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How My Dad Helped Me Master My Autism
Leland Vittert
September 25, 2025

When I was a kid, experts didn’t have a name for what I had. Asperger’s wasn’t a term until the 1990s, and autism wasn’t understood to be a spectrum disorder. The only diagnosis they could offer was “social blindness,” or “pervasive developmental disorder,” which gave my parents little hope things could get better. In fourth grade, my school brought in a specialist to administer an IQ test. A learning disability was usually defined by a 20-point spread between the verbal and nonverbal halves. My spread was 68 points. On one end of the spectrum, I was a genius. On the other, I was considered, in the medical jargon of the 1980s, mildly retarded. Math and science came easily; social reasoning was hopeless. If they could have measured my emotional intelligence, it would have been near freezing. READ MORE