People Think Having a Nonverbal Teenager Is the Hardest Age. They Couldn’t Be More Wrong.

People often assume the hardest part of raising a nonverbal child with autism comes during the teenage years, when your child is bigger, stronger, and harder to physically manage. After raising my 15-year-old son Lucas, I can honestly say the years that scared me most came much earlier.

This week, I talk about why the uncertainty of ages 5, 6, and 7 weighed on me far more than life with a nonverbal teenager today. I share a recent moment that reminded me just how much Lucas has grown, why fear of the future can be more difficult than the reality itself, and how years of patience, consistency, and small lessons have shaped the young man he is today.

I also discuss teaching emotional regulation, setting healthy iPad boundaries without constant battles, respecting a nonverbal teenager's privacy and dignity, and why peace of mind often comes from finally knowing your child instead of fearing who they might become.

If you're parenting a nonverbal autistic child and wondering what the future holds, I hope this episode offers a little reassurance. It may not get easier physically, but it can get much easier emotionally.

It's Here! Get the book – “Hi World, I’m Dad: How Fathers Can Journey to Autism Awareness, Acceptance, and Appreciation” on audio, digital, or print.

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Also, be sure to read the blog that started it all - Hi Blog! I'm Dad.

Transcript

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Welcome And Where To Find Me

James Guttman 0:03

Hi Pod, James Gutman. Thank you guys once again for finding me on any streaming service. I'm everywhere. I'm on HiPodOndad.com. Every Friday. We are on the cusp of August. It is another edition of the show. Thank you for finding me. Thank you for joining me. Maybe you found me uh through streaming services. Maybe you found me on TikTok. If you don't follow me on TikTok, follow me on TikTok. Hi, James Gutman. That's my social media kind of across the board. H-I James Gutman. That's the brand. And um I

Learning Video Editing From TikTok

James Guttman 0:31

don't know. I like TikTok. I've been enjoying it because it gives me an opportunity to, I don't know, man, see more, I guess, of the pictures that I take. One of the cool things about making these videos, I'll take you guys behind the scenes. I didn't know a lot about video editing. For the duration of my writing career, I've written, I like to write. But as I learned early on, it's not just writing. If you're a writer, especially nowadays, you have to learn how to do, you know, web maintenance. You didn't have to learn how to do web pages. I built my old website. But as time went on, it became, do you know podcasting? And now do you know video editing? And I used to not know video editing, but nowadays everything is like click and drag and plug and play. So it's not as difficult. And what I love about it too is that, again, behind the curtain, when you put some of these videos together, it's not just videos that you have on your phone. I don't take a lot of videos. I take live photos. And one of the reasons I take live

A Photo Moment That Shows Growth

James Guttman 1:23

photos is because Lucas is a candid picture taker. I used to joke all the time that all of his pictures were candid. And I take a hundred of them. I go, Lucas, smile. My son is nonverbal. Um, and sometimes it's hard to get him to post her pictures. So a lot of my pictures are live. So I do the videos, I get to see more of them, and it's exciting. And it's funny because on that note, I want to tell you this happened the other day. And it's an example of what I'm gonna talk about here today. It's an example of what I wrote about in the blog. And Lucas was standing in front of me, and I went to take a picture of him just to have. I have these pictures just on my phone. Like for every one picture I show you guys, which seems like I have a million of them, I have a million to go with them. There's like a ton of pictures. And he's standing there and he's doing the thing where he's got his hands in front of him, like Paulie walnuts in Sopranos. He does that a lot. I'm like, Lucas. And he's like, I'm like, are you gonna box somebody, buddy? So I was like, Oh, I'm gonna put your hands at your side. And I went to put his hands at his side, which I've been doing. He's 15, so for like 15 years. And before I could do it, he put his hands on his side. And I was like, oh my God, he knows what that means now. And again, it's the example that I talked before about the time that I told him, you know, we gotta go wash our hands, buddy. And he went to the sink to go wash his hands. And I realized not only does he understand what I'm saying, but I don't even have to be dramatic about it. No, Lucas, hands like you're saying, pants of mime, like Hulk Hogan. No, man, he he gets it and he understands it. And a big part of that is the growth and the learning and the time that we spend together. And that is what I wrote about for Monday. And this is an important podcast, and I'll

