DSM-5 AUTISM DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA---REWRITTEN BY A REAL LIVE AUTISTIC PERSON

Dear Persons,

Here, as promised, is my rewriting of the most commonly used publicly available DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism. 

It’s still clinical and doesn’t reflect what I personally would say about my neurology, never mind the brains and minds of the many, many Autistic people I’ve come to know. I myself would write a very different definition (we actually discuss this in our recent podcast).

And please note that I have issues with diagnosis, considering that autism is more properly an identity and way of human being than a “condition.” 

I’ve spoken frankly about “medical” diagnosis and the diseaseification/pathologization of autism in many of my talks, especially in this keynote about developing better neurodiversity paradigms. And I’ve written about it at length here on my blog and here [click on “Free Resources and Downloads”] in the FREE online fourth section of our most recent #ActuallyAutisticBook, under “Working for systemic evolution, No. 1: Shift professional paradigms.”

But I know that a diagnosis is still needed in many educational, therapeutic, medical, and other gatekeeping contexts. 

And it can give people really helpful tools and resources. 

So I thought perhaps this primary aspect of most diagnostic processes could benefit from improvement! 

It took a long time to update just this small amount of text because I had to do it in small doses. Kind of made me sick every time I would start. Traumatic. 

Please don’t force yourself to read it if it feels potentially painful! 

...Unless you are a professional, in which case, onward—please. 

I usually write first and foremost for my Autistic brethren, but this one is especially directed toward professionals. 

To be clear, this is a work in progress, a draft evolution of an inherently discriminatory and harmful system.

 

To that end, I have tried to eradicate words and phrases from the original text that were triggering, condescending, and discriminatory.

 

To offer just one relatively benign example, I might change the word “excessive”—which implies that the Autistic person is doing “too much” of something—to “intensive,“ which has the connotation that there’s a goodly amount of said activity, but doesn’t carry a negative  judgement or labeling aspect. 

I have included the general format and most of the original text, with updated language and descriptions of the differences we Autistic people share, as compared to neurotypical people, while attempting to erase the implicit and explicit negative connotations incorporated in the original text. 

The word “spectrum”—which I myself incorporated into my blog title more than a decade ago—is increasingly seen as an imperfect representation of our diversity, but I am not sure “wheel” (a more nuanced vision of neurodivergent variations) works in this setting, so I have simply removed the former.

 

I do want to say that even this updated criteria list can still be disturbing and upsetting. 

It’s really hard to be different in a world that does not always welcome, never mind celebrate, neurodivergence. 

That’s one of the reasons I set myself this task: to shift one element of this challenging world—these brutal diagnostic criteria—into something more useful, truer, more affirming.

Idea: Could these standards be subbed in for what clinicians use now in order to more realistically and fairly diagnose this common and equally valid neurological way of human being? 

Let me know what you think!!!

Autism DSM-5 diagnostic criteria: 

A. Persistent differences as compared to neurotypical social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by all of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive; see text):

• Differences in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from unusual social approach and disinterest in typical back-and-forth conversation; to reduced or increased sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to a lesser tendency to initiate or respond to social interactions.

• Differences in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from less integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to variations in eye contact and body language or alterations in understanding and use of gestures; to a lower propensity for facial expressions and nonverbal communication.

• Differences in developing, maintaining, and navigating relationships, ranging, for example, from challenges with adjusting behavior to suit various neurotypical social contexts; to difficulties in sharing standard neurotypical imaginative play or in making friends via standard neurotypical means; to a lower or higher level of interest in peers.

Specify current impact: Impact is based on social communication challenges and focused and/or repetitive patterns of behavior.

B. Focused patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive; see text):

• Specific and/or repeated motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor or vocal repetitions, lining up toys or flipping objects, idiosyncratic phrases).

• Insistence on sameness, adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal/nonverbal behavior (e.g., distress around changes, difficulties with transitions, entrenched thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take the same route or eat the same food every day).

• Highly focused interests that are extraordinary in intensity or specificity (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with particular subjects or objects, very circumscribed or concentrated interest).

• Higher or lower reactivity to sensory input compared to neurotypical standards or strong interests in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, intensive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

Specify current impact: Impact is based on social communication challenges and focused and/or repetitive patterns of behavior.

