Parents felt relief when autistic children joined in, and relearned what socialising meant

The first thing parents felt when their autistic child joined an autistic led program, according to a panellist at the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, was relief. The panel, in the opening session in Melbourne on 18 June 2023, spent its discussion of parents on what that relief rested on, and on the work of persuading parents that what they were seeing was already a kind of connection.

Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked the panel how to talk to parents about their children. The first answer came from a panellist recalling their own childhood. The panellist used to play a great deal of RuneScape, and their mother hated it, calling it mindless games. The irony, the panellist said, was that RuneScape spearheaded their career in software development. Wanting to write cheat codes for the game, the panellist learnt to write Java, because there was an online community devoted to taking the game apart and writing code to make a character attack a chicken or mine coal, and later took those skills into professional life. The panellist’s advice to parents was not to judge a child’s special interest and not to worry about where it might go as a career, because something unexpected might come out of it.