I’ve thought long and hard about what that “one thing” is I would like to share. But that is tricky, because as we all know, none of this is a simple matter.

If I were to sum up everything I have learned over the last 20+ years, it would be this–you must work to understand the big picture of your child’s health. Change your perspective to look at the BIG PICTURE.

Does that sound overly simplistic? It’s not. In the autism world, we have spent 20 years looking for the “magic pill” that would fix our kids. The probiotic that would fix their gut. The supplement that would stop their stimming. The protocol that would enable sleep–even for one night.

But there is no magic pill. One of the major turning points in my own autism journey happened while I was reading a nutrition book from the earlier part of the 1900. The author of this book made a very important point–if a person is deficient in one vitamin or mineral, he will most certainly be deficient in many, even most, of them. He encouraged his readers to move beyond supplementation to fixing the diet overall. Up until this point, I had been adding supplement after supplement, and taking out a wide variety of foods that tested as allergic on my son’s ELISA test. Reading that book was my wake-up call. I had totally missed the big picture.

Growing a child is a lot like growing a garden. A plant does not just require soil. It also requires light, and water. And it doesn’t just need soil–it needs GOOD soil. And not just light, but the right amount of light. And not just water, but the right amount. We must keep out weeds, and fend off pests and disease. And all of these things must be worked on consistently, every day.

Again, that may sound simple, but we are dealing with a very complex situation. The world has changed over the last 100 years, and it is not ever changing back to what it was. We need to fix our problems while living in our NEW world–while using commercially prepared foods, while participating in many activities, and probably, while mom works. We have a hundred new stressors in our child’s environment, many of them designed to encourage dependency, if not outright addiction. And an additional piece that many are not looking at is genetics. I am not talking about the genetic anomalies that many in the autism community are looking for, but the multi-generational decline that the nutritionists from 100 years ago were tracking, and about which they had grave concerns. It often takes three or four generations for a compromised genetic line to fully collapse, and it’s possible that our most affected children are the third, and even fourth generation of health-compromised people in our genetic line. More about that later.

But we have lots of good news! We are beginning to understand. We are beginning to accept that yes, it’s possible that media addiction has been a big contributor to our problems. There has been a major shift in our young people towards simple, nutritious food. The excessive consumerism that was the hallmark of the last 50+ years has run its course; our young people are turning away from an obsession with stuff and are instead working toward building balanced, meaningful lives.

And unlike me 25 years ago, you have tools. Back then we were still fighting about the cause, and what might effect a cure. Was a cure even possible? Was the problem in the food? Was the answer therapy? Way back then, I only recall ONE person who suggested that media might be a problem–an excellent therapist who carried us through the first years of our fight.

The way I see it, my generation fought the first round in the autism fight. And my biggest learning was that our fix would come from NOT just the food, NOT just therapy, but from evaluating and fixing the way we lived our life. I had to step back and look at the big picture, and get back to basics. But first, I had to learn what those basics were. Now, let’s get down to business.