The Beauty School Dropout: Became the Queen of Denial

Traveling over the weekend for my parents' 50th Anniversary, I missed this article in my mailbox (thanks, Mike). It's a commentary by Didi Conn, best known for her role as Frenchie in the movie "Grease". In the article, Conn discusses her reaction to her son Danny's autism diagnosis and her efforts to help him. Many parents with a child on the spectrum will find parts of their own story in this one:

(CNN) -- When anything is wrong with your child, your first instinct is to make it better. Diagnose the situation, find the answer to the problem and take your child's pain away. But with autism, that takes quite a lot of doing.

Right after our son Danny celebrated his second birthday, he started to have increasingly lengthy and violent tantrums, usually initiated by his extraordinary sensitivity to sound. At the slightest provocation -- telephone ring, doorbell, a blow dryer, blender -- he would begin to scream, hold his ears and throw himself down on the ground.

We went right to our pediatrician, who was not alarmed, gave him a routine hearing test, and basically said, "He's 2, you've heard of the "terrible 2s."

Click here for the rest of the article.