The question of how to educate neurodivergent children has accompanied the topic of autism from the very beginning. One well-known and touching story is that of the first person ever diagnosed with autism: Donald Triplett (who, at the time of writing, was still alive and in good health at the age of eighty-six). Born to well-educated and caring parents – but at a time when autism was virtually unknown – Donald underwent all sorts of trials and detours before finding the environment that would allow him to reach his full potential. Initially institutionalised, his condition deteriorated dramatically. It was only after his parents placed him in the care of a nearby farming family (close friends of theirs) that Donald found the peace, affection, support, and environment in which he could thrive.

The topic is – for easily understandable reasons – the subject of public, scientific, and ideological debates. As for myself, I only have surface-level knowledge of its historical development. Still, I believe our own case may be quite revealing when it comes to how the German social and educational system cares for children with special needs, as well as how this highly developed country approaches the matter in general. Put as simply as possible: we believe that Lea received the best of what the education system, we ourselves, and the individual professionals responsible for her care could offer. Today, she is a calm, happy, and balanced young woman who – within the limits of her serious condition – enjoys life and fills all of us with a sense of earned pride and satisfaction after so many years of relatively difficult trials.

Once again, the main credit goes to her mother, who invested enormous effort in researching and comparing every possible educational path for a child with such unique needs. As I said earlier, we were incredibly lucky that one of Berlin’s best schools for children with special intellectual and psychological needs was literally on our doorstep – just a few hundred metres from our home. After the inevitable hesitation, doubts, and meetings with educators and social workers, we ultimately enrolled Lea in that very school. Thus began the next major chapter of her life – and of ours as a family.

The pedagogical and educational focus at the Helene-Haeusler School is directed primarily at acquiring practical and social – rather than purely academic – skills and competencies. Depending on your personal outlook, that may sound either entirely self-evident or deeply controversial. For us, however, there was never any doubt or difficulty in accepting the idea that it would be far more important for Lea to master the basic techniques and habits of everyday life with others than to develop purely intellectual abilities. (She never managed to learn how to read or write, for instance, but she does operate her personal computer with ease and displays a remarkable ability to navigate large amounts of information through purely visual means.)

The Helene-Haeusler School is a large institution with several hundred students, all with varying disabilities. There are children with Down syndrome, autistic children, and many others with diverse diagnoses and difficulties. Naturally, with such a wide range of needs and tasks, the pedagogical framework must be broad and adaptable – but the real vitality of the whole system lies in the concrete, day-to-day work of the professionals who teach there. And they are truly excellent: well-trained, serious, and deeply committed. That, at least, has been our experience over the ten years Lea spent under their guidance and care.

The school is large and modern, and – especially important in today’s climate of budget cuts to social services – relatively free of the funding struggles that plague many other public schools. (In Germany, private schools have not acquired the same status of exclusivity and necessity for a “proper” education as they have in the English-speaking world.) The classrooms are spacious, modern, well lit, and well equipped. The school includes numerous workshops for developing practical skills, a large gymnasium, and even a swimming pool. I hardly need to mention that the school operates full-day programmes.

The educational routine is entirely centred around the school’s guiding principle: Lebenspraktische Förderung – practical life skills training. Every classroom includes an adjacent space set up as a modern kitchen, since preparing food – not full meals but breakfast and reheating lunch – is an important part of the daily rhythm. The day begins with the morning circle (Morgenkreis), a practice familiar to most children from kindergarten, involving activities such as singing, light exercise, or sharing important thoughts if needed. Each class has no more than ten children, supervised by three or four teachers and caregivers. A large calendar in the room helps clarify the structure and flow of each day. The classroom itself is anything but rigidly arranged – there are no traditional rows of desks. Instead, it is divided into several zones: a play area, a work and study zone, and a rest area. Photos of the children engaged in various activities are displayed throughout. The environment does change, though not very often – autistic children are not fond of frequent changes. The daily schedule is relatively strict, but not inflexible.