C. The above neurodivergence must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until neurotypical social demands increasingly misalign with neurodivergent capacities or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).

D. The above aspects of neurodivergence create significant impacts in social, occupational, or other important areas of current context.

E. These differences are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay. Intellectual disability and autism can co-occur; to make simultaneous diagnoses of autism and intellectual disability, social communication should vary from that expected for neurotypical developmental level.

Dear reader, thank you for taking this hard journey with me to reimagine these criteria, shifting from diagnosing a “problem” to describing a neurotype. 

Please be well and take care of yourself. Know that you are worthy. You matter. 

Little by little, we are together helping this world become more welcoming for all of us. 

Thanks and love,

Full Spectrum Mama

SHE/THEY/ME

For beloved T. And everyone else feeling scared right now, especially my 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings. I see you and I know together we will rise, elevate love over hate, and live welcoming and inclusive lives. 

But I will fight for and with you, too. 

Dear Persons,

I have a good brain. It helps me understand things about the world, like some of the rules of good manners or finances. And, in collaboration with my feelings, this brain has empowered me to be a strong advocate for justice, ethics, and inclusion. 

It’s enabled me to achieve great academic and professional success, too, although it never quite managed to suss out the institutional dynamics of schools and universities, never mind corporate environments. Nor did it help with earning the big bucks. Nonetheless, it does help me expertly manage what bucks I do have. 

In the absence of any neurotypical capacity to read social cues or intuitively grasp and honor customs and hierarchies, my brain has used logic to navigate interactions and spaces. It has a fairly powerful eidetic memory capacity. It can even answer lots of math questions without any conscious calculations. 

But there are some areas my brain hasn’t been able to help me with, such as certain aspects of proprioception, facial recognition, directions, unspoken sociocultural codes, and spatial awareness. 

And I’ve never been able to use my reasoning to figure out why people are supposed to look or act a certain way when it comes to gender and sexuality, from gender identity to relationship norms.

Statistics around gender diversity amongst Autistic people are eye-popping: We are per capita way, way more diverse in our gender identities, expressions, roles, sexual orientations, performances, relationships, lived and hoped-for family models, etc. than the neurotypical population. 

This makes sense to me, as an AFAB (assigned female at birth), nonbinary veering toward femme, pansexual Autistic human who has explored, blundered through, and lived a variety of relationship models—and who is probably naturally polyamorous—with an inclination toward living alone—despite being married (twice! see below). 

I have a doctorate in sociology, so I do have some academic-style thoughts on the matter, but I haven’t done more than anecdotal research in this area and so will hold off on sharing on that level. 

Still, I thought my personal experience might be illuminating and/or comforting for readers. 

Especially now, when those of us who don’t fit the incredibly limited bounds of the next president’s narrow vision of human worth feel more vulnerable than ever before. 

So here’s a microcosm of my own journey as a contributor to these remarkable statistics.

I don’t think I really thought about gender in childhood. I played with the (sometimes but not always gendered) toys I was given. The only toy I really remember desperately wanting was a skateboard, when I was eight or nine. From as early as I can remember, I really loved to draw, write, listen to music, and do extensive research in the library—all non-gendered activities. I was relatively content. 

But the years when you really try to fit in (mostly 11-17ish?) didn’t work out well for me. I admit to initially trying to pass as “normal,” with moderate to little success. This may have been especially challenging in my preppy environment, where the difference between Nantucket red and Caldor red was glaringly obvious to everybody but me. 

Yes, I was a blonde, thinnish, fairly tall white person, but I genuinely didn’t know what I looked like or claim my privilege.

What I did look like also included: sad, droopy, beaten down, “L sign” on my forehead.

Most social pressures that others bow to didn’t (and don’t) even register for me. Or if they did (do), and I occasionally attempt to capitulate (usually I don’t), I do it wrong. Think fluffy mohawk. 

At a certain point, I guess I just decided that wasn’t going to work—the whole fitting-in project. I realized that while I was quite good at thinking for myself, I was not able to successfully or consistently think like the “normal” NT people. 

For example, there were girls and they acted like girls and associated only with female friends and…huh? Because they have those bits?

But what would work, as a mode of living and performing my own self? I began working out my own rules for living early on. At 11 years old, I didn’t know any vegetarians, but I became vegetarian. I didn’t initially know any Queer people either, but over the course of becoming conscious of sexuality and identity (also beginning around that same age of 11), I simultaneously evolved as Queer. In both cases, I followed what seemed to make rational sense to me…but also my heart and gut. 

