Photo Credit: ambro at www.freedigitalphotos.net

If only I had read this book early in my teaching career.

That was my thought as I turned the last page of Kristine Barnett’s book, The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism. Her tale of her two-year-old son’s autism diagnosis, his downhill slide into silence, and her decision to build upon strength in him rather than always remediating his weaknesses resonated with me.

Granted, Barnett’s son Jake had amazing strengths to build upon. Now fourteen, he’s verbal, well-socialized, and in graduate school. Yes, graduate school. Studying physics and solving math problems thought unsolvable (think Good Will Hunting) thanks to an IQ higher than Einstein’s.

But his mom didn’t know that when he was three, uncommunicative, and displaying classic symptoms of autism.  She was firing a shot in the dark when she decided to give him time to build strength. She gave him time to explore his passions, which at the time were stars, light and shadows, stringing yarn around the house in strange patterns, and dumping the contents of cereal boxes on the floor.

The lesson to be found in this story is not to pull our kids with special needs out of therapy. The lesson is not for parents to allow kids to stare blankly at lights and shadows. The lesson is not that we should look the other way when our kids throw cereal on the floor.

The lesson is for parents to look for our children’s passions and to give them time to build strength by pursuing those passions.

I didn’t learn that lesson in time use it in my classroom. But, God has granted me time to pass it along to you, along with a few tips about how to build strength in your kids with special needs.

The remainder of this post can be found at the Not Alone website.

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