Great attention is given to a wide range of sports and movement therapy activities, since most of the children here struggle with gross motor skills and spatial orientation. These therapies and exercises are therefore an essential part of the school programme. As the students grow older, more and more emphasis is placed on social abilities – there is, for example, a dedicated dance club, and the subjects of sexuality, love, and friendship are anything but taboo. Like all other adolescents, these students need orientation, knowledge, and experience in this delicate but crucial area of personal development (all of this, of course, only in the upper grades).

Such, in the briefest terms, is the overall atmosphere at the school. What follows, however, is the vast subject of specific approaches to the education of children on the autism spectrum – and as you might imagine, it differs greatly from, say, the education of children with Down syndrome.

Without going into unnecessary detail, my own understanding is that autistic children respond far better to visual than to verbal modes of communication. Lea is a textbook case: she often cannot grasp the meaning of even the simplest verbal instructions, but orients herself quickly and effectively when she can see what is being asked. Examples of such challenges (and their solutions) are countless. At the school, for instance, there was a well-known case of a child who, despite countless explanations, was never able to find his way to school on his own – until his parents uploaded a series of photographs onto his mobile phone, showing each turn and street along the route. This method worked like magic.

Lea’s development followed a similar path. We turned to the well-established TEACCH system (Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication-handicapped CHildren). I won’t go into detail here about the history or theory of this method – there is plenty of information available online, at least in English-language sources. The basic premise of the programme is the recognition that autism is not something “curable,” and that the aim is not to free students from their condition but to help them live with it in the most practical ways, while removing the many internal and external obstacles that inevitably confront every person on the spectrum. In contrast to other approaches (such as the well-known ABA method I mentioned earlier), TEACCH does not attempt to alter underlying behavioural motives or attitudes. Instead, the emphasis is on working around the natural barriers autism places on cognitive abilities. The key word, at least in my view, is this: visualisation, visualisation, visualisation.

If you do a quick search online, you will find what are called the five core principles of this approach. For me, though, it all comes down to one thing: strict structuring and visual representation of every activity throughout the day. As the parent of a child on the spectrum, you cannot simply leave their preparation and education entirely to the professionals – your own involvement and commitment are crucial. Lea’s mother – who, over time, became something of an expert in applying TEACCH techniques – prepared a large visual board at home. Using Velcro strips, she created daily columns of laminated pictograms representing activities from waking up, brushing teeth, and getting dressed to going to school and various extracurricular events, arranged in the order in which they occurred.

The effect was remarkable: the child who until then had reacted with complete indifference to every verbal prompt – “In the morning we brush our teeth,” and so on – suddenly began doing these things without difficulty, sometimes even with enthusiasm, simply because she could now understand them. An important element of the programme is that after completing each activity, the child removes the corresponding pictogram from the board, gaining the added satisfaction of a job well done. Needless to say, parental support and encouragement are an indispensable part of the process.

I don’t know to what extent what I’m about to say will align with your sense of what information is truly relevant here, but for me – and for Doreen – what has always mattered most were our own attitudes: the need for constant flexibility, the willingness to learn alongside our child, and the refusal to cling to rigid preconceptions about what counts as important and what does not. Many parents at our school struggled with what they saw as the overly practical focus of their children’s education. They wanted to see their kids master the things children are normally expected to learn at school – basic literacy like reading, writing, and arithmetic. For us, this was never the top priority.

Of course, we made every effort to teach Lea to read (and even now, we don’t really know whether she can or can’t – how else does she navigate her computer so well?). But since the results were never clear, we gradually stopped treating this as crucial. Writing, meanwhile, seemed impossible from the very beginning. She has limited control over the fine motor movements of her fingers, so everything that depends on that coordination – from fastening buttons to holding a pencil – gradually dropped out of our goals and expectations.

That doesn’t mean we ever gave up trying to introduce her to more advanced forms of human communication – the symbolic realm. We never stopped trying, and fortunately, the availability of computers in our era turned out to be decisive. Like many autistic people, she has a natural affinity for the visual. The graphical interfaces of computers always came easily to her, and as someone who earns his living working with these machines, I did everything I could to nurture this ability to the fullest. She started very young – probably no older than four or five.

