Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ? - Embracing the Chaos: Kyle Jetsel's Autism Parenting Strategies

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Send us a text Navigating the world of autism parenting can be overwhelming, especially when you're just starting out. Our guest today, Kyle Jetsel, a father of six, two of whom are on the autism spectrum, opens up about his journey into the heart of autism parenting. Kyle generously shares his own family's trials, triumphs, and strategies, offering guidance, encouragement, and camaraderie to other parents on a similar journey. Kyle's story is not a straightforward one. Struggling to manage his son's autism, he developed a unique system - the COST system - to respond to his children's unique needs. This system, despite its simplicity, helped his family to thrive amidst the chaos. Kyle's sharing of his family's story, from handling sibling rivalry to dealing with meltdowns, provides practical strategies for creating a harmonious home environment. But there's more to autism parenting than just strategy. Kyle speaks passionately about the importance of love in helping children with autism. It's not enough to just say the words; children must feel it. Kyle believes that maintaining an stress-free and loving environment can play a pivotal role in helping children with autism. This episode provides a heartfelt look into the power of love and patience in the face of adversity. Join us as we travel with Kyle through his enlightening journey of autism parenting. https://tonymantor.com https://Facebook.com/tonymantor https://instagram.com/tonymantor https://twitter.com/tonymantor https://youtube.com/tonymantormusic intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI) The content on Why Not Me: Embracing Autism amd Mental Health Worldwide, including discussions on mental health, autism, and related topics, is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect those of the podcast, its hosts, or affiliates.Why Not Me is not a medical or mental health professional and does not endorse or verify the accuracy, efficacy, safety of any treatments, programs, or advice discussed.Listeners should consult qualified healthcare professionals, such as licensed therapists, psychologists, or physicians, before making decisions about mental health or autism- related care.Reliance on this podcast's contents is at the listener's own risk. Why Not Me is not liable for any outcomes, financial or otherwise, resulting from actions taken based on the information provided. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Why Not Me The World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor. Broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will make your laugh, some will make you cry. Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world. hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World. Today's guest is Kyle Jetzel. He's a father of six children, two which are autistic. He joins us today to tell us how his autistic children changed his life and what he does on a daily basis to give

give them the best opportunities so they can succeed in life. Welcome, Kyle. Hey, Tony, how you doing? This is Kyle Jetzel, the Driven Autism Dad. Hey, I'm doing great, and thanks for coming on. So earlier you was telling me that you and your wife had your first two children, and everything was kind of going along as planned, and then along comes child number three,

and things weren't working out quite the same, because the things that you did on your first two children wasn't, working the same on the third child, and you started questioning yourself as parents. Could you expand on that a little bit? Right. So with my first two sons, my first two typical sons, my wife and I were really unafraid to study and really work at being good parents. And we had talked about how we were going to do this together.

So we read a lot of books, and we had a pretty good plan. And even though my first two sons were what she called feral, right, I think all boys are kind of crazy. We were still doing real well, and we were kind of building the, you know, the dream family, the white picket fence, you know, kind of when we first get into those kind of things, we had this dream of what our life will be. Sure. And things were going well. I mean, we were happy. Our kids were good little boys. My wife and I were enjoying the experience. And then when my third son came along, everything changed dramatically. And it wasn't until he was, was maybe two or three where we started to see real dramatic differences, you know, he wasn't

really talking. He was having these tremendous outbursts. The things that we had done with our first two sons were absolutely not working with him. And so as we, as he got a little older, you know, he got to be about four or five, we decided to put him in a little preschool to see if maybe some outside influence might help him. And after a few months of his preschool, we had one of the teachers come up to us and say, have you ever thought about getting him diagnosed for autism? And at that time, this was 20 years ago. He's now 24 years old. So at that time, autism, it wasn't like what it is now, right? Everybody realizes it's a spectrum. Absolutely. Autism is much more known now than it was back then. So we're talking 20 years ago. What were your thoughts when they brought

it up to you that your son might be autistic? Yeah, and we knew that wasn't our son, Eric. We said, well, he's not autistic. I mean, we know what that is. And they got kind of educated us and said, no, it's a spectrum. And so we ended up having him diagnosed on the spectrum. And once they did, it was almost a sigh of relief. Because my wife and I looked at each other,

we thought, oh, no, we weren't horrible parents. You know, we weren't, we hadn't just lost our ability to parent all of a sudden. It's just he needed something different. And so initially it was a relief. And we looked at each other and thought, Now we can get him the help he needs, and then we can get back to having our, you know, typical white picket fence family.

