The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Challenges of Raising an Autistic Child

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Rita Miceli discusses her experience raising her autistic child. Tech expert Sinead Bovell on Canada's AI future. Have strong mayor powers made a difference? And, Mandi Gray discusses her book, "Suing for Silence."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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have the bandwidth to keep a journal? It was therapeutic, like I said. It really helped me process what was happening because I couldn't wrap my head around it. I have four children, and my oldest was 18 months older than him. So she spoke nonstop, and he didn't. So I wrote it down to try to kind of monitor what was happening, and it really helped at the time. Not a coincidence, I gather, that this book is coming out now during Autism Awareness Month? No.

Not a coincidence. Right, right. How did your son react to the book? I wish I could say he understands what's going on. He doesn't have the cognitive ability, but he sees himself on the cover and he just loves looking at pictures. It's a sweet picture. It's a beautiful picture. Yes. And he's such a handsome boy and young man now. Indeed, with a great smile. He is a bit of a superstar on TikTok. How did that happen? It's surreal, honestly, for our family. Well, my twin daughters were two years after him.

And it was at the beginning of COVID. And they were doing some art activities. And they just videotaped it and posted it. And people just couldn't get enough of Judgy. They just adored watching the videos. And then there were so many, like millions of views on certain videos that I think it resonated with other families, especially the one of him living as an adult in our home,

how we set up our home. That one has millions of views. And I can understand why, because that's such an incredible fear for parents, the fear of the future and not knowing how your child will live. And so many people from all over the world, like we're talking England, Hungary, Europe, everywhere, reached out and were asking me questions of like, Rita, how did this happen for you? And how did you handle, you know, haircuts? Or how did you, how do you, you know, handle the fear of the future and all of those things? And that's really how I realized that I had to take those journal entries

and put them together for those that, you know, to answer a lot of those questions for people starting their autism journey. There was a, some would argue, significant step taken in the province of Ontario in that regard this past weekend, where the Minister of Education said he wanted smartphones banned from classrooms. What do we think? I 100% agree that that is an important place to start. The data, I think we all know and feel that we are distracted by these devices in our pockets that have been engineered with tons and tons of psychology research to keep us on platforms, whether it's apps on these devices or checking these phones constantly or these devices constantly. So I think at the very least, they need to be banned in classrooms. But when you actually look at the data as to smartphone bans, the stricter the ban is, the more effective the outcome is for children.

So there was a study done in Norway recently that looked at 400 schools that had different levels of smartphone bans. And they found schools where you couldn't bring the smart... If you did bring the smartphone, it has to be off the whole day or you hand it in at the beginning of the school day. Those schools had transformative outcomes in terms of mental health for girls, academic performance, and lower bullying by 46% and 43% for girls and boys respectively. And you can draw a straight line between those two things. You can draw a straight line, but what becomes more interesting, the classrooms where you just had to turn it off, but you

could have your phone, it actually became counterproductive because the kids couldn't wait to get to recess to check all those notifications or to quickly take a million bathroom breaks. So I think the stricter the phone ban, the better. And I think the more the data comes in, it's going to show we're better off giving kids a phone-free eight-hour, seven-hour day. I think that that's probably going to turn out to be the direction we go and the best-case scenario for outcomes for kids.

You know, in my experience, though, it's not the kids who are the problems here. It is the parents. Because when the kids come to the parents and say, I need a smartphone and I need an iPhone, whatever, are we up to 16 now or something? Anyway, the parents should say no, but they say yes. So how do you get this message through to parents that actually you just need to do some parenting here and not say yes to everything your kids want? I mean, I think it's a tricky one, right? It's the definition

of a collective action problem, where if just one or two families or one or two strict parents are the ones that say no, you are what seems to be disadvantaging your child in the short term, because that's where all their friends are. I think that's why we need a bit more education and a bit more support from government to help us understand the dangers of smartphones and the dangers of social media for young minds. We've been here before. We've seen similar kind of fights with big tobacco, with seatbelts. So I actually don't think it should be on an individual family or parent to recognize these harms and challenges on their own. I think we need more societal education on it and government to kind of step in and to help because it is impacting mental health. It is impacting educational outcomes.

Even among adults, we can feel we're distracted. Imagine trying to sit in class all day where you have something that's been engineered to keep your attention away from whatever it is that you should be doing. So a 12-year-old who asks for a state-of-the-art iPhone, a parent should simply say, I am worried about your safety, and for that I will give you a flip phone, and you can deal with it for the next four years. Is that the right response?

I don't know about a specific response. I would say a flip phone, sure, I'm very much in favor of those. For some kids, if you're walking to and from school, maybe a smart watch if you're able to get something like that. But I think it is going to require a broader shift for more parents and more students to move away from smartphones. I want to get a sense from all three of you off the top of what your view was on these strong mayor powers when Premier Ford gave them to you in the first place. Mayor Horvath, was it your inclination when you first got the powers to use them or not? Oh, definitely not. In fact, I was pretty clear with my council colleagues that my way of doing things is trying to hammer out a consensus or at the very least make sure that everybody's comfortable with decisions that we make as a group.

