up that week.

Unfortunately, a lot of the jobs that are ideal for word-fact thinkers are disappearing. Filing, record-keeping, clerking—these are tasks that increasingly are being handled by computers. The trick, then, is to let the computer become the word-fact thinker’s friend. A lot of these thinkers would be great at conducting elaborate Internet searches and organizing the results.

Word-fact thinkers would benefit from learning how to be what I call business-social. They can still talk, but they’ve got to learn when to talk and how to talk, either through getting out in the world and learning through numerous examples or through on-the-job training. Telephone sales, for instance, would be a good job for them once they’ve learned the script. And it’s no coincidence that Leo Kanner’s first patient, Donald Triplett, grew up to become a bank teller.

A
picture thinker
might be able to make art and sell it. After one of my talks recently, I met a teenage girl who designs jewelry. I know jewelry, so I can confidently say it: She has talent. She’s a pro. I told her that she should sell it online, and then I told her mother how to figure out a fair price: twenty dollars per hour of labor, plus the cost of materials. At a hundred and twenty-five dollars, the bracelet I saw would be a bargain.

A
pattern thinker
who’s good at math can fix computers or tutor neighborhood kids. A pattern thinker who’s gifted in music can play in a band or join a choir—technically not paying jobs, usually, but jobs nonetheless, in the sense that they require cooperation with the other musicians as well as a regular commitment of time.

In short, any job that teaches autistic children about responsibilities is a job that will help prepare them for adulthood.

But job skills are only half the battle. The person with autism will also need social skills. These lessons, too, should be taught at a young age. Learning to say “Please” and “Thank you” is a basic, nuts-and-bolts necessity. So is learning to take turns; board games and card games are good instruction methods. Table manners too. Behaving appropriately in a store or a restaurant. Being on time.

Again, get those kids out into the world! The other day I talked to a mother who said that her grown-up daughter had never gone grocery shopping. Her daughter was high-functioning; she could drive a car. How will she be prepared for adult life, especially if she eventually has to live on her own, if she can’t go to the store? The mother was low-income, so I told her I wasn’t going to ask her to spend any money she wouldn’t already be spending. “You’re going to buy the groceries anyway,” I said. “But have your daughter do it. Give her the shopping list, give her some money or a credit card, and send her into the store. You can wait in the parking lot.”

Mother made me do social stuff I didn’t want to do. I remember being scared to go to the lumberyard by myself because I was afraid to talk to the clerks. But Mother insisted. So I went, and I came back home crying. But I had the wood I wanted—plus a new social skill. Next time I could go to the lumberyard with less trepidation and greater confidence.

These basics are just the foundation—the social skills that are a given for anybody entering the work force. People with autism, however, often have to master more specialized social skills.

I remember two kids I went to school with who would be labeled as having Asperger’s syndrome today. One has a PhD and a good job as a psychologist. The other has held on to good retail jobs and is a valued member of the store’s staff because he can talk to customers about every product in the store. In the meat industry, I have worked with many successful individuals who are, I’m pretty sure, undiagnosed Asperger’s. At one plant I visited, the undiagnosed Aspies never went in the cafeteria; instead, they ate their lunches at a picnic table in the shop. I once visited a research lab for fish farming. I could see that all the equipment was put together from materials available at Home Depot—water filters made out of window-screen mesh, for instance. The lab was amazingly inventive, so of course I had to ask whose was the mind behind all this innovation. It turned out to be the (nondiagnosed) Aspie who was the maintenance guy at the time he’d created these inventions—and who had now graduated to running the lab.

All these people were fortunate to find jobs in fields where they could flourish. Some of them, like the fish-farming lab director, had to come in the back door. But at least he knew what to do once he walked through it.

I’m not sure that would be possible today. I have talked to numerous young people with Asperger’s syndrome who have been fired from their jobs. Yet their condition was no more or less severe than the kids I knew in school, or the Aspies who ate lunch together, or the fish-farming research director, or any of the other on-the-spectrum people I’ve met who have managed to keep their jobs for decades. It’s a generational thing, I suspect. The younger generation doesn’t know how to behave. Maybe the families and facilitators of kids who have received official diagnoses since the addition of ASD to the
DSM
in 1980 have become so focused on the label—and the deficits—that they think they don’t need to attend to the social skills that are necessary to advance in society. I don’t want to sound like some old coot who’s always talking about how much better everything was way back in the good old days. But when I ask these people why they were fired, I find out that they didn’t know how to do simple tasks like show up on time or that they were doing stupid things that I learned not to do when I was nine years old.

Here’s my advice—the advice I give to folks who ask me how to prepare someone who’s on the spectrum for employment.

• Don’t make excuses.
  

A high-school senior was complaining to me that he screwed up in English class because of a learning disability, and then he mentioned that he had done well in a philosophy course. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Writing an English paper and writing a philosophy paper require the same skills. Don’t tell me you have a learning disability in English.” He insisted he did. I kept pressing, and sure enough, he finally said he wasn’t interested in English, but he did like philosophy.

