There is one thing I can’t stand more than anything in the
ASD community and that is people claiming to be “experts” on a subject when
they haven’t lived or experienced it themselves and creating products/or
paid-for-advice for autistic individuals or their parents for significant financial
gain without considering if the advice or products they are selling are
actually benefiting or harming their customers. Don’t get me wrong there are
good intentioned people out there that don’t know anyone directly that has
autism but still want to learn and help people in the autism community. Plus when
you donate a significant amount of time to studying and creating something you
do need to recoup some costs or you will eventually be living under a bridge. However, I caution parents to please consider
your sources of information and the sources motives. If their number one motive
is to make money from you – then BEWARE!
The advice or product/s they are selling need to be researched before
using them on your child or student. Please be careful! It only takes an extra
minute or two to do a Google search of reviews of a product or informational
source. I also will tell you that some reviews need to be read carefully though
because I have seen people write pieces that are completely inaccurate, but
again it just took an extra minute to do one more search of their claim to
prove that their article was entirely fabricated. As a parent of three
children, (two on the spectrum) I urge you to please consider your source and
guard your money. Make sure that money you donate and spend goes to safe, moral
causes and/or businesses, etc. Just in case,
there is a negative viewer out there that thinks that I write and edit only for
financial gain let me explain one thing - I make it a goal to have sound advice
for our children and parents through the magazine and have insisted that people
that can’t afford a yearly subscription still have access to some of the
information through our You Tube channel and the Autism Parenting Magazine
blog. Ultimately, the magazine is a
business and it has expenses so we must charge to keep up the production but
know this I will never knowingly sell bad information or recommend a product
that I haven’t tried for my own financial gain without considering the effect
it has on people’s well-being or finances.
