Ariane Zurcher

We are inundated with disturbing imagery depicting autism in the media. Perhaps one of the most famous was a video made by a well-known organization several years ago. It was a montage of a number of parents expressing their distress and the difficulties they face while raising an autistic child....

Fear. It creeps up on me, seemingly without warning. Sometimes I get hit with it while brushing my teeth or waiting with my autistic daughter, Emma, for her school bus or when I am walking to my studio. Like a person suddenly and without warning appearing...

A few months ago Emma's teacher emailed me asking if we had a pair of sneakers we could send to school with Emma so she could participate in their gym class. First of all, Emma is 10 years old and she is autistic. (She is also the star of my...

You are beautiful.

It doesn't matter that we've never met. It doesn't matter that you do not know who I am.

You are beautiful.

You are beautiful exactly as you are, at this moment, no matter how sad, how angry, how confused or lonely you may feel, you are beautiful....

When my 10-year-old daughter, Emma, was a toddler, she had a mermaid finger puppet. It had long black hair, sported a blue bikini top and had a blue sequined tail. At the time, I thought it was the first of what would be many dolls.

I...

Emma reached for the last bag of Pirate's Booty the other day and said, "Minus one equals zero." Then she grabbed the bag and ate its contents.

I am constantly impressed with my 10-year-old autistic daughter Emma's mind and creative use of words. I often think when I...

The other day I received the following text from my 10-year-old autistic daughter's therapist, Joe:

"Heading your way. Em had a rough day after museum trip. Wants to see you."

First of all, I need to point out that the fact that Emma was able to communicate...

An autistic child has been killed. Again.

His name was Daniel Corby. He was 4 years old.

The following is by no means a cohesive or complete list.

March 2012 -- Mother kills George, her 22-year-old autistic son.

August 2011 -- Mother shot and...

My 10-year-old autistic daughter, Emma, woke up in the middle of the night crying. Her screams of pain, the result of intense pressure in her ears, were like the sounds of an animal under attack. Last night, having read about the intense sensory issues many people on the spectrum must...

The beginning of my "awareness" regarding autism came in the form of an apologetic voice, over the phone. "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you," she began. I don't remember the exact wording of the rest of the sentence as I was too distracted by her apologetic tone...

I think of myself as pretty determined, a person who doesn't take "no" for an answer. In the over seven years since I had learned of autism and first heard the word applied to Emma, I had thought of it as something to battle. It was a thing we needed...

There's hope, and then there's desperation. Often I am not sure which one is pushing me more: the feeling that with each year my 9-year-old daughter Emma grows older, the farther she is from her neuro-typical peers, or the knowledge that others have progressed and come so far, therefore so...

Here are some things you will not find in your research on autism:

You will not learn how this diagnosis will affect your marriage or other members of your family. You will not be told how it may fundamentally alter your perceptions of what is "normal," how it may change...

Labels are useful. They're shorthand for what we want to communicate and yet, they often obscure what is really being said. We say things like, "oh, he's schizophrenic," "she's bipolar," "he's an alcoholic," "she's anorexic," "he's blind" and the meaning seems to get conveyed, but does it? After all, that's...

I first heard that term used in reference to my daughter, Emma almost seven years ago now, when she was first diagnosed at the age of two years and nine months. It was a term we became familiar with as time went on. One of Emma's early intervention...

On Monday night my 9 and a half-year-old daughter, Emma, was up at midnight screaming. Her ears were bothering her. This has been an ongoing problem for many months now. She is highly sensitive to the changing air pressure. As a result of Emma's sensitivity, I too have...

Dear Mr. President:

I received a form letter from Vice President Joe Biden recently -- one of those mass emails one gets but rarely reads. I read that if I were to make a donation of $5, my name will be thrown into a hat for a chance to have...

Birthday parties, anticipated with great excitement by neuro-typical children, are something parents of autistic children often dread. Many autistic kids have sensory issues, which cause them to crash when they are over- or understimulated. Emma is affected by both, and it's impossible to predict what might trigger her. Crashing for...

This morning Emma said, "Play musical chairs!," then positioned several dining room chairs in the middle of the room so they had their backs to one another, fanning out in a kind of lopsided circle. Emma turned on some music from her iPod and danced for a minute or two....

When Emma was a toddler she got a little scratch from the tag on the back of her shirt. It seemed so insignificant, hardly worth noticing, except that Emma screamed as though her entire body had been scalded. I remember at the time thinking it strange, her response...