Mindfully Healing

It seemed like simple gesture. A college football player who was visiting a middle school spotted a red-haired sixth grader eating lunch alone, so he joined him. Then the boy’s mother posted a photo on Facebook capturing the moment: her autistic son sitting across a cafeteria table from Travis Rudolph, the Florida State University wide receiver. “This one day,” she wrote, “I didn’t have to worry if my sweet boy ate lunch alone.” The heartwarming image spread on social media, and news stories reported that after that, the boy’s popularity

Thomas was proud of his young son “Roger’s” remarkable knowledge of birds. Roger’s grandmother, an avid bird watcher, had shared birding books and toy bird replicas with the boy when he was young, and he had shown such great enthusiasm for the topic that at age 3, Roger could identify more than 50 types of birds. But when the boy was diagnosed with autism, a therapist took a more guarded view of Roger’s intense interest. The therapist described the boy’s constant chatter about birds as “stimming”—short for self-stimulating behavior. Suddenly,