It didn't take long to realize over the next few years as we tried everything the experts asked us to do. You know, there's therapies and experts and, you know, ABAs and occupational therapy and physical therapies. And we had them doing all these things, but we were still struggling like. mightily at home. And we were calling them at home autism challenges

is what we ended up calling them, because we would send him to these therapies. And first of all, it wasn't easy to get him there. It was a fight to get him to go to any therapy, first of all. And he would have meltdowns and kick and head and bide and scream and even to get him there.

But once we got him there, and he was done each day, it would come home and it didn't seem to be helping the challenges at home. So basically, when you had them at therapy, it was helping, but then you noticed the transition back home, it went back to what it was. You know, these people, they're experts and therapists, they do what they do and they do it well.

I mean, I don't want anyone to think I'm saying what they don't do is valuable because they do. But it didn't help us at home with meltdowns and self-harm and biting and kicking and, you know, all the things that we had been struggling with up to that point we were still struggling with. And the tension in our home was absolutely overwhelming. It was, we would wake up every morning with kind of a pit in our stomach wondering what's going to happen today. Wow, that's really tough. So what was it going through your mind at that time? Is he going to throw a brick through a piece of glass? Is you going to, you know, smash his head

through the wall, is he, and we really didn't know what to do. We were kind of at our wits end as to how to manage it. That's really tough. So with all this going on, did you find that it affected your marriage at all? You know what? We had to go to the lowest of lows before we really came to a good meeting point. For years, we struggled with this, right? I mean, the stress was, she would call me at work five or six times a day saying, you know, he's busted out of another window or he's smashed another TV or, and I would be driving home dreading coming home

because I knew there was going to be stress. And I'll never forget when it all kind of came to a head is one Saturday morning at about 6.30 in the morning, the whole house was awakened by him screaming, like this blood-curdling scream. You know, the horror movie scream that you hear sometimes. It's so frightening. We were all awakened with that.

And I'll never forget my two older typical sons locked themselves in the room because they knew that it was dangerous and scary. And they would just lock themselves in their room and hide from it. That's a scary thing for young kids. So with this meltdown, how was it different than the others that he'd had? He had what we called the meltdown of all meltdowns. And it was typically a meltdown with a lot. anywhere from, you know, 15 minutes to maybe an hour. And by then we could get him calm down and back to a normal state,

but this one lasted four hours. Wow. And every time we would think we would get him calm down and ran back up and start smashing things and hitting things and just tearing the house up. And my wife and I were kind of at our wits end. And I remember because we had, it had, because we didn't know what to do as parents,

I think she had kind of her own little plan and I had my own little plan and they were kind of budding heads on what we should do, right? There was really no experts to say, here's how you manage these things. Yeah, that I'm sure is very tough. So how did it work out? By the time we finally got him calm down after about four hours,

I mean, our house was a shambles and it felt like an earthquake shit at the same time there was a flood. And I remember, I think this happens to a lot of parents who are raising kids on the spectrum is, you know, you look for somebody to blame. You want to blame it on. You don't want it to just be blameless. And so, you know, I think at that point, my wife and I kind of turned on each other. And we got into this real mean-spirited argument because we were just so stressed out, right? She was stressed out. I was stressed out. There was no answers. Nothing we had tried was helping.

