LAST UPDATE | 7 hrs ago

ON WORLD AUTISM Day, my husband and I look at our two children and feel so very grateful to them for enriching our lives and teaching us everything we now understand about disability. They have challenged our assumptions and helped us understand what inclusion actually is. Among many other things, this is their huge value.

Our daughter is seven and has an epic imagination. She spends hours writing and illustrating books. Our son is the calmest, most placid giant of a six-year-old. He is the king of regulation! The pals in his class stay by his side throughout the day, co-regulating because he makes everyone around him feel really good. They are great kids, deserving as much as any other child to feel good about who they are.

However, sadly and persistently, they are devalued, and I think we really need to take a moment to question and interrogate how we all value autistic children. It’s exhausting as parents to constantly grin and bear it as we watch the sometimes well-intended, sometimes not, make decisions which affect but don’t include them. Careful not to discourage well-meaning efforts, we process feelings of frustration and hurt while their value in progress is repeatedly missed. You quickly learn the terrible mistake we have all made in designing everything — schools, the health system, communities — without them.

You can feel a bit like a pioneer; one of the first to recognise how it’s supposed to be. But year after year you wait, as your children grow up, for everyone else to catch on. It’s a lonely place, and you ask yourself all the time, how can I make everyone else see the contribution my children can make to changing this rigid society, which is built for some but not for all?

Our son has an intellectual disability. His language of choice is non-speaking. He teaches us a very different and valid way of learning and of communicating. Yet this diversity appears not to be of interest to most schools. He is not supported to thrive at school in his own community; despite having the same educational rights as other children. He is shipped away every morning on a school bus. While we are grateful for the beautiful school he does attend, we see first-hand the negative impact this has on his life within his neighbourhood. Without him physically in his community, he is judged and stigmatised. When we give our children the chance to grow up with difference, we empower a future which eradicates........

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