It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
More than seven years ago, I printed a letter from a reader whose son is on the autism spectrum. He was years away from working age, but she was looking for advice about about how to help him when that time came. Here’s the update.
It seemed so far away when I first wrote in, but now my son is already 18 years old. In some ways he’s doing great—he has a couple of close friends that he texts with constantly (who would ever imagine *that* would be a good thing!), and he was a commended student in the National Merit Scholarship competition. In other ways his behaviors still cause some problems. His grades have been abysmal at times because he just doesn’t care about doing basic homework assignments. We’re working with him on that attitude, but it’s slow going. He’s usually gone waaaay deeper on the topic than the rest of the class, but he just doesn’t want to “waste” his time documenting it via written assignments. (Insert parental facepalm). He’s currently an A+ student intellectually but a B to C student at best grade-wise. Overall, we’re seeing him slowly mature, so we are only gently pushing on the job front right now. He’s living in an apartment building because his campus doesn’t have dorms, and that’s added a lot of extra changes to his life, so we’re letting him get used to that first, and then add a job into the mix.
With some of his issues with homework and other basic responsibilities, I’ve been worried about how he will perform in the working world, but the past two summers I’ve had a glimmer of hope. I have a key role in a local festival, and in 2018 I told him that if he helped me during the setup, I’d let him hang out the rest of the weekend at the event while I was working. He helped out cheerfully the first day, and then slipped off to go have fun as we’d discussed. Midway through the day, I found out that instead of goofing off, he’d gone back to the main office and continued to volunteer. He made friends with another boy and they worked crazy long hours helping everyone out. By the end of the weekend, the organizers were taking pictures with him and giving him all sorts of swag. He did all of this on his own, without any involvement on my part. It was the first time I’ve truly felt that he could do fine on his own. By all accounts, he was a perfect “employee” under some pretty trying circumstances. This year he came back and they actually trusted him enough to handle money, and though it was completely a voluntary position, they paid him a small stipend for how much work he had put in.
It’s very difficult trying to parent a teen on the spectrum because we can’t always tell when the issues are normal teen stuff vs when it’s caused by his challenges. We can be strict on the normal teen stuff and it resolves, but the spectrum issues can only be fixed by taking a different approach. So we’ve had a lot of “learnings” (ie we go too far down one road before we realize we need to respond another way). I’d give anything for a do-over, but since that’s not an option, we continue to muddle on. We are seeing growth and maturity starting to kick in though, and I think that as he starts to take more ownership, he’s going to step up on the responsibility side as well. So we remain quite hopeful that he’ll be able to be a self-sufficient adult, and given his intellectual strengths, he may even be able to be quite successful. Thanks to everyone who weighed in back then, as I read through all the replies and have kept them in mind over the years since.
update: job searching with autism (an update 7 years in the making!) was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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