Today, one in every 150 individuals is diagnosed with Autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined. More specifically in the state of California 1 out of every 154 students are diagnosed with autism according to Autism Prevalence Public School State Ranking 2006-2007.
As these children grow toward adulthood these difficulties continue to persist for the children and their caretakers. The age appropriate life skills that typical children established naturally are quite a challenge for the child with autism. Life skills such as: navigating and engaging the community, problem solving, playing team sports, expressing needs and desires with peers and adults and self-care are areas of need for young adults with autism. The communication of the world at large becomes difficult to navigate for autistic youth who struggle with communication and sensory deficits. The primary caretakers of these young adults can assist in paving new pathways of experience yet; the caretaker alone cannot fulfill the necessary social needs of their child. These young adults need a variety of age-appropriate, experiential, social, and learning developmental support. This learning developmental support should be delivered with a humanistic, systematic, individualized framework that supports and expands each youth as they explore and engage new learning environments.
True, very true. My son
True, very true. My son continues to have few friends outside the family and struggles to find activities where he feels that he fits in. We are generally optimistic, but naturally at times our faith in the future wans. I will say that things have improved over the years and continue he continues to make strides in development of social skills areas. I don't think parents have to panic if their child hits adulthood without perfecting their social skills since, for all of us, learning in these areas is a lifelong process.
However, one of the toughest issues we have is to get people who knew my son as a child to set aside their impressions of him as that child and to actuall see how he has grown and changed over the years. While society often describes people with autism as being "stuck" in a behavior and adhering unreasonably to routines, etc., I often see a similar stubbornness in "normal" people about how they "see" individuals with autism who they first met as a child and then meet again as an adult. It seems that the person with autism has to continually battle the ghosts of their childhood when trying to socialize with their old school peers and this alone makes it harder for them than it should be to fit in despite having largely "recovered" (i.e. having learned to cope and to "normalize" their behavior).