And while we are on the subject of medication you always need to look at risk versus benefit.

I'm a believer in biochemistry. But I tell people to try only one thing at a time to see if it works. And if you do give a powerful drug to a kid, it better have a big wow factor.

There is three different ways that autistic kids will interact with animals.And they also need to make sure that they're not getting too rough with their animals - they need to learn how to pet the dog properly, they can't be pulling its ears and things like that.

I get asked a lot why cats mess outside the litter box. The simplest thing is if you have more than one cat and you have two litter boxes, don't put them right next to each other.

I was nonverbal until I was four years old. Back in the 50s, I was the kind of kid they used to just put away in an institution. But then you get the milder autism where there's no speech delay, but they're socially awkward. Those kids were around when I was a child. They were just called geeks and nerds.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be

One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others.