The Headline People Misread

James Guttman 3:00

tell you guys why. Sometimes I write things that you get, you get what they mean, right? Like you go through some of these. I'm looking at it right now. Like, my nonverbal son's silence isn't permission to do less. I wrote this last week, July 20th. You could tell what that is from the headline. You get it, right? Um, I remember even that I struggled with because initially it was gonna be like, he's easy to neglect, but I'm like, that sounds terrible. You don't want to have neglect and the headline, you know, all that stuff. But you get it. My nonverbal son's silence is not permission to do less. Makes sense. But sometimes I write something and it's about making you click on it to read more. But guess what? A lot of people don't read more of it and it requires explanation, especially on social media. So on Facebook, I posted the article. The article was called on Monday People think having a nonverbal teenager is the hardest age. They couldn't be more wrong. And the reason why this headline works, again, I'm a writer, I've been doing this web stuff for a while. I don't love that headlines have to be somewhat more direct. What makes this work is that it appears on the surface to be factually inaccurate. Um, this is the age that he's at now, 15, that people dread because he's gigantic. How am I gonna handle this kid? And it's scary. And people will talk about it before they reach that age. Well, eventually he's gonna be too big. I won't be able to handle it. It is a frightening age. But the fright that comes with Lucas being 15 all came before he was 15. It came when he was three, four, five, six years old. Imagining, oh my God, what is this kid gonna be like at 15? And I got news for you at five, six, seven years old, it was terrifying because he was this little ball of energy that I had to pick up and drag and bring around. And it was easy to pick him up, throw him in the car. We're going to the store, get in the car, you throw him in the car. When he would get rough and he would be, you know, rummaging around, he went crazy. I would be able to pick him up, but every time when I was fighting him on these things, I would think to myself, what's it gonna be like when he's 15, when he lays on the ground, when he doesn't want to go places? How am I gonna move this kid? And I thought about it all the time, right? So the fear when he's little was what is he gonna be like now? And now here we are, the age that everyone dreads, right? The age that when people read the headline and responded to me, some of them on Facebook. I don't, that's not true. Oh my God, I would give anything. Because they didn't get what I'm saying. What I'm saying is by the time he reached 15, he looked at nothing like I imagined he would when he was five. The 15-year-old that I pictured in my head was not only a stranger,

Why Ages Five To Seven Felt Hardest

James Guttman 5:40

but it was a man who was acting exactly like my five-year-old was acting. And I got news to you, man. If Lucas was still acting like he acted at five, I'd kind of be screwed. You know, like he was very rambunctious and running and chasing him. Lucas doesn't run anymore. And I try to tell people this too. Like, I've seen kids around his age that still elope, as they say, which sounds cute, man. Sounds like he's getting married. Uh, Lucas doesn't really elope either, but they do. They leave, they wander. But when he was five, man, Lucas would take off. He would dart all over the place. We'd go to the mall, he'd run. We'd go to the sensory Easter bunny. They would make you go at like seven in the morning to the mall before it opened so that we can have autism-friendly Easter, but he didn't care about the Easter Bunny or Santa. But we'd go there, and what he loved is he would run through the mall and it was closed, so he would just go up and down aisles. When he was little, I would bring him to Tanger's outlets out here on Long Island. It's his open-air outlet, and he would walk on his own. He was so proud of himself. Um, because he liked to run. We would go to the schoolyard. I'd let him go, go, run. He'd run. Now he was 15. I don't know. I don't know how much he weighs, two bills, whatever. He's a big kid. If he was running like that now, if he was refusing to move all the time now, oh my God. And that's what I imagined when he was five, six, seven. That's what kept me up at night. That's what scared me. Uh, responses from people scared me. I wrote one of the most popular blogs I've ever written here, and I love it to this day, uh, was I'm sorry my son drank your coffee, or I'm sorry my kid drank your coffee. It was something like that. And it was about Lucas stealing food from people. And the replies of some of the people, again, on social media, were terrifying. One day he's gonna steal somebody's food, he's gonna end up in jail. He's gonna end up in jail. Everyone's saying he's gonna end up in jail, someone's gonna punch him in the face, you know, you're not training your kid right. People are very judgmental when you have a little kid with autism. And I pictured it. Well, oh my God, he's gonna be one day he's gonna be a grown-up. He's gonna take candy out of a kid's mouth, and I'm gonna have to fight the kid's dad. He's gonna get arrested. Like all these things I kept imagining. I can tell you this: one of the things that we don't realize when our kids are five, six, and seven is that the time in between then and adulthood is kind of long. We have time. And I had 10 years between five and fifteen to prepare my son for being a gigantic 15-year-old.

