When Autism Doesn’t Explain Everything When my son was two, he was only using a handful of words and had only begun walking at 18 months. Because he had more than one delay, we were encouraged to have him evaluated. The diagnosis at the time was PDD-NOS, which was later updated to autism. But that diagnosis didn’t explain everything I was seeing. It didn’t explain how he spelled the word airplane in foam letters on the bathtub wall at age two, or how when I told him there was

If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country, you know how stressful it is to enter an unfamiliar environment. Everything is different: the customs, the language, the social norms, the mentality. You’re stressed and overwhelmed. The novelty makes your head spin. This anxiety is very familiar to me–not because I travel, but because I have autism. Social norms and cues that most people seem to grasp intuitively have never come naturally to me. I had to piece them together labor

As a 2e teenager, I was almost always anxious, but I didn’t always know  I was anxious. I felt my rapid heart rate, my thoughts racing, the fluttering in my stomach, the dizzy spells–but these perceptions never cohered into an overarching sense of emotion, and I couldn’t connect them to anything that was happening in my life. If you asked me how I felt, I probably would have just said, “Fine,” “Bad,” or simply “I don’t know.” This lack of emotional awareness wasn’t specific t

Our May 2025 support group for parenting 2e kids, Tarra Knotts discusses the traits and experiences of students with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance). Read the transcript here I think I ran into real to eat before I ran into parents helping parents. But anyway, I've been running the PDA, pathological demand avoidance or pervasive drive for autonomy parent group with parents helping parents. Originally it started in real 2 and then we moved it over to parent helping parents

the dynamic duo of Amy & Jac of Autism Level Up (ALU) spoke to REEL about how adults can be neurodiversity affirming forces in the lives of their 2e students.

By Callie Turk, Co-Founder, REEL It’s estimated that there are four times as many boys diagnosed with autism as girls; but researchers believe the incidence may be closer to three to one if only autism in girls were better understood (Ratto, 2020). This has massive implications for our ability to provide important early intervention services for girls who could benefit from them. If you listen to stories from females who have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition i