Comedian and actor Denis Leary has issued an official apology to parents of autistic children this week for comments made in a chapter of his soon-to-be-released book, Why We Suck: A Feel-Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid. But deep down, maybe the parents should be thanking him.

OK, let me back up. I don’t agree with the comments that have been released. He says they’ve been taken out of context. I don’t know. Regardless, I don’t believe that kids diagnosed as autistic are really just lazy or stupid (or the rest of the comments, which you can read in Sunny’s post here). Autism is quite real, and parents of autistic children have a rough row to hoe.

A major contributor to parents’ stress is the reactions they get outside of the house. One autism support educator told me time and again she has parents crying on her shoulder because they were out in the grocery store and a Nosy Nelly dropped a nasty comment about their child’s behavior. The autism spectrum is so wide that educating the public about an autistic child’s particular quirks (for lack of a better word) can be hard. Too few people understand that it’s a disorder that varies from one child to the next, so they carry the misperceptions that a child who speaks, for example, can’t be autistic – because they’ve always heard autistic kids are non-verbal. By contrast, a non-verbal child in the supermarket will mystify onlookers who just don’t know any better.

Should they be nasty? Should they be nosy? No. But we can’t make it stop until we get the word out. Plug “Denis Leary” and “autism” into a term-specific Google search, and you’ll get 100,000 hits. I was encouraged most because the response was in the form of a backlash against Leary. Newspaper, magazine and internet journalists alike came out in storm to support parents. It showed groups like Autism Speaks are having an affect with their campaigns to make autism a household word.

It put questions into the minds of people who in the past have been willing to write autism off as a fad, something parents are making up to excuse their lack of parenting skills or doctors have invented to justify higher bills.

So maybe Denis Leary isn’t so bad after all.

Image/Source: Boston Herald

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