Skills That Changed Everything

James Guttman 8:09

And through dealing with his temperament, which was important, right? Like I'm I'm chill, like ridiculously chill, like tranquilo, right? And Lucas gets worked up. He'll come over to me out of breath, handing me his iPad. He's all worked up. And what I've been doing since he was little, I put my hand on his chest, hey, hey, hey, hey, breathe. And I breathe. And he doesn't take a deep breath. He might not even know what it means, but he knows to stop and he stops. And he breathes. He doesn't breathe the way I breathe, but like it's uh, you know, a second goes by, so he has no choice, just and he calms down. And I've taught him those skills. I had times in his life, and I will suggest this to you guys too. The way it works with Lucas and his iPad for me, and a lot of you guys see it. He always has his iPad, always has it. He's always on his iPad. He is, but it's different. And this is why I allow him. Because when he was little, I didn't. I remember when he was little, taking that iPad away was a big deal because he refused. If you took it away, he'd freak out. Anything with a screen, he would grab. If you left your phone there, he would grab your phone. If you left your iPad there, he'd grab your iPad. He would go nuts. He needed that device. So what I would do, especially going back to school, because we would go on like, say, a school vacation, my school break, and he'd be off from school for like a week. He would go back to school and be a monster because he wanted his iPad, he wanted to play all day. So the day before, and this was hell on earth, he didn't have his iPad at all. I started taking away his iPad on the final day of the vacation so that he would get used to it. And those days were terrible. But they got better. He was better at school, he understood what he was supposed to be doing, and it all worked out. And now we have a rule. Lucas has his iPad almost all the time. But when we have to do something, he puts it down and he does it on his own, which would have been unheard of at five, six, seven years ago. I go, Lucas, I take my hands, I go up, down, almost like placing my hand down, like a wave. I wish I could show you guys. It's my hands up and down. And he knows, puts his iPad down. We get dressed, we eat, we go out. There's sometimes we go out, I go, no iPad, he'll leave it in the car. He might whine a little bit, but depending on the day, depending on what we've been doing, depending on how much he's had it, he kind of goes with that too. But the main rule, and I'll suggest this to anybody listening, I always say, take whatever you can out of this. I'm not giving you ironclad advice, but this worked for my son. Lucas has his iPad and can play on it unless he becomes so fixated that he doesn't even know what's going on around him. So if I say his name, I'm like Lucas, Lucas, and he doesn't look up from his iPad, I take the iPad out of his hand. I go, hey, look at me, look at me. I calm him down. We talk, I make him breathe, I make him wait 10, 15 seconds. I don't, I want this to be something he enjoys, right? It's the equivalent of me being on my phone. I can go on my phone, I can play around, but if somebody says something to me, I'll be like, hey, what's up? But if I'm so like in my phone all day, I that's bad. Same thing with my kid. So the point of the story is once your kid hits that teenage, you know, age, they're gigantic, they're big, but you've now put in the work to make sure they've matured to the level they can reach at that age, right? Like Lucas is 15. Is he 15 in the classic sense of the word? No, he's not. Do I like the mental age stuff that people do? I hate it. I've written about it. I never say, like, he's 15, but really he's four, he's three and a half. Like they uh make these fake ages up. Lucas is 15. Lucas is flirty sometimes with girls. It's cute. Like if he likes a girl, I could see we had did I tell this story? I don't know if I told it on here. Uh his care manager came over. We're doing, you know, uh OPWDD on Long Island and trying to get him funding, and he has a care manager. She came to the house. It's a young girl, it's nice, pretty girl, nice person. Every time he got up from the table to go get something because he gets up and down all the time, he he would have to kiss her on the cheek. I'm watching him do this. And she's like, Oh, it's so sweet. I'm like, is it? I'm like, Lucas, come on, buddy. What are we doing? Like, I know what this is, but it's a good

