Life, Animated by Ron Suskind Page A

professionals—is that this passion should be used as a tool, a reward, to encourage Zack to complete educational tasks and personal care goals he was otherwise resistant to undertake. Of course “Finish your homework before watching TV” is a common refrain in every household. But a typical child—the term of art is “neurotypical”—is able to discover and nourish interests much more broadly, more liberally, whether managing to find something provocative in that night’s homework, or seeking the joy, and affirmation, of bringing home the “A” on a test. With the autistic kids, their interest, say, in the desired video is deep and maybe unquenchable; their interest in so much else, often very faint. Left to their own devices, the thinking goes, they would slip into their chosen area, to the exclusion of all else. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others it’s maps. Or, in the case of Owen and Zack—and we’re certain, many others—it’s Disney movies.
    Don’t cut it off, Gordon suggests. Control it. Use videos as a reward, to be viewed at a designated time if certain things are done. And no rewinding , which Gordon feels just deepens the perseveration, like a wheel in a ditch. That’s what he did with Zack. Scheduled viewings and no rewind button: the videos were important, largely as a motivational tool.
    We’re already placing some controls on viewing. Now we add to them. We set up a point system at school, a behavioral technique, where he can pick up points for appropriate behavior—listening to the teacher, attending to his work. Enough points meant a video that night. Some nights, there are not enough points. Sorry. No video.
    There are modest improvements in his behavior at school—nothing dramatic—but after two successive days of no-video edicts, Cornelia is awakened in the middle of the night.
    She jostles me out of a deep sleep. “I definitely heard something downstairs.” I check the clock. It’s three A.M. Five minutes later, baseball bat in hand, I meet Owen in the basement. He’d settled in for a movie marathon.
    He’s profuse in his apologies. He says he won’t do it again. But, a few days later, we see clues in the morning. He’s just gotten better at covering his tracks.
    Soon, the house slips into low-grade guerilla war—a hearts and minds struggle that draws from us decidedly mixed feelings. It’s like we’re cutting off his supply lines. School is hard and stressful. His release, his refuge, is being cut off.
    Cornelia calls me one morning as she’s driving him to school. Owen is snoring away. What’s the point of bringing him to school, she asks. We need to bring in heavy weapons. After work, I stop by the hardware store.
    That night, we all gather in the basement to discuss the new house rules. I’ve padlocked the cabinet that holds the big TV. I hold the key, like a federal marshal.
    “Mom and I will hold this one key. There will be no other.”
    Disney is now a controlled substance.

T he concept is a massive redirect.
    With TV now limited inside the house, with us trying to help Owen control his passions and impulses, we need to channel the animated river toward school. Lab speaks endlessly about its arts-based learning. Let’s see if they can harness Owen’s self-directed learning, just as we’ve been doing in the basement and, now, everywhere. All we do is act out scenes; drama is one of Lab School’s specialties.
    Of course, the self-directed part makes it all a bit more complicated. We have to be guided by whatever Owen is into . As the fall of 1999 turns to winter of 2000, he isn’t into just any Disney movie. He’s deeply besotted with Song of the South .
    It was trouble when it was released in 1946. And that was before the civil rights movement.
    After its debut, Time magazine wrote that the movie’s rendition of race relations in the years just following the Civil War was “bound to land its maker in hot water.” It did.