First Steps


A opinion piece for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

My twelve-year-old son is a high-functioning autistic. We have been blessed; he has language skills and few behavioral problems. He attends a public middle school and takes the full curriculum of classes, some general-education and some special-ed. He does this with the help of a “shadow” teacher’s-aide to keep him on-task, modify general-education schoolwork as necessary for his disability, and handle his autistic behaviors.

My husband and I started our careers working for McDonnell-Douglas where my father-in-law and a brother-in-law also worked, sort of the “family business.” But our second son was born in California because we moved there after the crash in the defense industry in the 1990s. His physical development as a baby always fell just inside the “normal” range, and none of his problems were diagnosed until he did not develop language skills on schedule. Our pediatrician sent us to Family Services, my baby was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Non-specified, and we entered the California version of First Steps.

Because language development was what had brought him into the system, he received speech therapy. What a difference it made! His brain simply could not build words into a sentence and send it out of his mouth. However, he was quite capable of memorizing the correct sentence for a situation and repeating it. He could even substitute the right name for something into that sentence to get the thing he wanted. In six months my toddler went from pointing with a high-pitched shriek, to stating, “I want Cheerios and bananas.” We found out he was very intelligent for his age. It also turned out that several of his behaviors were simply frustration because he couldn’t communicate.

My best memory of that time is from the third session with the speech therapist. Speech therapy for a 30-month-old is mostly games with rewards and praise, and our therapist’s favorite praise was, “Good for you!” She and my boy were taking turns identifying pictures on cards when she had trouble with one because she was looking at it upside-down. When she finally got it right, he burst out, “Good for you!” with exactly the inflection she always used. Both she and I sat there with our jaws hanging open for a few seconds, then burst out laughing and hugged him and each other. I was still laughing and crying when we got home that day. I’m crying again as I write this.

I shudder to think what would have happened had there not been a program like First Steps for him, if we had sent him into a public school system at three years old without knowing how to teach him to communicate, if we had to live with him pointing and shrieking until someone stumbled across how to help him. Hindsight is 20 - 20, and I wish we had known to get him help even earlier than we did.

Just as McDonnell-Douglas was our “family business” in the 1980s, politics can be the “family business” for some. The tradition goes back to our founding fathers; the Adamses come easily to mind. It has continued on to today, through several families like the Roosevelts to the Kennedys, Gores, and the Bush clan. We have state and local examples such as the Clays and Carnahans, and now a second political-generation Blunt lives in the Governor’s mansion.

When a family makes politics their “family business” we sometimes study them, looking for connecting threads, family crusades, and legacies. Whatever else there is to say about the Kennedys, they have turned their eldest sister’s personal tragedy into a wonderful legacy for all the mentally and physically challenged: the Special Olympics. How terrible it is that the governor of Missouri begins his tenure denying services to this same group. What a horrible legacy for this “family business” to leave behind.

Posted: Sat - February 12, 2005 at 07:46 PM   Home         | | View Technorati reactions

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