Archived webinar - Employees with ASD: Tips for Educating Employers and Colleagues

View the webinar here. 

Archived Webinar on Autism and Skills for Adulthood

In this video, Dr. Peter Gerhardt discusses the adaptive skills/skills of daily living that teens and young adults with autism spectrum disorder need to acquire to help them lead safe, productive, and fulfilling adult lives. These skills include safety, hygiene, employment, social competence, decision-making, self-management, leisure, and communication.

Watch the video here.

For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Downs Syndrome

Jamie is my son. He is 22 years old. He is a bright, gregarious, effervescent young man with an amazing cataloguing memory and an insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world — its people, its creatures, its nations, its languages and (perhaps most of all) its culinary traditions. If it were possible for him to travel everywhere on the inhabited globe, he would do it, and he would try to ingratiate himself with his hosts, just as he does when he greets the owner of our local Indian restaurant by bowing, hands clasped, and saying "namaskar." (The owner, Sohan, is delighted by this.) Since graduation, he has been looking for work. Jamie also has Down syndrome.
By the end of the year, though, Jamie had lowered his sights from "marine biologist" to "marine biologist helper." And by the end of eighth grade, when we met with all his teachers and aides and paraprofessionals to go over the Individualized Education Program that would chart his way through high school (good news: the high school French teacher agreed to have him in French 1 for two years and French 2 for two years!), when he was asked what he might do for a living when he graduated, he said dejectedly, "Groceries, I guess."

I'm not sure what I would have felt that day if I had known that he would have to settle for less than that.

Read more here.