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Many people believe that autistic individuals lack empathy. This is not true. The reason this misconception never seems to get discarded may be due, in part, to its deep historical roots. Early descriptions of autism and autistic individuals, dating as far back as the 1930s, tended to emphasize the social and communication difficulties associated with the condition. This helped foster an assumption that autistic individuals lacked empathy. Even as recently as the early 2000s, research sugge …

In today's digital world, it's common for scenarios like this to play out: A teenage girl comes into the kitchen obviously upset. When her dad asks what's wrong, she says she is having a fight with a friend who said hurtful things to her.Her dad can't believe the friend would say some of the things his daughter told him about. For proof, she takes out her cell phone so he can "read" the argument. The entire thing was happening via text messages, and they hadn't actually spoken about the problem …

When I was 11, I walked over to the corner store to buy a soda. I paid with a twenty-dollar bill, and the guy mistakenly gave me back some ones and a fifty instead of a ten. I ran up to my dad and said, “Guess what? I just got paid to buy a pop! It’s my lucky day!” My dad looked at me surprisingly and said, “You’re keeping it?” I replied, “Heck yeah! He’ll never know.” Then he said, “But you will know. You’ll know today, and tomorrow, and forever. You just sold out your integrity for forty …

Social Distancing and Social Skills seem like polar opposites. The former asks us to keep our space while the latter is about the ability to communicate and interact with others.But even as we distance ourselves we are still interacting, just in a different way. Classes were moved online but kids still need to know how to take turns and stay on topic and visits to loved ones may be from between a glass door which means we need a good handle on reading facial expressions. So how do we co …