Comment by refurb

To start with, someone directly affected by autism is someone experiencing it themselves. Parents, educators, and caregivers have historically been granted primacy in these discussions, largely because so many autistic people cannot effectively advocate for themselves, either at all or in the current systems that exist for it. That doesn't change our obligation to center the experiences of autistic people, who are having the most direct one possible.

Parent- and caregiver-focused approaches are how we've ended up with things like ABA¹ being fairly mainstream, and sympathy for parents pursuing experimental or simply crank treatments to "cure" their children, frequently with extremely harmful results. Support and advocacy groups run by autistic people are absolutely full horrific stories of abuse in this vein.

Which is, I believe, a large part of RFK's interest² in it. I think he wants to make more ad hoc, extreme, and experimental and frankly abusive "treatment" supported for parents of autistic children.

So the comment you're responding to isn't a curious or "diverse opinion", it is basically the standard view of this up until the last 10-15 years or so. Autistic people had to fight very hard to have our own views and experiences taken seriously. RFK's focus here is part of an even-more-recent backlash against that.

¹ Essentially conversation therapy for autism. It can be effective at teaching us how to behave like "normal" people which can be comforting for parents of autistic children. But autistic people overwhelmingly experience it as extremely distressing or worse.

² He has also signaled that he will use it as a justification to ban vaccines. I don't have enough of a read on the guy to reckon which of these is a bigger motivation to him. There's also an understudied but impossible-to-deny correlation between transness and autism. A lot going on here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Crit...