‘Love That Boy,’ by Ron Fournier
After covering Bill Clinton’s rise from the Arkansas state house to the White House for the Associated Press, he headed the AP’s Washington bureau for two years before becoming a columnist at the National Journal.
[...] he had trouble making friends at school, and had the unnerving habit of speaking his mind a little too bluntly, as when he asked a woman with a prominent mole, “What’s wrong with your face?” As time went on, it became clear that Tyler loathed sports, lacking the fine-motor control to dominate on the playing field.
The answer came to Fournier’s wife Lori one night in 2010, watching a new NBC series called “Parenthood,” when she saw reflections of her son in the socially awkward character of Max, a kid with Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism usually described in the news as “mild,” though there’s nothing mild about it for the people who have it).
After watching several episodes in secret, Lori showed them to her husband, who wept with recognition of their son’s struggles to make sense of social cues.
The parental memoir of raising a child on the autism spectrum is a literary genre unto itself, with new “inspirational” titles released every month by specialist presses.
In its message that children — including children with disabilities — must be regarded as individuals pursuing their own paths to maturity, the book recalls Andrew Solomon’s “Far From the Tree,” which describes the most pressing question of parenthood as “to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.”
Love That Boy” is full of feeling, but refreshingly free of the self-pitying histrionics, dehumanizing stereotypes of disability and eagerness to embrace quack cures that typified a generation of books like Jenny McCarthy’s “Louder Than Words.
The primary focus of “Love That Boy” is not the travails of raising a child on the spectrum, but the crushing burden of parental expectations on all children — including typically developing ones — in a culture in which superior intellect is viewed as a commodity rather than a gift, and “‘accelerated’ has become the new normal,” as Bronwen Hruska aptly put it in a New York Times opinion piece.
In suburban communities adjacent to the precincts of power, “jockeying for admission” to elite day care centers “begins before pregnancy,” Fournier observes — and expectations of academic stardom ramp up from there.