By Barbara Firestone, Ph.D.; 218 pages. Subtitle: Portraits of Families Meeting the Challenge.
Thirty-eight families share their experience of raising a child with autism in short narratives and large black-and-white photos in this special-needs coffee-table book, augmented by essays on Dignity, Hope, Opportunity, and Love by author Firestone, founder of The Help Group. It's a moving and beautiful package, but your enjoyment of it may depend on your comfort level with the notion that parenting a child with autism is in and of itself an act of heroism.
- Narratives from parents are insightful and honest
- Portraits honor all family members, including siblings
- Layout makes reading easy and quick
- Categories of Dignity, Hope, Opportunity, and Love highlight different family experiences
- It's undoubtedly a book that means well
- The only voices here are of parents and professionals, not of individuals on the spectrum
- Frequent emphasis on broken dreams and how hard parenting is can make for downbeat reading
- Characterizing the parenting of an autistic child as a heroic act may be troubling to some
- The focus is more on memoir than on how-to helpful detail
- At $35, it's pretty pricey inspiration
- Foreword by Teddi and Gary Cole
Foreword by Catherine Lord, Ph.D.
Preface
Acknowledgments - Dignity: Cole, Calzada, Bradshaw, Guruji, Bentson-Geyer, Peyser, Rosen, Gour, del Olmo
- Hope: Kip, Sweeney & Miller, Rufael, Gott, Sarkisian & Elkin, Kell, Katz, Lewis, Russell
- Opportunity: Jacobs, Vismara Cerbantes, Palmer, Fils, Emanuelli, Urquhart, Shapiro & Sharif, Green, Hartman
- Love: Andrews, Mantegna, Paul & Canby, Reyes, Maldonado, Martin, Schneider, Spalding, Almog, Wade
- Afterword
Selected Reading for Families
About the Help Group
I have seriously mixed feelings about Autism Heroes.
It's certainly a gorgeous book, filled with charming and inspiring photos of children with autism and their families, produced with care and all good intentions. The first-person essays by parents are moving and heartfelt, expressing a range of emotions about a range of children with their own unique challenges and gifts. I hate to come down on something that celebrates the work that parents of children with special needs do.
Yet so much of Autism Heroes, from the introductions (written by the founder of a nonprofit that serves children with autism) to that title, gives me the same feeling I get when a stranger hears I've adopted children with special needs and tells me what a saint I am, or an educator shakes her head sadly and tells me how wonderful I am to fight for my kids. There's something condescending about it, and something insulting to my children, too. What does it say about a child to characterize the act of parenting him or her as saintly or exceptional or heroic? Something not so nice, is the way it feels.
One of the stated goals of this book is to help parents of children newly diagnosed to learn from those who have gone before, and certainly these families have a wealth of experience and insight to offer. I wonder, though, if reading so many stories about how hard it's going to be might be overwhelming for that audience -- and whether they wouldn't benefit from something with more how-to to it.
The book is also intended to remove the stigma of autism, but I'm not sure you do that by making children with the disorder inscrutable objects of beauty to be commented upon. How 'bout starting with the fact that some of these kids are pretty heroic themselves? That's something the parents here seem to understand more than the packagers.