The experts, the therapists, we had spent thousands of thousands on all these things. And we were still on the same spot. And so I remember this argument just started the last two wrong. And I thought to myself, I really need to walk away because it's getting escalated beyond a point of nothing good is going to happen at this point. It's just, it's out of control. I had my keys in my pocket and I walked out on my front porch and I thought, I've got a couple of options here. I considered leaving. And I thought, I'm going to leave and never come back. That crossed my mind. That's a lot of emotion to go through. So needless to say, you didn't leave. So what changed to make you say, you know, I'm going to see this through. That exact moment, I remember having a thought of a lesson my father had

taught me when I was about 12 years old. I was playing in a baseball game, and I was playing shortstop, and there was two outs, and all we needed was one out to win the game. Well, a kid hit the ball to me, and I made an error, and as so often happens, when an error happens, the next couple of kids got hits, and they ended up winning and we ended up losing, and it was all my fault. And I remember after the game, I was dejected, you know, at 12 years old, this is your life, right? I mean, there's nothing bigger than this in your life. And so I remember why, I was walking over to my dad, and I said, you know what, Dad, I wish they hadn't hit the ball to me because then we could have won. And my dad, in the kindest way possible, we kind of leaned down on my level.

And he said, you know what, Kyle, that's not how we do things in this life. You never want your success or failure to be ever in anyone else's hands. He says, you want to take responsibility for your life. You want to take responsibility. You want every ball, every game hit to you. And you want to prepare yourself so that that's how you steal. He says, we never run from things that matter. we don't you ever go down without the biggest fights you can give and I remember it crossed my mind

in that exact moment and I thought this is my family what a great memory and to have it pop up at that particular point in time your dad really gave you some solid solid advice so after you thought about it then what was your next steps what was you thinking we can't continue to live like this the stress is overwhelming my two oldest typical sons aren't happy my wife and I had a damaged relationship because of the stress we were under. How old were your kids at that time? They were probably about, I would say, nine and seven maybe. So they were really young at the time, but old enough to see what was happening.

Sure. Kids that are seven and nine can understand a lot more than we give them credit for. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, at that moment I thought, well, you know what, I can't give up. I'm not going to leave. I'm never going to leave because this is important. But also, we can't continue to live like that. this. So I remember I did another thing my dad had taught me. We were living out in the country,

a little country town called Red Oak, Texas at the time. And we had a big giant pecan tree in our front yard. And I remember walking over under this pecan tree. And this is another thing my father had taught me. He said, when you don't know where else to go, just pray. Your father gave you some great advice. I went under that pecan tree and I knelt on my knees and I just prayed to God. And I said, hey, I'm not leaving. I'm not giving up, but we cannot live like this. Help me know. tell me what to do. And I remember pouring my heart out for probably five minutes, but it seemed like five hours, right? You know how that means. Sure. And I remember having this feeling, tell me, the problem is not your kids and the problem

is not your wife. The problem is you. It just struck me really hard in that moment. And I felt like it can't be me. I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, right? It can't be me. It's either the kids are the, I mean, it's the situation. It's my wife. She's not handling it well. It's the kids. And I was blaming it on everybody else, and that message just kept coming to me. And I thought, you know what, this is good, I guess, because I can do something about me. Sure. And it goes back to what your father was telling you, too. In that moment, I remember, you know what, I'm not leaving. We're not going to live like this anymore. If I have to die trying, I'm never going to give up trying to figure this out.

And it's going to be my mission and my goal to learn how to thrive. I called it thriving in chaos. I'm going to learn how to thrive in the chaos. Well, that's a good way of looking at it because you have to definitely get a new mindset for sure. I want to somehow or another figure out a way to lower the stress for my family, lower the stress for my wife, and give all my kids the best chance of happiness, including me. Right, because the most important thing is your family. In that moment, I got up and I walked back in the house and my wife was still mad. And so I said, you know what, Shelley's her name.

I'm not going to leave and I'm going to figure this out. And in that moment, I could tell she was still married because she said, well, good luck. So after that, you started with a plan, I'm sure. So what was your plans and how did you implement them? You know, I decided what I was going to do is every Sunday night, I would get my nine and seven-year-old sons. You know, we're going to have a plan for this week. And I would say, our plan for this week is we're going to be super patient. Okay, that sounds good.

