As many of you know, Miss Lisha has several pet peeves. Today I heard one of my all time pet peeves pretty much the whole day—following me around like a bad habit. The phrase, ‘Well all kids do that’ gets under my skin like an infectious rash.

It’s not that I don’t believe children with autism will never do things that typically developing children do. Of course there will be parts of this child’s development that will be right on the money to what all the other children are able to accomplish with their feet and hands and mouths at the exact same age. It’s merely the frame of context that is often so neatly swept under the rug as we think about the autistic child. When we use the phrase ‘all kids’, we fail to appreciate the pervasiveness of autism. Autism doesn’t only happen at 9 o’clock in the morning. Autism doesn’t only occur when you wear uncomfortable clothes. Autism doesn’t only affect your life when you forget to take a shower. Autism is a part of you, every part of you, every part of every day.

Let’s take jumping as an example. Do children with autism jump? Sure they do. Do typically developing children jump? You betcha. Can typically developing children jump around like Mexican jumping beans? Oh yeah they can, especially when presented with situations that revolve around urinary urgency. If I saw two children jumping, one autistic and one not, could I say ‘Well all kids jump’? I could but I could also be generalizing a bit too much. Because is it possible that the child with autism is jumping excessively as compared to a typically developing child? Yep. Are the reasons a child with autism jumps different than those of typically developing children? They can be, but they can also be for the same reasons.

To assume these two scenarios are exactly the same assumes the quality and quantity of jumping is the same. What about pointing? Can children with autism make their index finger stand out from the rest of the fingers? Sure. But is the quality of this action the same as the typically developing child? Is the child using this pointing action to indicate a protoimperative or protodeclarative thought? So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: is the experience of jumping and pointing and the rest of life different for our autistic children?

Here’s the conundrum: you can’t separate the autistic from the individual anymore than you can separate the sun from our solar system. You cannot remove the autistic lens that this child perceives the world from. This autistic lens will color every second of this person’s life in a way that a neurotypical person can scarce begin to fathom. The context of autistic pervasiveness cannot be separated out and we cannot view this child as experiencing the world in the same way as all the other children on the playground or in the classroom or in the medical setting will. What you see through your eyes is not what your son sees. What you hear through your ears is not what your student hears. What you feel on your skin and in your hair is not what your patient feels.

For someone who thinks about the world so radically different, how can we possibly use the phrase ‘all kids do that’ in response to anything this child does or feels? Because even if the autistic child and the neurotypical child are doing the same action—the context will forever be different. The phrase ‘walk a mile in his shoes’ takes on a whole new connotation. So in essence, the phrase ‘All kids do this’ has no meaning when applied to the child with autism—because not all kids have autism. These two children will walk a very different path in life, even if they pass by the same landmarks.

We can apply this philosophy to every part of life, every second of the day, every single day of their lives. An autistic child will derive meaning from events and actions that are drastically different because of the pervasiveness of the disorder. An autistic child will learn from experiences in a radically different way because they perceive the entire situation from a different perspective. They walk on a path that we cannot. All children will make social faux pas as they learn to navigate the world. All children will say embarrassing things to strangers. Yet the typically developing child will learn from these social faux pas by the reactions of others in the environment, by watching mom and dad, by seeing what’s successful in their peers. This is not necessarily true for the autistic child because he or she may not even recognize the social faux pas to begin with. And how can you learn from something that isn’t there? Hence the phrase ‘All kids say embarrassing things’ cannot be universally applied to any situation that involves the child with autism.

As Jim Sinclair so eloquently puts it, “Autism is a way of being. It is pervasive. It colors every encounter, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter. Every aspect of existence. It’s not possible to separate the autism from the person.”