I became who I was.

In the process, I never found any arguments that weren’t culture- or faith-based to explain the much more common, “acceptable” ways of living (like eating meat or looking like a “girl” and only “liking” “boys”). I was both unable and unwilling to conform to such norms in my life. 

All of the wonderful Queer gender diversity we see now in many (not all!) places was much more hidden then. One risked bullying, ostracization, etc. But I had less to lose (since I was already on the margins)—and more to gain (acceptance from people who truly accepted me). 

The punk rockers and the Goths, the weirdos and the Gays…they accepted me. 

Others…not so much. The only person in my family who really welcomed me exactly as I was (most family members were clueless or worse; in their defense, it was a different era) was my grandmother Merlin, a petite beauty from Knoxville, Tennessee, who, to all appearances, led a completely conventional life and should have naturally partaken in the discriminatory norms of her generation/milieu. 

I’ll never forget Gram saying to me at a Woolworths counter in the mall, “Darlin’, people should be able to love whoever they love.” 

Eventually, at my girls’ boarding school I learned that many other girls were also attracted to girls. Passionate crushes, love relationships, and everything in-between, with plenty of drama. My first romantic relationship was with a fellow AFAB student. 

Over time, I cut my hair progressively shorter and became androgynous. I never wanted to be masculine, exactly, so much as I wanted to be an elf. A gamine. A garçonne. A demigirl (new language! I love all the new language!!!)! 

My self. 

Throughout my entire life, I’ve been hugely into feminism, goddess spirituality, wimmins’ cultures and communes…but also Queer, alternative, artsy, edgy spaces and ways of being. Fundamentally, I’ve lived a life both feminist and unconventional, as usual at once following logic and heart—what feels like the essence of me. 

I married two men, though. I attribute this man-marriage thing in part to my friend Pickles betting me $100 to not cut off my hair (I bet her the same), thereby veering me toward femme. Since I’ve rarely cut it since, I guess I appear more cisgender now. 

But my internal essence has always combined all of the above. As “black and white” as my thinking has always been around justice, kindness, living a moral life, honesty, etc. (I’ve written and spoken about this a lot elsewhere), gender and sexuality have always seemed arbitrary to me. 

As with being Autistic, none of this has been something I’ve discussed much publicly, in part because I assumed everything about me was pretty obvious. Also, I’ve always felt that who I am is expressed through my actions and ethics, rather than the details of my identity. 

That was, I now realize, a luxury. 

Who will they come for next, dear reader? 

As for marriage, I like the ethical clarity of monogamy. I am open to it as an alternative option to my natural lack of monogamous inclination. I think it’s a good model for raising children and creating family, although I honor other models and think they can be just as successful, ethically valid, hot/enticing, and/or safe/comforting. 

Neither society nor any pro-monogamy ethos or religion has ever convincingly convinced me otherwise. 

Now I live in one of the most 2SLGBTQIA+-friendly areas in the world. Families and people of all permutations safely thrive here. For now. So  much so that it has rarely occurred to me to interrogate how I got where I am—to be me, here. But I get that for many others in other places or coming from more typical neurologies and/or inclinations this journey to comfort and self-acceptance can be very painful and even life-threatening. 

I very recently became terrified on behalf of many people I love, as well as myself, when the country I live in elected an openly transphobic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rapist felon. And this draft post became even more important to me. (I am still terrified.) 

I want to be clear that being Queer is a way we are born and not a “choice” or “preference.” And obviously it’s not just an Autistic or Neurodivergent intersectionality. What I am exploring here, from my own perspective, is, first, the ways social pressures can be less obvious or binding to Neurodivergent people, as well as, second, the ways we may ultimately decide that since passing and masking are so hard and exhausting and even impossible, we might as well just be ourselves. 

I drafted these concluding paragraphs before the election, but they resonate even more now: 

My Autistic readers, do you see yourselves here? Maybe your story is quite similar—or maybe the resonances are around other aspects of your whole self that you’ve integrated and celebrated over time, perhaps despite societal or interpersonal obstacles? 

If you are not Autistic, can you imagine navigating life like this? Can you see how divergent it might feel from a neurotypical life, yet how internally coherent and integrous? 

