Concluding Remarks

Abstract

When I began this project, I wanted to better understand the lives of parents of children diagnosed with autism. I wanted to know what parents experienced on a daily basis and how caring for a child diagnosed with autism impacted their daily activities, and outlook on life, dreams, fears, and hopes. I wanted to know more about the daily activities of autism than I was able to see in my elementary school classroom, and I wanted the focus to be on the caregivers. I had a feeling that the activities, emotions, and events I would observe would be different from the “autism experiences” I encountered as a classroom teacher, but still began this project with the assumption that there is an “educator’s autism experience” that is different from a “parent’s autism experience.” With this binary—an “us” versus “them” mentality—I entered my fieldwork. Yet I emerged with an understanding of the great variation of experience within “them,” which I believe is critical for any anthropologist to experience first-hand.