Temple Grandin To Educators Focus on Students’ Strengths

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In SXSWedu Speech, Temple Grandin Asks Educators to Focus on Students Strengths

Parents should be doing this building up of their children's strengths instead of on getting lots of special services for what their children are bad at and crutches in the form of school aides. When building up one's strengths, the strengths tend to get so good that one can use them and their development to help the areas that one is not naturally good at, and also build up self-confidence too.

How are parents supposed to build up their children's strengths? What if your kids strengths are in areas and subjects you know nothing about? What if it requires expertise and equipment only a school is likely to provide?

It is very natural for parents to build up their children's strengths.
For example, when I was a kid, one of my strengths was drawing, and neither of my parents were interested in drawing, and my mother is quite bad at drawing, but they still built up my strength in this area by encouraging me to draw, showing interest in my drawing, taking me to the library to get drawing books, letting me spend uninterrupted time drawing, looking into art programs and enrolling me in art programs even when I didn't know there were any programs and bad at communicating my interests.
The same for my interest in music, which both my parents know nothing about, and science, which my father does know about, since he is a scientist, and nature, which both my parents are interested in too.
Another aspect of building strength is simply to focus on strength as an attitude instead of focusing on weakness.
For example, my parents didn't emphasize what I was bad at growing up, it was always what I was good at, so I grew up without constant reminders of you are bad at x,y,z even if I was bad at communicating, socializing, sports, etc. It was all about how I was good at academics, art, music, etc. There was no school aide to monitor me or make me do things their way, so I was free to use my own strenghts to figure out my own ways of doing things, which help me a lot still.
My parents really did not depend on the school for raising me. They depended on the school for academic education, but in all other aspects, they depended on themselves for raising me, including teaching self-help skills, EF skills, social skills, etc, which in my opinion is the role of parents, not the school, whose job is academic education.

It sounds as if your parents were very good, but I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect everybody to do what your parents did.

Not all parents have the ability and means to provide for their kid's special interests. The way I see it, people pay taxes to fund schools, and in turn schools should provide for their kids. For instance, musical instruments can be very expensive - I know at my school instruments and lessons were subsidised, which made them much more accessible for poorer kids. If kids have particular interests and talents perhaps schools could provide tutors and special classes. At my school we had special tutors for people doing AS Maths early, and Further Maths at A-Level.

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When I was growing up, we did not have a lot of money, but my parents did figure out ways to provide for my interests in spite of not having much money to spend on them. For example, we always checked out books at the library instead of buying books, as it is free. I did not have much drawing supplies, only the cheap kind of colored pencils and crayons from walmart, but I find it is not necessary to use high quality things to imagine something and draw it on regular white paper. The art programs I got into were selective, but also free. For music, I did not play an instrument until teenage years, when my parents had the means to pay for lessons and buy a keyboard, then a piano. Before that, I did singing and also got into selective, but free programs. For science, my father was a great resource. For nature, we went on family car trips around the countryside or to nature parks like smoky mountains, always camping, staying at motels, and cooking own food or eating at cheap fast food places. So I think it is not necessary to have much parental money to provide richly for a child's interests and build their natural strengths. But it did help that my parents are smart people, especially my father is verry merry berry smart, but my mother is smart too, so they were able to use their smartness in raising me.

These are very good examples, and they at the same time teach children that they don't need much money to do good things and learn good things, and that they shouldn't expect the government to do everything for them.

If Autism has a spokesperson I guess it's Temple.