Laura Shumaker is an author and also runs a blog on the San Francisco Chronicle website. I’ll admit, I haven’t read her book, “A regular guy, growing up with autism” yet. But every now and then someone sends me a link to her blog and I’ve liked what I’ve read.

In this piece, Voices of Autism: a “lucky” mother’s perspective , she let’s a guest blogger take the helm, Claire LaZebnik .

Claire talks about the progress her son made, from non-verbal to echolalic to mainstream with support to preparing for college.

It’s a nice piece, and well worth the minute or to to read.

She’s also had a piece in the New York Times, Adolescence, Without a Roadmap which I enjoyed and, I’ll admit, is what prompted me to write this piece linking to her work.

This section caught my eye:

“Hey, Mom?” he says as we’re walking out of a store. “That girl was hot.” He thinks he’s talking in a whisper but he isn’t, really, because he has voice modulation problems and has trouble hearing what his own voice sounds like. The lifeguard in the bikini at the beach is also “hot.” So is Jessica Alba, whose picture he printed and carefully glued onto his binder, next to a photo of Keira Knightley.

The term “hot” may be an affectation he picked up from his friends, but his appreciation of skinny girls with big breasts seems to be genuine, as we realized when we discovered he’d started using the Internet the way other teenage boys are likely to only when they think no one is watching.

We put content filters on our browser software, and his father sat down with him to go over some basic rules: Wait until you’re in love to have sex. Always wear a condom. Hide your pornography where your mother won’t find it. He’ll remember all this because they’re rules, and he’s very good at remembering rules.

Those links again, just in case:

and