And can you extrapolate to envision how Autistic people, as often not subject to, able to, and/or inclined to bow to the same pressures and conforming limitations, deserve to thrive everywhere, in their gloriously varied ways of interacting and envisioning and living and communicating, including diverse gender and relationship modalities? 

Likewise, dear reader, knowing that everyone has their own journey, are your mind and heart open to ALL other people’s perspectives and experiences, including gender and relationships and family and identity? 

I’m talking about the worth and dignity and equality of every human being, not just the ones who look, think, and behave like you—or in ways you and the people you know and the media you consume deem “acceptable.”  

Can you see and affirm our humanity? 

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama (she/they)

P.S. Here’s a formative song for me.

BOOOOOOOOOOK!

Dear Persons,

 

I hope this finds you cozy and well despite these challenging times.

As Madeline, Judy, Celeste, and I convened for the first time 10 years ago (this month!) to discuss our initial writing group submissions, we could not have imagined what we would all go through in the following decade—or the world we would live in today.

 

Nor would I have dared to dream that the wee blog I began that day would grow to have hundreds of thousands of readers interested in neurodiversity...and ultimately result in a book collaboration that means the world to me. 

 

I'm over the moon to let you know that my first book with Jenna Gensic, The #ActuallyAutistic Guide to Advocacy: Step-by-Step Advice on How to Ally and Speak Up with Autistic People and the Autism Community, is available for pre-order here. 

 

Please stay tuned for more release information and reach out (my email is jineffable@gmail.com) if you'd like to help spread this book's message. We believe this text will serve Autistic people themselves, as well as families, educators, therapists, caregivers, friends, partners, employers, and anyone else who'd like to know more about Autistic perspectives.

 

In addition, we've begun work on our second book, The #ActuallyAutistic Guide to Teen and Young Adult Advocacy and Activism: Step-by-Step Advice for Autistic Youth and Those Who Care About Them. 

 

We're asking all interested Autistic teens and young adults to fill out our survey. Here are the links if you fit this demographic or know anybody who does (please only fill out one version):

 

SHORT survey: https://forms.gle/qKRmuAVsCCwEAF4A9

LONG survey, for people who really like writing: https://forms.gle/FYhmxMmvoYWpcX1e7

 

Thank you so much for being a part of this journey to spread inclusion and awareness!

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The #ActuallyAutistic Guide to Advocacy

by Jenna Gensic

Giveaway ends April 30, 2022.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

HOUSEKEEPING (Big news and a SURVEY!!!!)

Dear Persons,

I hope this post finds you well.

 

And it may not have found you as it usually would, as the app that sent out my posts to subscribers stopped working with Blogger. If you’re here and would like to be notified of future posts, try the new subscribe button at upper right. I don’t know how these functions work, but I didn’t understand the old one either. I’m just hoping it will work for you! With almost 300K readers, FSM has been a success beyond my wildest dreams, at least in the connection department (still waiting for the enormous financial windfall so typical of personal blogs about family and differences…). 

 

Lots of other news in Full Spectrum Land. I do hope to have some new substantive posts in the coming months but for now:

 

1.     My first book about neurodiversity is coming out on 2/21/2022. Written in collaboration with Jenna Gensic of the Learn From Autistics blog, The #ActuallyAutistic Guide to Advocacy: Step-by-step advice on how to ally and speak up with Autistic individuals and the autism community integrates more than a hundred interviews with Autistic people to offer guidance to anyone looking to thoughtfully, respectfully, effectively self-advocate, or advocate/ally with Autistic people. 

 

Both Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison have already endorsed the book!!!! I’m over the moon. I’ll get a link up here when it’s available for advance purchase. You’ll also be able to contact the publishers for review copies. WOOT.

 

 

2.     We’ve begun work in earnest on BOOK TWO!!!! This book will cover many of the same advocacy themes but from a teen and young adult perspective, with a special focus on BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other intersectional perspectives. 

 

To that end, we are looking for Autistic teens and young adults to fill out our survey, so that we can include the broadest range of voices possible. By the way, we consider self-diagnosis completely valid. If you or anyone you know fits the demographic (that is, ANY Autistic teen or young adult), please click ****here****. 

