The Coyote Curriculum: How Autistic Special Interests Become Strengths, and What Parents Can Do

I spent my childhood convinced I was from another planet. Decades later, I stood in my own kitchen saying, "Please don't pretend to be a dog." My child looked up, offended. "Coyote,” he corrected me. Then he howled—not in anguish, but with the strained urgency of a creature trying to cross a communication barrier I had not, until recently, known existed.

A few months earlier, we had both been identified as autistic, six weeks apart—a revelation that reframed my own childhood conviction that I was from Jupiter and left me willing my child to stop being a coyote. I understood that his transformation into animals was an expression of feeling so alien that he did not consider himself human. But I had been the alien child once, and I knew how that story went. The last time he howled, a group of kids had taped his mouth shut.

What I hadn't yet realized was that the coyote wasn't a deficit—it was a developmental doorway.

What Is a Special Interest?

If you're raising an autistic or 2e child, you already know the thing I'm talking about: the topic your child reads about, draws, talks about, dreams about, and, on occasion, becomes. Researchers estimate that special interests are present in about 90% of autistic individuals. What has changed (dramatically, and recently) is how we understand them.

For most of the past century, special interests were treated as symptoms to be reduced rather than strengths to be cultivated. The word "autism" itself was coined by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe a self-centered retreat into fantasy, a definition that positioned deep imaginative engagement as pathology from the very beginning. Leo Kanner, who formally named “autism”, observed that autistic children exhibited intense, absorbed preoccupations, and framed it as evidence of social withdrawal rather than cognitive depth. The DSM codified this logic through successive editions, classifying special interests as "restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior"—diagnostic criteria for something wrong. In deficit-focused eras, autistic children were themselves compared to animals, a history worth holding in mind when we encounter a child who insists, with complete conviction, on being something other than human. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, interventions that pathologize or restrict special interests remain common. A colleague recently met with parents who wanted to take away their three-year-old's math books because it 'wasn't normal' to love math that much. The instinct to make autistic humans appear “less autistic” still runs rampant.

What the Science Says Now

The neurodiversity movement shifted the terms of the conversation. Judy Singer's coinage of "neurodiversity" in the late 1990s and Steve Silberman's landmark NeuroTribes reframed autistic minds as variation rather than defect, and researchers began asking not how interests interfere with learning, but how they might support it.

Cognitive science has since offered a more precise vocabulary for what special interests actually are. Monotropism—first theorized by Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson—proposes that the primary feature of autism is a tendency toward singular attentional focus. Rather than distributing attention broadly across stimuli, autistic minds submerge deeply into a single channel, producing what researchers call “flow”—intense concentration, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self. What cognitive science calls “monotropis”, gifted education calls a "rage to master." They are the same phenomenon, observed from different disciplines—and both fields, when they encounter it, call it a strength.

Special interests, in other words, are learning in its most motivated form. In practice, they do three jobs at once:

• Cognitive anchor. The interest is reliable terrain in an otherwise unpredictable sensory and social world, and that predictability creates the safety that makes engagement possible.

• Regulation tool. Engagement with a special interest measurably drops nervous system arousal, reducing stress and anxiety while improving overall functioning and wellbeing.

• Relational bridge. For the child who struggles to connect, the interest is where connection starts. As Thomas Armstrong observes in The Power of Neurodiversity, these children's interests define who they are—which means talking to them through the lens of their interest meets them where their brain is most open. It says: I see you.

  
  

When my own child began drawing groups of coyotes—inspired by the sound of them hunting in packs in the hills behind our house—I initially assumed it was a solitary interest. But the research was pointing toward something I hadn't yet considered: that the interest might not be pulling him away from social connection, but toward it. I began to speculate that perhaps it was the concert of these animals that mattered most—the chorus, the groupness, the ruminations of a child whose howl had not yet been answered. Perhaps the interest wasn’t entirely solitary, but a bid for connection. And perhaps if I could just let him be a coyote, someone would howl back.

Researchers have confirmed what I was beginning to suspect: special interests function simultaneously as social initiators, social facilitators, and anxiety regulators. And students can actually improve their areas of challenge by working in areas of interest—meaning the choice between addressing challenges and honoring strengths is a false one. Temple Grandin doesn't see these passions as obsessions, but as clues to what these students can be in the future. 

It's worth noting that adults are becoming admired for their special interests: the founder who cannot stop talking about the company, the professor whose entire career is one deep interest pursued in public, the hiring managers at tech companies who now ask for 'spiky profiles' instead of well-rounded ones—we call that expertise. In children, we too often call it a symptom.