First of all, “I’m not interested” isn’t a good excuse for not performing a necessary task the best that you can; it just means you have to work harder than you would at the task you enjoy. But “I have a learning disability” is an even worse excuse if it’s not the real reason.

• Play well with others.
  

I know one woman who was constantly getting into verbal fights—with the bus driver, the lady at the post office, you name it. Every day. And of course it was never her fault. It was always the other person who was being unreasonable. She would tell me this, and I’d think,
How do you get into a fight with a different bus driver every day? Most people don’t even
talk
to the bus driver!
I hear too many individuals with Asperger’s syndrome saying things like “I have authority issues with the boss.” I want to tell them that there’s a reason the boss is called the boss. It’s because she’s
the boss.

That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. I was doing a summer internship during college at a hospital that had a program for kids with autism and other problems, and my boss did something with a kid that I didn’t like. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember that I went over his head. I took my complaint to the psychology department, which was a different department. My boss didn’t fire me, but he did let me know he was upset. He told me about the hierarchy at the hospital, and how I worked for the child-care department, and that if I had a complaint I should go to him first. And he was right. And I never made that mistake again.

Playing well with others, however, isn’t just about avoiding confrontations. It’s also about learning to try to please. My mother motivated me by making sure that I got real recognition when I did a good job—like when she framed a watercolor of the beach that I’d painted. Another time, I was allowed to sing a solo at an adult concert. I was thrilled. I knew this was a special privilege, and when the audience responded with applause and cheers, I felt tremendous pride. In high school, I painted signs for many different people. I learned that when I made a sign for a hair salon, for example, I had to paint a design the client would like. These were the experiences I later drew on when I embarked on my design career. I wanted to do work that people really appreciated.

• Manage your emotions.
  

How do you that? By learning to cry. And how do you do
that?
By giving yourself permission. (And if you’re in a position to give someone else that permission, then do it.) You don’t have to cry in public. You don’t have to cry in front of your peers. But if the alternative is to hit or throw, then, yes, you do have to cry. When parents tell me that their teenage boy cries when he’s frustrated, I say, “Good!” Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought,
Good for him.
That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.

From a neuroscience point of view, managing emotions depends on top-down control from the frontal cortex. If you can’t control your emotion, you have to
change
your emotion. If you want to keep a job, you have to learn how to turn anger into frustration. I saw in a magazine article that Steve Jobs would cry in frustration. That’s why Steve Jobs still had a job. He could be verbally abusive to his employees, but as far as I know, he didn’t go around throwing things at them or slugging them.

I learned my lesson in high school. I got in a fight with someone who was teasing me, and I had horseback riding taken away for two weeks. That’s the last fight I ever had. When I got into the cattle business, I was angry plenty of times, but I knew enough not to show it. Instead I would hide out on the cattle catwalk. I was right in plain view, but I knew I was so far off the ground that nobody could see I was crying. Or I’d go underneath some stairs, or I’d sit in my car in the parking lot. Sometimes I’d go in the electrical room, because the lovely sign on the door told everybody else to
KEEP OUT
. But I’d never hide in the restroom, because I couldn’t know if someone was going to walk in.

• Mind your manners.
  

When I was about eight years old, I learned that calling somebody Fatso was not appropriate. I’ve met a number of high-functioning autistics and Asperger’s individuals who have been fired from jobs because they made rude comments about the appearance of coworkers and customers. Even if you’ve reached adulthood without knowing what’s rude or how to relate to people in public, it’s not too late to learn.

I met someone who told me that his therapist’s advice on how to learn to socialize was to practice saying hello. I told him that advice isn’t specific enough. I told him to divide up his grocery shopping so that he would have to go to the supermarket every day, even if he just wound up buying a can of soup. Then when he got to the cashier, he should have a simple conversation.

• Sell your work, not yourself.
  

If you can avoid the front-door interview, do so. Human resources departments are usually staffed by social people who tend to place a premium on getting along and teamwork, so they might not think a person with autism is the right fit for the workplace. They might not be able to see past the social awkwardness to an individual’s hidden talents. A better strategy for getting the job might be to contact the head of the particular department you want to work in (the engineering department, the graphic design department, and so on).

People thought I was weird, but they were impressed when they saw a portfolio of my drawings and photos of completed projects. I also made sure to use attractive brochures and portfolios to sell my design services. Electronic devices today can remove a lot of the social awkwardness of showing your work and even auditioning for a job. You can attach your work as a file in an e-mail, once you establish contact with a prospective employer (but not before—no one will open an unknown sender’s e-mail attachment). You can store it on a smartphone, because you never know when someone might want to see it. A verbal thinker’s portfolio of writing, a picture thinker’s art or crafts, a musician’s recordings, even a math whiz’s coding—they’re all portable today.

• Use mentors.