Naturally, we’re speaking only of abilities that fall within her own interests. For Lea, the computer is a way of being “together” with people and things that matter to her – without being constrained by their physical presence, which usually confuses, exhausts, or simply bores her. She has vast collections of family photographs and videos, and she is an avid fan of YouTube, where she finds endless things that captivate her.

Perhaps it’s worth giving you a glimpse of a typical day in Lea’s life now, at twenty-three, so you can judge for yourself whether what we’ve achieved might seem sufficient – or even desirable – as a form of development and way of life for your own neurodivergent child.

Let’s begin with the fact that Lea is exceptionally privileged. She lives in a specialised home for autistic people, located in a peaceful rural setting with full access to infrastructure and recreational facilities. This is far from guaranteed, even here in Germany; as far as we know, only about 4 percent of autistic individuals receive such comprehensive support, housing, and care. The other 96 percent, we suspect, must find other ways.

Lea has her own room, largely furnished by us, though the overall standard of the environment and furnishings throughout the home is exceptionally high. Each resident has their own room, and each is furnished differently – parents and residents together decide what should go where. Lea, for instance, is one of only three residents with a personal computer – simply because the others have no interest in such things, or their interest wasn’t encouraged early enough. Others, instead, have televisions, something that never appealed to Lea, perhaps because it offers no interactive element. In any case, the home is modern, pleasant, and filled with an atmosphere of warmth and care.

The day begins with the usual routines of personal hygiene, dressing, and preparing for daily life – all of which she now manages on her own. For us, it was nothing short of a revelation to discover that just a few months after starting her independent life, Lea suddenly became able to control her bodily functions and was no longer dependent on diapers. When you have lived with something like that for as long as you can remember, overcoming it feels more significant than any academic achievement. In fact, it was a profound breakthrough – intellectual as much as practical, at least from our perspective.

Back to the daily rhythm: just as in school, the day begins with a shared morning ritual of some kind – whether it’s called a “morning circle” or something else is irrelevant. What follows is each resident’s individual programme, tailored to their preferences and abilities. The home provides a wide range of activities and facilities – from puzzles and games to a loom and even a woodworking shop in the courtyard – where everyone can find what suits them best. After this come various scheduled activities focused mainly on physical wellbeing: swimming, sports, long walks, physiotherapy, and outings to the nearby town, among others.

Later in the afternoon, each resident has personal time – and this is when Lea turns to her own world of music, singing, dancing, and, of course, her computer. Doreen is in almost daily contact with the caregivers, and we constantly see that they not only look after our child but also surround her with the atmosphere of warmth, humanity, and love without which no autistic person – no person at all – can live a normal life. In all the years she has lived there, we have never once found her despondent or depressed. On the contrary: she appears so balanced, happy, and content with her life that even we sometimes cannot quite believe the good fortune we’ve ultimately been given.

Is it enough?

For us – yes.

⸻ ❦ ⸻

 

 

A very normal day in the life of Lea Enev, described by her caregiver in a letter to her mother

Hello, Ms. W,

I just returned to the residence with Lea. Since it was quite chilly today, we went to X instead of P. We also did some fitness exercises that required her to pay close attention to her coordination. She was very communicative and happy, laughing and giggling throughout. Bowling was great fun for both of us – Lea finds throwing the ball down the lane simply fantastic.

Afterwards, we headed to V for dinner. Subway now offers new gluten-free sandwiches – a small surcharge, but really excellent. She enjoyed hers immensely. No surprise, after all the exercise. I’m saving the zoo visit for a warmer day.

I’ll prepare the plan for your visit with Lea right away [in accordance with the TEACCH programme, all events in Lea’s life are presented in graphical form on a large board]. She’s already very excited about your upcoming visit and stay.

This week, Lea’s “offers” went very well again [these are the daily activity proposals given to the “clients” – Ed.]. Some days she spends almost entirely chatting and laughing. Who knows – maybe it’s the weather. Animal care, sports, music, neck exercises, and walks are regular activities and responsibilities. Yet she can also be persistent and focused in carrying them out.

Best regards,
D. C.