I would write patience on a piece of paper and I would print it off and have it in every room of the house. And we would focus on one thing a week. and I kind of engaged my two older sons in this. I think that's a great idea to have that kind of participation like that. Over a period of time, we started creating strategies for handling everything from, you know, meltdowns to biting to self-harm to, you know, when they would be defiant. He was actually diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder at one point. And so it's almost as if we decided, okay, there's no challenge we can't face if we have a plan,

for instance, right? And so over a period of time, my wife saw the change in me because instead of, there was a time when my son would melt down, the whole family would go into fight or flight because it was so dramatic and overwhelming and I decided I was not going to go into fight or flight anymore.

I was going to go into an action plan, a series of steps I was going to create. So did the steps that you create, how do they work for you? Sometimes those steps worked well. Sometimes they didn't, but I was willing to make adjustments to every strategy. And so over a period of time, I started creating these strategies so my son would have a meltdown and I would handle it beautifully and I would handle in the spirit of love. And it was, you know,

my patterns started to change and his patterns started to change. And over a period of time, my wife said, what are you doing? I see something going on. And I see you handling this so well and it's lowering his, the amount of time he has meltdowns and you're not freaking out and you're getting very calm and loving. And over a period of time, I started to regain her faith in me. Well, that's good, because you made some changes, and evidently the rest of the family saw that and adapted to it. And now she's seeing it.

She was seeing me working and trying to create. And I basically took over. I said, hey, anytime there's a problem, I got it, babe. And I would just run to it. And over a period of time, I started creating this curriculum, and eventually, you know, maybe about a year, later she actually bought the end. She saw an experience where something horrible happened and I handled it so beautifully. At the end, she was, she pulled me aside and she said, you know what,

Kyle, you can't keep suppressing your anger is what she said, right? And I said, I'm not angry. I have a series of steps I follow and I try to do it in the spirit of love. And it doesn't make me angry. I just handle it. And she said, well, tell me what you're doing. And then once I started sharing these strategies and she started applying them, we really started to see success as a family. and no matter what he did, even if it was something new, he would have some sort of an outburst or difficult time, and we would create a very specific strategy. We would create steps for that strategy,

and we would teach it to the whole family, and we would try to apply it. And if it didn't work perfectly, we would make adjustments. And eventually, we'd create a curriculum that allowed us to really thrive in the chaos of raising our kids on the spectrum. And we started to get back that, and here's one of the things that's interesting is we never,

I don't know if we ever, or got back to White Pickett Fence family. Does that even exist? Maybe on TV, maybe in the movies, but what you was doing was creating a real live dynamic to help your family towards a better life.

Right. The stress wasn't overwhelming anymore, and we started to realize that it's the challenges, facing those challenges together in a loving manner that creates the love and the happiness and joy in our home. It's not the lack of challenges. It's to facing those challenges.

and doing it in a spirit of love and kindness, that creates a, you know, connection. Absolutely. And I'm just so happy that it's working for you. So you have your first two children, then you have your third child, he's autistic and gives you some challenges. Then you have a fourth child, and you find that he's autistic as well. So what are some of the similarities and differences between the two of them? Yeah, it's interesting because my first, the first one that was diagnosed was diagnosed severe on the severe autism into the spectrum. And so his, his, his, his, his, his cognitive functionality is, he has a very limited speech patterns, uh, cognitive functionality. My, my, my fourth son who was born is higher functioning. And, and, and it's interesting,

because my more severe son is, is an introvert, an extreme introvert. He wants to be left alone. My number four son is an extreme extrovert. And so there was tremendous conflict between those two, right? One is an extrovert. He wants to play all the time. The other one just wants to be left alone, and that creates a conflict. And so we're able to apply some of the same strategies, but we also, luckily, we had also created a framework for creating strategies. And so as we saw the differences in those two kids, every child is unique. Every child is different.