Feel free to forward this survey link to anyone who might be interested. Please also note that the survey is long. Take your time, use the save/cut-and-paste options if helpful, and absolutely feel free to skip questions that don’t interest or relate to you. The ONLY required question is contact info.

 

Our survey was designed and is being disseminated with the brilliant and powerful young folks at Detester Magazine. 

 

Here are some links to find out more about it:

 

·      Instagram survey post 

 

·      Instagram podcast post 

 

·      Facebook survey post

 

·      Facebook podcast post 

 

Thanks and love,

Full Spectrum Mama

PROM NIGHT II—LONELINESS IN A PANDEMIC

Years of meditation practice have allowed me to sometimes approximate a sane person.

The other day, I awoke inundated by cortisol and genuine worries, both pandemic-related and other. I didn’t know how I would get out of bed, much less make it through a very full day. 

Sitting up halfway, trying to muster my gumption to get a move on, a question popped into the tiny bit of spaciousness my meditation practice has created in my head: 

Is there some way I can see this differently?

I didn’t have an answer, actually. But it made a little room in my heart to not feel quite so despondent. Times like these, that's a precious gift. 

Subsequently, I’ve been finding plenty of applications for a “see-this-differently” approach! 

One area that's ripe for a bigger vision? My son's senior year. 

For the class of 2020, there’s no senior prom. No big, festive graduation. I hear that some kids (well, young adults, at this point) are defying social-distancing rules and hanging out without protections. But mine aren’t. Most others aren’t, either. 

And these kids are lonely. All of them. Not just the marginalized kids. Not just the students who don’t “fit in,” or are “different.”

In a way, it’s kind of an amazing moment for the latter groups, I suspect. 

Popular people just can’t be popular in the same ways while sheltering in place. And perhaps people who are often lonely can’t judge themselves (and others) in the usual ways. This is simply how it is—for everybody.

Is it possible that pandemic-induced social isolation actually mitigates the social isolation that so many feel in their usual day-to-day lives? 

I think of my mother-in-law, who—despite having seven living children—rarely sees anyone besides a caregiver who comes for a few hours every day and the one daughter who lives in the same city. 

Now, she must feel less disappointed—because nobody’s seeing anybody. I hope so, anyway. 

I think of my son, who as a junior so assiduously tried to get a date for the prom—with no success. At that time, I began to pre-worry about this year's prom. 

These days, I’ve been asking myself if the lack of prom is actually a great way for those who might not have found a date to avoid a lifetime of that bad memory? 

That said, is social-distancing in some ways a blessing in disguise for students who struggle socially? Especially those who connect better digitally? 

Has this terrible pandemic created online social spaces that are more accepting? 

If everybody is lonely, are some lonelier than others? Or are our children (and elders, and selves) being equally lonely, together but apart? Maybe even experiencing loneliness in ways that might make them (us) more compassionate and inclusive for the long term? 

In other words, is this challenging period in some ways a powerful equalizer? Aside from all the myriad challenges and tragedies, are we finally learning to create a world in which there’s more acceptance and our real gifts shine and we can be free to be ourselves? (I know a lot of wild animals certainly feel that way right now.) 

Also, I'm wondering what will continue to resonate most after we’ve moved through the pandemic—the terrible loneliness and fear, or the unprecedented shared experience of an extraordinary time?

I certainly see how this global crisis exacerbates inequalities around access and economics, and I genuinely fear many of us, and many of our towns and cities, may not be able to recover—for a very long time.I mourn for the hundreds of thousands dead, and for their living loved ones who couldn't be with them at the end.I'm deeply grateful for the many brave essential workers who have risked their lives to keep civilization functioning worldwide. 

Here in my own small, relatively safe universe, I nevertheless experience waves of such sadness, fear, plain-old grumpiness...So I’m trying to see things slightly differently, in the interest of family and community morale, in general, and personal sanity, in particular.

May we in our mutual loneliness find ways to uplift ourselves and each other. Some days, that’s going to be really hard. On those days, may we remember that it's possible to see our lives from another perspective.  

Stay well, dear persons.

You are not alone in your fears or your loneliness or your joys, and you are loved,

Full Spectrum Mama

FAILING SAFELY/DARING GREATLY

Dear Persons,

By the end of August, almost everything I said was making G really, really mad. Could be sulking mad, could be yelling mad; whatever I had to say, he was angry. 

All the time. 