iPad Boundaries Without Power Struggles

James Guttman 12:15

excuse. Um, he's 15. He's a little man, he has a little mustache, right? I shit when I shave his face, I shave his face, and I leave the little, the little peach fuzz Garfield mustache on his face. Um, as a reminder, my kid is 15 years old. You know, I dress him in clothes befitting a 15-year-old. I I try to give him privacy. I try to give him respect, even in this blog, even on this podcast. I've always said there's certain aspects of his upbringing and certain aspects of his milestones that I won't talk about. I won't talk about private things. Anything that would have embarrassed him if he was verbal, I won't talk about. Because that was the one thing that held me back from doing this blog initially was I didn't want to betray anyone's, you know, uh privacy of my kids. That's why my daughter is not talked about in here as much as she used. I mean, more and more as she's gotten older, but she went through her teenage years. She was verbal. She said to me, I don't want my pictures on there. I feel weird. I don't like them. So I would send them to her once in a while to approve, and then she approved less of them. I go, listen, I love you. I don't want to make you feel awkward or uncomfortable. I will write about you when you're ready for me to write about you. And there we went a while. And I wrote about her last year. My daughter's a masterpiece, I leave for the universe. I wrote about her this year for her graduation. I talked about her on the podcast. Because that's what it's about. Anybody who writes about their kids, it's a responsibility to portray them in the best light. So I I make sure I give Lucas the same privacy and the same respect that I gave his verbal sister. It's important to me to be able to do that. Now here's the beauty of it, right? And this is why it gets easier, in my opinion, as your kid gets older. Physically, no. Is it physically easier? No. If your kid needs to be picked up, no, it's not easy. And I will tell you this: before you listen to this, you go, oh, well, you got a good kid. Your kid's great. Last week, the bus came, the school bus came, and he got off the school bus and he promptly sat down on the ground. And I didn't know why. I'm fairly sure it was because I didn't give him the countdown to take his iPad away. I just took it out of his hand, which is on me, and I felt bad about it. Uh, or or he may have banged his name. I really don't know which one it is. But he gets out of the car and he sits on the sidewalk outside of the bus. And they're all like, Come on, buddy, it's time for school. You know, like that, and you get that anxiety almost. Like, I don't really get, I mean, not anxiety, but like really rushed. And everyone's like, Come on, come on. And you're looking at me sitting there. I'm like, come on, buddy. And he stares at me, I'm like, Lucas, come on, get up, take his hand, and now he's like a solid ball of person, he won't move. So I did what I did. And I underhook one arm, I underhook the other arm, right? Which is you just kind of grab him from behind like um, like George the Animal Steel. I wish you guys knew all the wrestling references, but yes, that's right. Double underhook, Andre the Giant, suplex. Uh so I grabbed him from behind and I stand him up, and we stand up, and just as we do, he goes up on his heels and he falls back, and the two of us go tumbling onto the grass. And I'm fine at this point. I don't know what it is. I know people my age sometimes they like they hit the ground and they break 10 things. I'm always, I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'm still 20. Maybe it's not reality. Um, but it was embarrassing, and we got up and he saw us. As soon as we hit the ground, he was he looked at me like like, oh snap, I better get on this bus. He just got up and got on the bus. So it's hard, man. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that it's easy physically, or that raising a nonverbal child at any age is easy. I won't say that. And people make that assumption sometimes with me when I talk about the positives and the benefits, that it's easy somehow. It's not easy at all. It's difficult. Raising any kid is difficult. But what I'm saying to you is in comparison to when he was five, the physical toll is not as hard because it's less. He's now matured to the point where he does not fight me back as much as he did when he was little, so I don't have to deal with that every day. But on top of it, for me, the mental strain is easy. And that's that was the point of the blog, and that was the point of what I'm saying here today. When he was five or six or seven, the person that I pictured as a teenager was a stranger, and it was terrifying. And I had no idea what he was gonna be like. None. I imagined worst-case scenarios. I would see videos of other nonverbal people at that age and imagine it being Lucas. It was a hazy mystery that kept me up every night. I worried, I was scared. Where is he gonna be? What's he gonna do? All the people on social, he's gonna get punched in the face for stealing food. I'm imagining him in jail for stealing food. I'm imagining all these terrible things, and here we are. And it's nowhere close to as bad as I imagine. And that's what makes it easy because now not only don't I have the fear of what's he gonna be like as a teenager, but check this out. He's entering adulthood, right? In 10 years, you know, 10 years from five is 15, 10 years from 15 is 25 freaking years old. To be an adult, what are we gonna do? Is it scary? Yeah, it's scary. Do you talk to people who have a child like Lucas who will talk to about that age? Those are the ages everyone fears. What am I gonna do one day when he's an adult? What are we gonna do? And I have that, I have that fear still. But

