Social interactions can be enormously challenging for people on the spectrum. That's part of the reason that unemployment among autistic adults hovers near 80 percent.

Autism is defined by looking at behaviors. And everybody looks at behaviors differently.

Over the years, autism has almost been a diagnosis in the eye of the beholder, which allows for all kinds of arguments and dissension and theories and competing therapies to come into play.

There are disagreements over whether autism is something that should be always and all the time embraced and celebrated as just a different way to be human, or whether autism sometimes can be really so debilitating to individuals that you want to do something to change those disabilities in them.

Social interactions can be enormously challenging for people on the spectrum. That's part of the reason that unemployment among autistic adults hovers near 80 percent.

Adults don't get nearly the attention and support the kids do, maybe because they're not as cute or because people forget that autism is lifelong. But it is.

I don't sense that people are loving the adults the way they have learned to love kids, because the truth is, they're not going to be cute in the same as kids are. And they shouldn't have to be cute to deserve and merit our attention and support.