Her son's diagnosis spurred her on to help others.

Momlogic: Tell us about your focus on low-income communities.
Areva: When I found out about my own son's diagnosis, he was 18 months old. I started the process of trying to access services and really make sense of what it meant to have a child with autism and parent a child with autism. What I quickly found was that it was overwhelming and incredibly confusing. Even though I was a lawyer and had practiced in the area of disability law and had been an advocate for many years in my professional career, making sense of autism developmental disabilities and all the services you need was very challenging, so it was very natural for me to focus on the population that has the most difficulty in accessing all kinds of services.

It was true, as I suspected, that families in low-income communities and families in communities of color face the same challenges I face only 10 times over. So focusing on that community only made sense. What I did realize is that if you have money, if you have access, and if you have education, you will eventually figure it out--you will eventually get the best services for your child. But if you strip away the resources, the access and the academic intelligence, you could very well slip through the cracks and not receive anything. It was this population with the most need and the one I thought I could have the most impact on.

ML: What were Marty's symptoms that showed that he wasn't typically developing?
Areva: The most noticeable was his language development. I have two daughters that are older than Marty so I knew what language development looked like in a child. I knew when they started to use complete sentences and the extent of vocabulary. At first I saw it as some language delay. I started working with a speech therapist who also thought there was nothing wrong but some kind of speech deficiency and as much as the speech was a central primary issue, there were other behaviors that seemed kind of odd--like separating himself. The family would be in the backyard or involved in some activity and he would often be off by himself. He preferred independent play or being involved in some type of tactile activity. That seemed to interest him more than the stimulation of a fellow child. He would separate himself and be really involved in some type of object--like staring at it or twirling it or something that seemed a little strange. So it was a combination of those things that caused me to start asking my pediatrician what her thoughts were. And as I'm sure you've learned, many pediatricians--depending on when they went to school--have very limited exposure to autism and any type of developmental disability, so my pediatrician wasn't a wealth of knowledge or information or assistance. I went around in a couple of circles before I ended up at a developmental pediatrician that put me on the right track.

ML: What were some of your hardest memories with Marty in the early stages?
Areva: Explaining to other people who didn't understand the condition and a lot of the public humiliation--you will hear families talk about that. Going out into public, being at a restaurant, the child having a meltdown. We took a family trip when he was 3 to stay with my brother who had just bought a new home. It was his first house after being divorced, and he had all these gadgets, flat screen TVs and all kinds of stuff. It was a disaster because Marty was touching everything. We came back and the experience really helped us kind of redefine what we wanted.

One thing about these services: You can have a lot of them, but if you don't have a focus, if you don't really know what you're trying to get out of them they'll just be like anything else. You just get them, but you're really not seeing the progress, so that trip really helped us focus on what we wanted our son to be able to do. One of the most important things we decided was it was far more important to us that Marty fit into our family and that he be able to participate in the things we do as a family. We decided early on--you know what? Marty is never going to Harvard, he's probably not going to be able to follow a traditional academic course, but being a part of our family was more important. I became a huge advocate of inclusion. That's why Marty is in a typical class in school; he has been since kindergarten. Now, he's not doing the work of a third grader, he's not academically on par; he's probably two and a half years behind academically, but we decided it was far more important for him to participate in society than pushing him academically. And we do push him academically, but you have to make a decision on what's important to you.

You've probably heard about these diets, the wheat free, gluten-free diets, we tried that and it was a disaster and a nightmare because the kids crave it, and it's in everything. So my girls were dying because we couldn't go to McDonald's; we couldn't eat a pizza, we couldn't bring any kind of wheat or dairy or any kind of wheat product into our home. If we did, Marty would hide it and we would go out to restaurants and there was nothing to order but meat and potatoes. They were miserable, and we thought, "Do we want them to hate him and resent him for this disorder? Or did we want them to love and embrace him?" So we said, "God, if this is the cure for autism, we're sorry, we can't, it was tearing our family up." We got rid of the diet and we could go out, we could go to a restaurant, we could eat food, we could enjoy things.

So I tell parents to pick your battles. You just can't do everything. You will see families having a lot of sibling issues--the siblings hate these kids because they require so much care and a lot of parents just throw themselves into the care of that child to the total exclusion of their typical kids.

ML: What would you like to say to other moms who have children with autism?
Areva: I would like to say to them that it is really about figuring out what your child's strengths are, and then figuring out how can you play to those strengths. For us it was figuring out that our son is very athletic--he loves the outdoors and he loves to swim. Giving him those opportunities to do those things that he is good at, that helps to build his self esteem and makes him feel good. And don't spend so much time trying to change your child.

I think if you're always on this quest to change that child to make that child look like, resemble, and act like your typical child you're going to be frustrated because that's not going to happen. There's so many people who have figured out ways to make money on families and get them excited about things that just aren't reality. And as long as you are on that quest then you're vulnerable; you're the perfect consumer client for that person who's selling the miracle cure. But with us, we're so comfortable now with our son. I'll read and stay up on the latest everything and if there's something out there I think, "Maybe I'll try it." But I'm not on some quest to try everything and run over here for this therapy or try this medication because we are at peace and have accepted our son for who he is. I'm thankful to God that we have Marty and he is so special in so many ways that I don't sit around and compare him to other kids.