Every kid on the autism spectrum is their own unique individual. And so you can't really use, you can use a framework for strategies, but you can use, you really have to customize these things for each child. And so with our number four son, we ended up, I mean, we ended up in a lot of situations just going back to the drawing board and saying, okay, this kid responds differently. He has different cognitive ability. He has different, he's more, he can talk better, he can communicate better. He still has limitations.

So you have two autistic children unique to themselves that you created a strategy to help them. So can you tell our listeners what that strategy is and how it works and maybe how it can help them like has helped you? A framework for creating strategies we call the cost framework. It's a C-O-S-T. So if you tell our listeners exactly how that cost system worked for you. The C, any time we would come across a challenge, right? Our son would be doing something that was unacceptable in the real world or a behavior issue. we would just call that a challenge. And we would write out the challenge, that's the C,

and all the different things it's causing in our family and the stressors and long-term how that's going to affect him and us. And so we would kind of write out all these things so that we can understand the why. Why do we want to help him overcome this challenge, right? And then the O is objective. We wanted to have a clear goal for overcoming this challenge, and it's a long-term objective.

and so we would write out what we want to learn from this as a family or to teach him as a child. And we would write this out and it's really important to write this stuff out because if you don't write it out, it's not, you really don't have a plan. The next, the S in cost is for strategy. We wanted to name the strategy so that we can remember it when the situation arose, right? And we came up with some silly names. We have one, a strategy called Winning Every Meltdown. We have a strategy called Good versus Evil. We have a strategy called Your Movie.

We would name these strategies funny things because we knew that would help us remember what the strategy name was. And then the T and cost is tactics. What are the steps we're going to follow to lead us to our objective long-term, right? And we realized it wasn't going to happen overnight. We realized these kids aren't going to, you know,

our objective had to be a long-term objective and the steps that we took, the cool part is when the event would happen, when we were faced the challenge, we would say, okay, what's the strategy name, where are the steps? And we would apply those steps. And so by applying the steps, we took ourselves out of an emotional state. You know, instead of going into fight or flight, we went into a productive mode. And we could follow those steps every time. Now, the cool part about the process is you can adjust those steps, right? So if it doesn't work right away, sometimes you have to make adjustments, and this is true with what typical kids too, right?

Right. So it's my understanding that you use your steps to help other parents that are having issues with some of their children as well. Absolutely, yeah, and it's really fun because, you know, we'll come across families that have unique challenges, very unique challenges because every child is different. And we always just plug into the strategy and talk with them. We talk about the objectives.

A lot of times, you know, parents have the wrong objectives. A parent is having a challenge with the behaviors with the child. And they want the behaviors to stop. That's their objective. I think that's the wrong objective. They're like, what? I said, yeah, yeah, you're trying to change his behavior. You have to decide long term, how you're going to manage that behavior so that they understand it's better for them long term to stop the behavior.

Sometimes parents have to think about your objective long term. For instance, my son used to have a lot of meltdowns. And that's just who he was. He gets overstimulated. You know, things happen and he gets escalated. Now, for me to say, I want him to stop having meltdowns is the wrong objective. The right objective is for me to manage myself in such a way that he sees I get to model proper behavior and escalated situation. What happens is when he has meltdowns, and what that does for him is that helps him to see, it helps him

calm down quicker. It helps him regulate quicker. But if he sees me escalating when he escalates, he's going to think that's what people do. Absolutely. So you was telling me about a kind of funny little situation that happened with your two youngest. And it was about how you applied these steps with them because your oldest autistic son called them a moron. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, That's a great story because it illustrates very clearly how this process works. So, yeah, so when my twins were four or five years old, they came downstairs one time crying, just with big, you know, crocodile tears in their eyes. And my wife was sitting on the couch, and I remember my twins ran over to her.

She said, what's going on? What's matter? And they were just so sad. And they said, Eric called us morons. And Eric is their more severe brother on the spectrum. And initially, I could see my wife getting angry. Right. And it's natural for parents for us to be angry when our kids call each other names. And almost as quickly as she started to get angry, I saw her reset herself very quickly.

