Chapter 22, Building Business. My name is Diana, and my son is about 30 years old. He got great grades in high school and college. He simply hated every single second of it. I never saw any of the work. All I ever saw was video games and World of Warcraft being played at home. It often looked like things were going nowhere, but he was doing the work.

When he finished high school, he actually dropped a 200-page manuscript of the book he had written in his spare time. He kept it a secret until the book was finished and he was about to graduate. It exploded our minds. We did not see that coming at all.

Growing up, he was really the type of kid who, if you asked him what the time was, he was and is the guy that first had to build the watch from scratch so he understood time. Once he did that, he would just take off like a rocket ship.

He selected a college close to home, but he didn't really like it all that much. After college, he spent three years at home. Again, it looked like he was going nowhere. But, again, I was wrong.

He had a group of friends in high school and another group in college who knew who he was and accepted him. I would press him to go out with his friends and do whatever they were doing, but he didn't want to do that. He preferred to be home. So he opened up our home to them. Because of how much he loved to be home, it took us by surprise when he told us he wanted to move to California. He didn't have any job prospects or anything.

I was definitely not in favor of him making that move, especially after witnessing how he had exhausted himself with endeavors in the past. But we consulted with people at Asperger Experts, who recommended we let him go. He was going to move in with some people he already knew from high school. They were all pretty good guys. And even though he didn't have a job lined up, we thought maybe those connections would help.

It didn't go exactly as we had hoped. And we found ourselves supporting him and paying the rent out there. We'd go visit, but he wanted to stay there, doing it his own way.

One day, one of his roommates asked him to build a computer for him. He built a computer, posted it on Reddit or something, and within a week, he had orders for 50 more. It was a shocking overnight development, and suddenly a businessman was born. It happened so fast that the place where he was living turned into a booming computer factory.

It got too big for the place where he was living, and his roommates wanted some communal space back, so he got himself a workspace out there. It was amazing. We would go out to help every few months with physical labor and support, but it was just this amazing business that he had built for himself. It lasted for about a year and a half, and then some uncontrollable things happened, like access to specific computer parts became unavailable, and he had to close.

After that, he did it again. A lot of work went into it. We didn't see it, so it almost felt like it happened overnight. But he launched a second company specifically around gaming computers. He now has several employees on two different coasts, and the business is growing.

Our son has turned into an entrepreneur who is doing what he loves. Even though I found him playing video games all the time growing up frustrating, his deep knowledge of computer games helps him every day with customers and their needs. He truly turned what I thought wasn't good for anything into a complete career. All those skills of teamwork, rapid communications, going after a goal together, identifying who you want to be on your team when you're playing a game, it all makes sense. It all works. It's funny, because his ability to rapidly identify what is happening on a complicated screen has made all the difference in his work.

At one point, I was back in grad school doing medical work, trying to read X-rays, echocardiograms, and other things on screens that I wasn't familiar with. My consultant on that became my son. He has become my teacher in many, many ways. We have a great relationship, and communicate often.

When he was about three, we initially pegged him as an engineer. There wasn't anything he didn't want to take apart and put together. It didn't matter what materials or how difficult it was. In college, he even built a 3D printer on his coffee table from scratch. It was the entrepreneurial part that was kind of a surprise.

I really feel like he is just an absolutely fantastic success story. Looking back, when he first graduated from college, as parents, we were a little disappointed that he didn't apply to graduate school, because that was the only path we understood at the time, as that's what we did.

We really got our brains handed to us over and over again by a son who really wanted to carve things out his own way. This guy is now managing a complicated business. He's managing the household that he's in. He's managed cross-country moves. Now he's got relationships with vendors and customers worldwide. I get to watch him on Twitch, YouTube, and social media. He's launched his business-related channels there. And I'm nothing but impressed. It just blows me away.

Advice for others. If you're a parent reading this, or even if you're on the spectrum, this might resonate with you. Things like traditional parenting expectations and techniques simply never worked for us, and they probably won't, or already didn't, work for you. For us, the more we insisted on something, the less it happened. Discipline never worked. It always backfired. We would see it work with our friends. We would consult with psychologists, who would tell us to hold boundaries at home and establish a reward system. None of that ever worked. What worked was getting him out of defense mode. Defense mode is where you have to start.

We learned, through AE, how important it is to make safety a priority. Nobody can learn or do things when they don't feel safe and are overwhelmed. Safety has to come first. Not paying attention to what other people do and timelines, the focus has to be, first and foremost, about getting away from being shut down. Once you do that, then you can start to move and do things within a comfortable pace.

Structured environments can help with that for some people, but for others, it won't. At home, we made sure there were foods available that he would eat and didn't push things we knew would not work. That didn't mean we served cookies and candy only, but that we provided options. We stopped pressuring him to look at people when he was talking to them and no longer insisted on always saying hello or goodbye. It was about getting him there on his terms so he could be comfortable.

Another thing we did is that he didn't like going places. So we brought his friends to him. For 10 years, we held a weekly dinner for him and his friends at our place. Again, it was social growth on his terms, without pressure and without pushing opportunities. It was about doing it on his terms so he felt safe.

I'm friends with some people who have forced their kids into more traditional pathways, and it has never ended well. There are so many kids who have been pushed into the mental health system to be drugged into some normality that doesn't really exist. So I'm glad we chose the direction we did. And we can see now that even those video games that I hated at the time turned out to be really important and useful.

My last piece of advice is to trust that you might not see everything that is going on. I am a pretty focused and ambitious person in the traditional sense. When I was pursuing my second postgraduate degree, seeing my kid play video games all day broke my heart, and making the decision to simply let him was difficult, but it really did pay off. As a parent, you have to trust that you might not see everything that is going on.

People are motivated in their own ways. So put your efforts and trust into creating an environment where your kids can grow and be comfortable in their own skin. If you can give them the space to do that, they will carve out their own way.