“This friendly, inviting, uplifting, and bracingly honest book is nothing less than a blueprint for a more humane future in which everyone is given a chance to live up to their full potential. By sharing their struggles as well as their triumphs, Lawson and Swearingen have laid out a clear path for others who want to create places to support young neurodivergent people in their transition to productive, engaged, and confident adulthood.”

- Steve Silberman, author, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“As a parent of an autistic adult, I've found that good programs for neurodivergent adults are few and far between. Janet Lawson and Dan Swearingen’s experience as parents of an autistic adult and Lawson’s as a therapist led to their creation of a successful program at Autistry Studios using project-based learning. This fun and easy-to-read book is a guide for how similar programs could be created by others in their own communities; not only would these programs nurture neurodivergent adults, they would challenge them to be the best they can be.”

- Debra Muzikar, author, The Art of Autism: Shifting Perceptions and The Art of Autism: Shattering Myths

“This book is an absolute gift to the neurodivergent community. In its pages are insights, observations, and interventions that will help families, educators, and therapists improve the lives of neurodivergent individuals as well as guide service providers in the creation of programs based on their strengths and interests.”

- Mary Jane Burke, Marin County Superintendent of Schools, 1994-2022

“This is a must-read, never-too-soon-to-read book that supports parents as they envision how their autistic child can become his/her best self as he/she grows up. What I found most admirable is Autistry’s recipe for independence for the neurodiverse: to learn to challenge, educate, take care of, and control yourself while finding a way to meaningfully engage with your community.

Janet and Dan write in a vernacular that will make total sense to any parent who has worked to unravel his or her child’s learning and seemingly idiosyncratic interests. Teachers, therapists, and autism researchers like myself will quickly ‘get’ that Janet and Dan’s discussion of needing to go where the child is at is working with ‘instrumental motivation,’ that the ‘primary aspects of autism’ they describe are what I have written about as innate primary disabilities in the neuropsychology of autism, and that their ‘secondary aspects’ are what someone like me writes about as failed self-accommodations, tertiary deficits—tantrums, obsessive, repetitive, self-injurious behavior—and so on.

There is no need to resort to the jargon of neuropsychology or behaviorism to apprehend the very successful and important principles that underpin the machinery of Autistry.”

- Bryna Siegel, PhD, Executive Director, Autism Center of Northern California