And she said, you know what? This is a challenge. Let's go grab our cost worksheet and let's figure this out. And so she ran over and she grabbed one. We have them all over the house. And she said, what's the challenge and what's the objective? And so she wrote it out and she wrote out the strategy and she wrote out the tactics. and she said to them, I missed immediately, before she even started, she said, you know what, y'all are the cutest silly morons I've ever seen, right? And she started laughing, and she reset their emotions too, and they started laughing. So they're all laughing together. And now they start creating this new strategy. And they called it, I don't remember what they called that it could have been the moron strategy. Something's silly, because it makes it something to remember.

Well, and so my twins, you know, in 15 minutes, they go from crying to laughing, and now they have a plan. And remember, they're four or five, you know, just young, real guys. They all leave the room and my wife is grinning, and they're grinning. And she takes what could be, you know, a bad situation and she turns it on its head and creates happiness. Well, no less than a week later, I remember my twins come down the stairs and they're just giggling. And usually that meant that we're up to no good because when you have twins, they conspire together. They set each other up, they do crazy stuff. And they were giggling.

And I said, why are you guys giggling? And they started laughing and they said, Eric called us morons. And they were giggling. Oh, that's just so great. What a great story. And it just shows that your plan was really working. It was so, it was so beautiful to me because my wife had taken, if you think about when one child calls another a name, the other one fights back and they start arguing,

bickering and flat. And then you as a parent have to get involved and you say, can you just never stop fighting? Can you just please not have played for 10 minutes? Can I not get a break in this world? And the parent escalates, right? And you get all this craziness. And then there's tension in your hole and your kids are scared and you're scared. And she took that.

Well, it could have been that and turned it into a beautiful lesson for my twins. Oh, that's a great story. And not only that, it's something that they can use and remember and carry on for the rest of their lives. Oh, my twins, to this day, they're 15. When he does something that's meaner, they realize what's happening is he just, he's an introvert. He wants to be left alone. He's had enough. And so they walk away and they grin and they usually come tell me and we have a good laugh about it.

You know, we go back to it and that's the kind of things in our family. Instead of letting an escalation or a meltdown ruin our denting or destroy our family, we realize the way we manage it really can change dramatically how our family sees the world and experiences joy. That's such a great way of looking at it. And it's just very, very impressive what you've done with your family. after you've started your steps. So I think that's a story that you wanted to tell us about your youngest autistic son

when he wanted to go out and get his driver's license. Yeah, so Ricky is his name. When he turned about, I think 19, he came to me and he said, I want to get my driver's license. He's mid-range, and so he scared me to be on the least. He has some cognitive disabilities, but I don't ever want to be the limiting factor in his life. I don't, and I don't think as parents, you know, sometimes I think we are the limiting factor because we're afraid.

And so we say, oh, he can't do that or I don't want him to, because we're afraid, right? And so I said, well, you know what, Ricky, let's do this. Let's make a plan. And step one is, for me, I knew the hardest part for him, he's a very responsible young man, he's a good kid. But the hardest part for him would be the written test. And so I said, here's what we're going to do. And I pulled my cost worksheet out, right? And I said, the challenge is getting your driver's license, the objective and the strategy and the tactics. And we wrote out the tactics.

Step one is for you to study the guide and then go take the written test first. Once he takes the written test and passes that, then we can put him into a driver's course where someone else could drive around with him with a break because it couldn't be me. I mean, I wasn't going to, because I would be freaked out. I can definitely understand your feelings on that.

It would just drive me crazy. and I don't want to be the one to limit him. And so somebody else has to either tell him yes or no. He said, okay, so he started studying the guide, and I would quiz him. And we went in and started taking the test, and he failed it the first time, and I think he failed it pretty bad.

That's too bad, but I'm sure that wasn't the last of it. He came to me, and he was pretty upset. You know, and I said, hey, you know what? Let's keep trying. We'll go back next week. You can do it every third or fourth day, and we'll just keep doing it and keep doing it. And we kept going back and kept going back and kept failing.

