The following is excerpted from a post to the ME list mail group by Megan Sumlin (pseudonym), and is reprinted by permission.

We know our son not only appears "typical"; we also know for a fact that in the eyes of others he's viewed as one of the brightest, most empathetic(!) and popular kids in his grade. So I guess he's not that "typical" after all (needless to say, we're SO proud). There are many parents on the [ME] list who have kids who no longer meet DSM criteria but can pass in the class as "normal" with problems. It may take many years for some to iron out residua; we were very fortunate to be able to iron it out during that first year. The mega amount of role-play and Social Stories based on "report card" feedback [from school] gave us the ability to streamline and facilitate a process that might otherwise have taken much longer....

Working in a deliberate way with our kids (using DRO and breaking all learning down to the smallest component) has become a way of life. BTW, it certainly helped that our younger almost-5 year old keeps catching up as far as "art" work is concerned. Looking across our older son's class, I wonder if any of the things we work on could be viewed as residua from the autism. We know it never would be by anybody who didn't know about his history. We certainly do treat everything as if it is residua although there's actually nothing he does that is developmentally inappropriate for his age at all. In the grand scheme of things, if there were a list for this and one looked at every (all born-NT) child in his class, ranking them as having from the most to least traits on a "residua criteria list" (again, IF such a list existed) our son would fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, and not toward the "most" end at all.

BTW, we've told our son that he used to be autistic, have explained in detail what it means, went over DSM with him, showed him the 1987 Lovaas film and other films about autism (one from the mid 60s called "Autism - The Invisible Wall" and the late 70s "Promises To Keep"), films of himself before therapy, of the therapy itself, "Rain Man" and "Awakenings"; we also took him to see "As Good as It Gets". He has thanked us over and over for helping him overcome autism, has become very teary-eyed several times about it (the one that got to him the most was the 1987 film where the young Pam is super-imposed over Pam "now" and then back to Pam "now" again -- he does realize that this will NOT ever happen to him) and is sure he wants to become a Psychologist someday when everybody finally knows how to do this therapy well (though he often changes his mind and adds different occupations he wants to check out -- "Psychologist" however is a constant). When he watches films of himself, like us, he first laughs and then shakes his head back and forth (like us as well) with a look of pure relief.

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