The question is no longer whether special interests matter. It is how to work with them. 

What Actually Helps

Start where the child is. That phrase comes from the researchers who first described monotropism, and it is the whole approach in five words. Leveraging a special interest is not a complete solution to every challenge—but it is the opening through which more comprehensive support becomes possible.

Find the interest, then honor it. Before an interest can be developed, it has to be noticed. Strength-based educators use structured tools for this—the C.L.U.E.S. interview, part of the Suite of Tools developed by Robin Schader and Susan Baum, walks practitioners through collecting information, looking for connections, uncovering patterns, exploring options, and seeking joyful learning (think: everything standardized testing never touches). At home, the tool is simpler. Watch what your child returns to when nobody is directing them. (Homeschoolers call a version of this strewing: leave books, objects, and materials in your child's path and see what they pick up.) Then ask whether the environments they spend their days in make room for it. Rather than asking neurodivergent kids to adapt to a fixed, "normal" environment, it is possible to alter the environment to match the needs of their own brains.

In practice, that means working with the school to some flexibility: math worksheets built around Pokemon, a research project where your child gets to be the class expert on coyotes or WWII aircraft, a teacher willing to let the interest carry the learning target rather than compete with it. Outside school, look for interest-based camps, clubs, online programs, or a mentor who shares the passion—and protect unstructured time for your child to simply go deep on their own.

Let the interest deepen in stages. In strength-based education, a student's deep interest is not incidental to their talent—it is often the clearest signal of where that talent lives. The Pathways Model, developed by Baum and colleagues, organizes learning into three progressively deeper types of engagement. Type I experiences are exploratory—they broaden exposure and ignite curiosity: a nature documentary, a wildlife center, a book of animal facts. Type II experiences build the skills needed to go deeper: research methods, writing, presentation. Type III investigations produce original work that addresses real questions and can be shared with others who share the passion. At Bridges Academy, a Los Angeles school for neurodiverse learners where these frameworks are practiced rather than theorized, a fifth grader who arrived at the school gifted, highly anxious, friendless, and convinced she had nothing to offer, channeled her interest in anxiety into a student-designed survey on school stress. Her data was adopted by the school. She became an advocate, then a lead in the school play. Outcomes like this are measurable: in one study, when talent development opportunities were extended to underachieving students, 82% reversed their pattern within a year. And a 2026 scoping review of 39 studies found that across school, home, and community settings, interventions built on special interests consistently improved social initiation, interaction duration, communication quality, and wellbeing.

Don't take the interest away. Attempts to restrict or eliminate special interests often intensify rather than diminish them, and removing a cherished interest strips a child of their primary source of comfort, strength, and meaning. Schools do a gentler version of this with the best intentions -- pulling a child out of the one class they love for remediation in the areas where they struggle, which teaches the child that what they're best at matters least. What looks like social withdrawal is often a mismatch of frequencies rather than a failure of desire: autistic kids who lack agemates with similar interests and intensities face particular difficulty forging friendships. The author Ron Suskind discovered that his son Owen's Disney obsession wasn't a retreat from connection—it was what finally let the world in. This is why interest-based groups (a Minecraft server, a herpetology club, a D&D table) often do more for an autistic child's social life than the 'social skills' classes parents are taught to seek out. A social skills class teaches scripts, while an interest group provides the proverbial pack. And if the interest is niche, the pack may live online—that counts, too.

The Coyote Was the Curriculum

One evening, my child was outside howling when a girl from his grade arrived with her parents for dinner. She wanted to play, but my kid was currently barking at the fence. I had, at this point, spent several months reading every paper published on the subject of autistic special interests and social-emotional development. I had highlighted things. I had taken notes. I knew, theoretically, what to do. Or at least what to try.

"He’s a coyote now," I said, pointing to my child, who had pivoted from the fence and was now barking at us. I crouched beside the girl. "Do you want to be a coyote too?"

I felt almost embarrassed asking this—after what my kid had been through, socially, my body anticipated some kind of revulsion. But children are naturally kind and accommodating.

The small newcomer considered my question with the gravity of someone being asked to sign a contract. Then she crossed the threshold from our back door into the wild.

A few minutes later, they were both tilting their faces to the sky, howling in unison.

I had never once seen my child play successfully with a peer and had always feared the howling would be what kept him alone in the world. 

But now, here they were, finding their pack.

About the Author

Kathleen Hale is an autistic author, parent, and doctoral student based in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on twice-exceptional (2e) learners, strength-based approaches to cognitive diversity, and the phenomenon of undiagnosed autism in humans born before 1990, particularly among those assigned female at birth. She writes at Autistic Motherload.

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