After the fourth or fifth time, you could see the pain. I said, it's okay because once you pass, all this is going to be a memory. It's going to be part of your journey. And here's the really cool part, Ricky. You can't fail if you never give up. Absolutely correct. And he said, that's true. And I said, yeah, so it's only a stepping stone.

That's 100% correct. So did he take it again? We took it one more time, so we got to six, and he failed it again, and he decided at that point he was going to take some time off. So how much time off did he take before we decided? You know, I'm going to try this again and see if I can't get my license. Maybe another six months passes or so, and he comes to me and he says, I'm ready to start again, Dad. Let's start again. Oh, that's great.

And so we go back up there, and by then they know us, you know, they know us at the DMV, and they're really rooting for him. So they're like, maybe you can take the written test on a piece of paper and we'll grade. it and they had some different ways we could do it because they know, you know, sometimes computers are hard for some kids and, well, we ended up going back and back and we continued to work at it. Well, that's 13th time. So was this unlucky 13 or lucky 13? I remember we go there and he, and again, you know, we're committed, right? You can't fail if you never give up.

That's 100% true. And I remember he took the test and he handed it to the lady and she was grading it. And he and I were sitting there and she says, okay, I've got the test. And usually Ricky would go up there by himself. And she says, Dad, I need you to come up here this time too. And I didn't know what was going to go on, you know. She had the biggest green you've ever seen and she said, you passed. That is such a great story.

And he just exploded in joy. He was so, and I exploded in joy. And for me, it was a tearful moment knowing he had put in the work. And it was interesting because I looked at the lady behind the counter and she had she had tissue and tears running down her face. And she said, this is the first for me, you know. And it was so exciting. And I remember just being so proud of him and him being so proud of himself

and realizing that, you know, some things are tough for us in life, right? But, you know, allowing him to continue and just go back and go back. And I think that was really a tipping point for him and his life because he said, you know what, there's nothing I can't do if I just continue to work in. And every failure is a step towards success. And now Riki has a job. He drives himself back and forth to work every day. He's doing tremendously well.

And that's so great to hear. Now, I understand that you've got quite a following yourself on Facebook. And, of course, you help and create a community there so that everybody can interact and help each other. So give us a little bit of information about that if you would. Yeah, it's called we have a Facebook page called Solving at-home Autism Challenge. On that page, we share tips and techniques and strategies. You know, I have hundreds of different strategies I've developed with different parents and myself that, you know, if there's not a strategy that works for you, there's probably a good framework to start with. And the idea is really is what we can't have or what I can't have, my mission is I can't have, I just, it hurts my heart to see parents who are just surviving because of the stress and turmoil they're living under, right?

because it's not healthy for the parents. It's really not healthy for their kids. It's hard to experience a lot of joy when you're in survival mode constantly. So my goal is to really help these parents realize you can get out of survival mode and start to really thrive, even though it's a difficult moment.

That's so true. I really think that it's a great philosophy and a great thing that you're doing that helping these other parents like you are. The most powerful thing, and I think the greatest blessing I've ever received, is to realize that when you manage those really hard moments very, very well, and you do it in a spirit of love, your kids feel that love.

Even when they're out of whack or melting down horribly or coming at you with fists, if you can be in a loving state and a patient and kind state, your kids feel your love. And it's not enough to tell these kids we love them. They have to, we really got to work on lowering stress and let them feel our love because kids don't, they don't hear you as much as they seal you. And if you start there, then those kids can really, you can start to model how to behave in the right manner. And that's really powerful for these kids.

It sure is. I have to say I've really enjoyed our conversation today. We could have talked from so much longer. You have so many stories that are both impactful and inspirational. So thanks again for coming on. You're welcome. I'm so, I'm really grateful you've invited me. And like I said, I just want to help.

Well, it's very apparent that you're helping a lot of people. I'm sure they appreciate it just as much as I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it. So thanks again. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to tonymentor.com. contact, then they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask, tell everyone everywhere about why not me, the world,

the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone, everywhere that you are not alone in this world.