If I said, “Ask yourself if you really need thirds on ice cream,” he’d be enraged, for hours.

“You’ve already watched two movies today, how about taking a break?”: infuriating. 

“Let’s get some fresh air”: seething, at length, with rage. 

Screens, picking up stuff left all over the house, bedtime, laundry, hygiene, homework, manners, state of his room…All were loaded topics. 

One night, after a loooooooong day, I decided it was time to let go. Yep, all at once. It was time for Operation [G] Freedom. 

I didn’t actually even think it through. At all. I just sat down at the dining room table and said, “I’m done. You’re going away to college next year and I’m not going to be there to remind you to sleep, or get exercise, or make good choices. 

“This year is a great time for you to ruin your life in a safe context. So do whatever you want! I don’t want to fight with you anymore and you have to learn this stuff to succeed in life anyway!”

Then I got up and went back into the kitchen to do all the things.

A few minutes later, I heard, in a kind of tiny voice, “Mom? I don’t want to ruin my life.”

“Oh sweetie,” I said, “I don’t mean ruin-ruin your life, exactly. It’s just that the things I tell you that make you mad, those are things that you need to do or not do. So if you do or don’t do them at home, that’s a safe place to fail. 

“I’m hoping you’ll realize for yourself that I’m not nuts or trying to annoy you. And figure out why you need to do certain things, like sleep regularly or not be on your phone 24/7. That way, when you get out on your own you’ll be able to do what you need to do to succeed—like get some healthy exercise and finish your schoolwork on time—without making huge errors in judgment.”

“In fact,” I added, “let’s call it ‘playing college!’”

Now, I don’t think any of this would’ve worked a year ago, or even a few months. I’ve watched my friends whose kids don’t have developmental differences gradually reach this point years ago, but G needed extra time. 

Paradoxically, I'm basically giving him more freedom than many of his typically developing peers currently enjoy. That's because until very recently G didn't seem to have enough common sense or self-regulation to manage the tiny amounts of freedom he was given. Now, he only has this year of high school left in which to practice those skills before leaving for college. 

What he said next showed me he was ready to try. 

“I don’t know if I want that kind of freedom,” G admitted a few hours later. “I think I’m going to use the same parameters you gave me.”

And he has, for the most part. Admittedly with less sleep and more screens, but not so much that he’s messing up in school or in general. (Yet?)

So far, perhaps the most amazing thing to come out of this is a huge shift in our dynamic. G can actually, finally hear me again without taking offense. 

For…years, really, there was a lot of struggle between us over just about everything. Now, because I’m no longer trying to command him—and because he feels respected—he’s able to listen respectfully. 

I’ll make a suggestion from time to time—“At your age, you need 10 hours of sleep a night, so if I were you I’d figure out what time I need to get up and see what is a good time to go to bed”—and then ask, “Does that make sense?”

He’ll usually answer, “Yes.”  

When he resists—“You just had cross country practice. How about a shower?” “Nah”— I simply state a logical consequence—“Well, you’ll be smelly all day”—and move on.

I never, ever claim to have “The Answer.” All families and all individuals are different. For some families, this shift is probably inconceivable (as it was for us not long ago); for others, it’s not on the horizon at all. And who knows, we may need to ease back into more  regulation—it hasn’t been that long!

Also? Don’t get me wrong: I’m scared. Really scared. About ALL the menacing things, for the foreseeable future. But this does seem to be working for our family right now. 

Figure I — Some Of The Menacing Things (not shown: accidental pregnancy, loneliness, driving, unintentionally breaking the law…)

Moving forward, I’m planning to try to stop even making those suggestions. I’m going to dare to allow for the possibility of failure—AND the potential for entirely self-directed success. I’m stepping back so that G can achieve his own kind of greatness on his own terms. 

That means when he chooses to stay up all night or never, ever do his laundry, or leave random dishes and papers and shoes and books and pens and Magic the Gathering cards (and so on, and on, and on...) EVERYWHERE I am going to stay quiet and let him experience the consequences…Also on his own terms.

That means I can reduce my worrying-about-college time significantly, freeing up time to worry about a bunch of random things for wholesome activities. 

At the same time, I’ve been grappling with ways to help him gain increased responsibility as a fair and natural part of increased freedom. That means picking up after himself more, at the very least, right? Fingers crossed.

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

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