Find a therapist to help with autism

Professionals routinely judge parents while claiming to collaborate with them.

A moral philosopher found that seeing a disabled person as fully human requires sustained "moral energy."

The solution is structural: ecosystems that keep families visible, not individual willpower.

A few years ago, a professional told me I was in denial about my autistic son's abilities. She had assessed him twice. She had her own report of things he "couldn't" do. I had a decade of evidence that he could do more than her report said.

What I didn't understand then is that this type of communication between professionals and parents is also a structural problem, one that two Dutch researchers I interviewed for my upcoming book, What Will You Do When I'm Gone, have spent years trying to name.

Little Space for the Parent's Voice

Edith Raap, a researcher at University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht who studies what she calls levend verlies or living loss, studies the chronic grief that parents of disabled children carry, not because their child has died, but because the life they imagined turned out radically different. Raap's research began with a simple observation: There seems to be little space in the Dutch care system for........

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