You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When my older daughter was about two or so, I remember my excitement at the prospect of taking walks with her, given her new ambulatory skills and her intense interest in being outdoors. However, I soon found these walks agonizingly slow. My idea of a walk entailed a brisk movement along a road or path. Her idea was quite different. The implications of this difference hit me one day when we encountered a fallen tree on the side of the road … The rest of the “walk” was spent exploring the fungal and insect life on, under, and around the tree. I remember my sudden realization that these walks would be no fun for me, merely a parental duty, if I held onto my idea of walks. As I was able to give that up and surrender to my daughter’s rhythm and focus, a different type of experience opened up to me … If I had simply restrained myself out of duty, I would have experienced the walk as a compliance. But I was able to become my daughter’s version of a good companion and to find in that another way for me to be that took on great personal meaning for me. (Mitchell, 1993, p. 147)
These five articles – representing a diverse array of modalities – including developmental/family systems, inclusive play groups, music therapy and “affinity”-based play – speak to the increasing richness and scope of contemporary discourse around treatment of autism. Their approaches all fall along the continuum of intervention to accommodation: Some focus on remediation of the affected individual, others on remediation of the environment. All support the notion that autistic deficits in implicit know-how – in the capacity to attune to one’s own and anothers’ intentions and participate in a shared world – can be understood as stemming from dynamic impairments in inter-corporeal communication (Stern, 1985) and effectively remediated at the “local level” of implicit interaction; that is, by rhythmic scaffolding of the individual’s naturalistic everyday interactions with objects and people. Accordingly,