What I’ve Learned From My Daughter’s Autism (And Why Green ASC VET Matters to Me)
When my daughter was born, she’d been through a rough pregnancy. My wife spent the last months on bed rest, on medication to hold off early labor, and our daughter arrived early, still inside the amniotic sac, looking like she’d fought her way here. She spent her first week in an incubator. For a long time afterward, she just seemed tired. Like she didn’t quite know where she was yet.
I have an older daughter too, and with her, the milestones came fast. You could see a little person behind her eyes within weeks. With my younger one, we waited. And waited. No spontaneous laugh at our silly faces. No pointing. No looking where we looked. By the time she was close to two, she had one word, and even that came and went. She wasn’t sleeping through the night. She wasn’t toilet trained. She screamed instead of asking for things.
We were lost. Genuinely lost. We called a speech therapist who came to the house, and we started reading everything we could find, because nobody hands you a manual for this.
The Hacks
My background is in software. At some point I started thinking about my daughter’s brain the way I think about a system that isn’t wired the way I expected. Temple Grandin’s writing helped a lot here, she describes the autistic brain almost like a computer where some of the long-distance cables between regions never quite connected. That reframing changed how I approached things. Instead of trying to teach her the way you’d teach any toddler, I started looking for the specific “hack” that would get a concept through.
The first real one was the iPad. She loved looking at photos, and I’d say “finger” every time before she tapped to the next one. That’s how pointing entered her world. Once I saw she understood what “finger” meant on a screen, I used the same word off-screen, and suddenly she had a way to ask for her water bottle instead of screaming for it.
From there it was picture books, flashcards, soap bubbles as a reward because she barely ate anything besides baby food pouches, and a lot of repetition. Not gentle, occasional repetition. Hundreds of repetitions. Her first spoken word came through pointing at picture cards, and it was rough around the edges, but it was a word.
Somewhere in that process, I ended up building a simple app for her. She’d already learned to navigate YouTube Kids on her own, so I built something with a similar layout but focused entirely on vocabulary, pictures and audio for the concepts we were drilling anyway. That became Word Tube. It started as flashcards of things from her own life, and other parents kept asking for ready-made exercise sets, so it grew from there. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme, but it came directly out of standing in our living room trying to find one more way to reach her.
What This Taught Me About the Bigger Picture
Here’s what I keep coming back to, years into this. The tools that actually worked for my daughter weren’t the standard ones. They were adapted, specific, and built around how her brain actually processes the world, not how a textbook says a toddler should learn. Every real breakthrough came from someone (usually me, at midnight, frustrated) refusing to accept that the standard approach was the only option.
That’s exactly why I think Green ASC VET matters. My daughter is still young, so employment is a long way off for us, but I already think about it. A lot. What happens when the school years end and the job market doesn’t come with the same support structure that early intervention does? Most vocational training assumes a certain kind of attention, a certain kind of social interaction, a certain comfort with unpredictability. That’s not a fair assumption for a lot of autistic people, the same way “just teach her like any other toddler” was never a fair assumption for my daughter.
Using XR and simulators to let autistic people practice a job role before stepping into the pressure of a real workplace makes complete sense to me. It’s the same logic behind everything that worked in our house: lower the sensory and social cost of learning something new, let the person repeat it as many times as they need without judgment, and build confidence before throwing them into the deep end. A simulated environment where you can rehearse a task over and over, at your own pace, without a room full of strangers watching you get it wrong, that’s not a workaround. That’s just good teaching.
I also think the awareness piece matters as much as the training itself. Employers need to understand that a different way of working isn’t a lesser way of working. I’ve seen firsthand how much capability there is once you find the right entry point, and I’d rather see that capability go into a real job than go unused because nobody built a door that fit.
Where I Am Now
My daughter is still working through the basics, communication, routines, the everyday hacks. I don’t know yet what her path to employment will look like, or whether it’s even the right frame for her specifically. But I know that whatever door she needs, someone is going to have to build it, the same way I built one small door for her to start talking.
Projects like Green ASC VET are doing that work at a bigger scale, for a stage of life I haven’t gotten to yet but think about often. That’s why I said yes to writing this.