Respect Privacy And Reframe The Future

James Guttman 17:40

it's not as bad as it could be. Do you know why? Because I've already done this. I've already imagined the mystery of what's my boy gonna be like in 10 years. And when we got there, it wasn't as bad as I pictured. So guess what? When we get to the next 10 years, I fully expect the same thing. Will it be difficult? Yeah. Do I have heartache ahead of me? Yeah. We all do. I used to say this all the time. You would get somebody who like couldn't handle things and would fall apart at basic, you know, things that happen. Life is hard, dude. People, people die, there's issues. And I used to tell people, I'd be like, I go, listen, this is gonna sound terrible. It sounds terrible. Um, but I was like, You're you have plenty more terrible moments ahead of you. This is gonna happen again and again and again. Life is full of bumps and uh worries and fear and all these things. All your best moments probably haven't happened, all your worst moments probably haven't happened. You weather them, you get through them, and you realize that life goes on. And as long as you show love, especially as a parent, show love to your child, whether verbal, nonverbal, you kind of help raise them to be the image of what you want them to be. By the time you get to that futuristic age, it's not scary anymore because that's the person you helped that person become. Did Lucas reach every milestone? No. Right? Would I like him to never fight back on getting, you know, off the ground? Yeah. This is all stuff that we could work on and we can deal with. Is he a much better person now than he would have been without me there to help get him through what he had to do? Yeah, man. And I'm so proud of him. And that's how I know like the work I'm gonna do with him now over the next 10 years is gonna create the 25-year-old that I want him to be, or at least a reasonable facsimile of what I want him to be. And it feels good. And I think that that's that was my point. Like, if there's one thing that I know, one thing that I know, every parent on my position, if you're listening to this right now and you have a child like Lucas, peace of mind. That's the big thing, man. Peace of mind. And I have peace of mind now. I know who my boy is, and I know what I'm capable of helping him become. And that's in me. That's why having a nonverbal teenager is much easier than having a nonverbal toddler, nonverbal preschooler. You still don't know how autism is going to affect your family. You still don't know what's gonna happen. I know all that now. I have this kid, and I love him. And if you knew him, you'd love him too. And that's the reason why I do this blog. It's the reason I

Peace Of Mind And Closing Notes

James Guttman 20:26

do the podcast, it's the reason why I wrote the book, Hi World Dumb Dad, available everywhere on Spotify, go listen to it. Um I get to share my boy with you guys, and it means a lot to me. And I love getting to do it, and I love getting to tell you the truth and putting it on the table. Even things that I say sometimes like this that sometimes people don't understand or might stand against what they believe. Um, I'll always tell you the truth. And I'll always put my honest opinion right on the table. It's all I got, you know, and you might not agree with it. Um, it might not affect your situation. There might be something in my stories that um that you can't use. You know, sometimes I'll give advice and I'm thinking to myself, well, this isn't for everybody, not everybody can do it. But even if you can't, read what I say, listen to what I do, and take the peace of mind from it of like, oh, all right. Well, he was worried and now he's okay with it. Maybe that'll be me too. I have a feeling it will be. And that does it for me, guys. Thank you. Be back here next Friday, hipodomdad.com. Monday, hiblogomdad.com. New blogs. Follow me on social media, H-I-James Gutman. That's TikTok, Instagram. Uh, Facebook is a little different. We have a hiblogom dad page, but also I'm on Facebook as well. Hi, James Gutman everywhere. Um, yeah. And I appreciate all this support. And I appreciate you guys listening, and I appreciate you reading, and I appreciate you listening today. So thank you. Until then, James Gutman, be well. Bye, Pod. I'm dad.