ROBERTS This is a big theme of your book, right, sort of a difference in attention. To my way of taking it, you didn’t have any lesson you were trying to teach the readers of your book. You were just trying to tell four stories, or five stories. But reading the stories, someone like me says “Oh my God, how can this be?” Not exactly that, but I felt like this wasn’t something that was supposed to be. There was a recent piece in the news about how kids who are disruptive in kindergarten grown up fine; they grow up without problems. One of the founding assumptions of our society is that things that we say are bad are harmful. They go together so well, right: harmful and bad? If your child has a problem, then presumably they’re going to grow up in some kind of bad way, and something bad is going to happen to them as an adult. But your book didn’t support that assumption, because these kids grow up to be unusual adults, but not terribly impaired, or anything. Is that a fair reading of your book?
NAZEER I think that’s a fair reading. The gloss that I think I would add to it is what happened to them in childhood was incredibly important. What was important about it was all the people in the book, what they have in common was that they all received the diagnosis very early on and received very early and very good intervention. That was fundamentally important to their success in later life. So autistic kids who don’t get the diagnosis early on, and don’t get the help that they need — and I’ll resist the word deficits, because I don’t think they are deficits — to understand the world better and to overcome the kind of differences that they have, then those kids actually do struggle. Whereas I think the kids in the book struggle less because they were lucky enough to get a diagnosis early on and get very good help early on.
ROBERTS I see. So this was unusual, the timing of the diagnosis.
NAZEER It’s usual now. It’s now thankfully becoming much more common for kids to be diagnosed at the age of three or four. It’s now becoming much more common for kids to actually get a decent level of education. It’s still not common enough, but it’s much more common than it was in the early 80s, when we were all at school.
ROBERTS What would have happened if the level of schooling had been worse, or less appropriate?
NAZEER I think it would have taken them a lot longer to overcome — and I don’t use this word in a perjorative way — overcome their disabilities. It would have taken than a lot longer to develop their language abilities, to develop useful hierarchies of sense data, and develop a sense of confidence about themselves, which I think is really fundamentally important as well. I think one of the big benefits of early intervention for autistic children is they begin to get a sense of things that they can do. And getting a sense of things that you can do then in turns builds a sense of confidence in yourself. So it means that even when you’re 13 and you’ve had a really really bad day, you can still remind yourself that you have had moments of progress, and there are things you can do at 13 that you weren’t able to do when you were 11.
ROBERTS What is an example of these things that you can do?
NAZEER Sometimes it can be very, very simple things. For Elizabeth, it was things as simple as teaching herself how to ride a bike. For somebody who perhaps was at the higher-functioning end of autism, somebody like Craig, that sense of confidence came from being able to write a good essay. So even though he might have still very profound social difficulties, because he knew that there was this thing that he was good at doing, that gave him a certain sense of confidence, even when it came to activities that he found much more challenging.
ROBERTS So you’re saying the way he was taught helped him to be confident, because somehow, his ability to write an essay was stressed, or something? Is that what you’re saying?
NAZEER Right. I think that’s what I’m saying. I think, in that sense, autisticyoung people aren’t any different from anybody else. I think, ultimately, nobody ever becomes brilliant at everything; we all become decent at some things, but being decent at some things gives us the confidence to try out things that we’re not so good at.
ROBERTS I think you’re right. I think that’s the incredibly important thing about education: to help people figure out that there are some things that they’re good at.
NAZEER People end up being good at different things. That is what I think — your deficit and difference opposition comes into play, which is that autistic people may well be different — may well be good at other things to other people. But as long as they get to the position where they feel comfortable, capable, and confident in doing some things, then that gives them confidence in functioning socially.
ROBERTS So they need schooling in which their abilities are recognized and developed and encouraged.
NAZEER That’s right.
ROBERTS That’s what you seem to be saying: that if autistic kids have different skills, then they have to have teachers who know how to develop and recognize those skills.
NAZEER That’s exactly it.
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