Read an Excerpt

At conferences, more and more parents of a recently diagnosed teen or elementary school child have told me that they may be on the autism spectrum. In some cases, they have an official diagnosis and in other cases, they do not. Almost all the parents who have been told me that they are on the autism spectrum have worked successfully in a variety of occupations. The question is: why was their life relatively successful, and their child is having problems with lack of friends, bullying, or is extremely hyper and anxious? In most of these cases, the child has no early childhood speech delay.

A possible contributor to a poorer prognosis may be excessive use of video games or other on-screen entertainment. When I was in college, I had friends who today would be labeled as having autism. Individuals on the autism spectrum are more likely to have pathological video game use. The ICD-11 now has a formal diagnosis for gaming disorder. Research shows that eight percent of all young people who play video games may be true addicts. There may be two reasons why both these mildly autistic parents and my geeky classmates got and kept decent jobs. They learned how to work at a young age. I have written extensively about this. In my generation, kids played outside with their peers and learned social interactions. They were not glued to electronic screens.