Some people will not be on side. Some people will. But didn't really expect to utilize the strong mayor powers. Mayor Mead Ward, what about you? Well, I said at the time that we didn't need strong Mayor Powers, didn't ask for them. We do need strong cities, which is a whole other show. But, you know, there's a whole bunch of different powers in there. And I think the one that got people's most concerned about was the ability to present a bylaw and get it passed with one

third support. So that's where all the focus of the conversation went. But there's also powers like my ability to appoint a vice chair of a committee. Does democracy crumble to the ground because I can appoint a vice chair? No. But this gets lumped in with this other one, which is overriding a vote with one-third support. So that is problematic. I understand the concerns around that. I've not had to use the powers for anything other than approving what council has decided. So that's been our experience in Burlington. We shall talk about all this and more. Mayor Guthrie, how about you? Your inclination at the beginning. Yeah, I, along with my colleagues here and probably many others, felt at the time that it was not really worth it. It was potentially going to cause some issues internally with relationships,

and it was better, as Andrea rightly said, the collaborative approach at that time. And it was also a divide, I think, between both the political and the administration, where that was not quite clear anymore with the strong mayor powers. So there was some concerns around there at that time as well. What I find interesting about all of your answers is that since then, you have all used these strong mayor powers, even though you were inclined not to use them off the top. And Mayor Guthrie, I'll follow up with you. You said when Premier Ford gave you the strong mayor powers, to me, this legislation starts to diminish the role of a councillor. A councillor can give opinions, ideas and feedback. No one mayor knows everything about every issue. So what made you change your

mind? I think a few things. The first is, is that a lot of this has to do for me with housing. And secondary would be affordability, of course. And when the legislation was tabled, there was no requirement of municipalities to have housing targets. The housing crisis got a lot worse since that time. And so in the ability for me to leverage the strong mayor powers to try to propel those issues forward around housing and affordability, I think was wise at this time to do that because it was the crisis that we were in on those two issues. I felt like it was needed for me to do that. As a previous councillor, before I became the mayor, I could understand why I said what I said there. And I actually still quite

believe it. But I think up to the mayor to work collaboratively, even with the powers to be used, with fellow colleagues on council and the administration, is still something that I want to continue to do. How did you get interested in the specific intersection of sexual assault and defamation law? So it started around 2017 when I was doing a lot of public facing work and in regards to sexual assault specifically.

And I was hearing from people globally about their experiences of reporting or trying to report and not being able to. All the things that we heard really during the Me Too movement. being able to, all the things that we heard really during the Me Too movement. And one of these stories really was shocking to me. And it was Lynn, who you meet in the first chapter of the book. And Lynn was apprenticing as a tattoo artist in France. She's Canadian. And while she was there, she experienced repeated bullying and harassment and eventually repeated rapes by her boss. And she reported it to the police in France, and he was criminally charged. And after the criminal charges were laid,

there was a trial, and he was acquitted. And following the acquittal in France at the time, he was able to criminally charge her for making false accusations, so she was facing jail time, and also sue her in defamation. And as you can imagine, this was really shocking to Lynn, who was already back in Canada, who then had to go to France and defend herself against potential jail time and a defamation suit in French, which was her second language.

And it really had a detrimental impact on her well-being even after the charges against her had been dropped and the lawsuit had ended. However, I assume that this was something happening in France, it was happening elsewhere until shortly after I met another woman who had a similar experience, but this was in Canada and she had reported somebody in her workplace for sexual harassment and similarly was sued. And so I asked Joanna Bierenbaum, who's a litigator in Toronto who specializes in sexual abuse cases at the time. And she was representing a number of women who had also been sued after making formal reports of sexual assault. And then the Me Too movement happened. And I don't need to give you a primer on what that entailed.

And then the Me Too movement happened, and I don't need to give you a primer on what that entailed, but it resulted in many people feeling empowered to speak about what happened to them, to make formal reports, and as become a more common tactic following disclosure or report of sexual assault in the Canadian context, but also globally. All right, before we dive into that, I do want to ask, which I find quite interesting, on the day you submitted the proposal for this project, the book, the subject matter got personal for you. Do you mind telling us what happened there? Yeah, it was one of those really unfortunate set of circumstances. So this book is from my PhD work, and part of that process is submitting a proposal about what you're going to do. And I was on that high of getting into my research, and I sat down in class, and I opened my email and saw, hey, have you read the National Post? You're being sued for defamation. And I was not being sued by the person who assaulted me, but I was being sued by somebody who was publicly accused of sexual assault. And I tweeted about the case when many people were

engaging in a public conversation about the allegations that were made to the university at the time. So it was shocking to me. And despite, you know, finishing my PhD, doing a two-year postdoc, writing this book, becoming a faculty member, six years have gone by and my case is still before the courts.