The realisation that my son Lucien saw the world in a different light came slowly, but there were small clues along the way.

Once, when asked to describe the colour of a banana, he answered white, not yellow. (When you think about it, he could well be right: while the skin is yellow, the flesh is much paler than that.)

And then there was the endearing way he followed the squares on a rug when he was learning to walk.

Watching him trace the pattern with serious concentration, I once flippantly remarked to my husband: “He’s a little bit like Rain Man, don’t you think?”

Even 25 years after the release of that Oscar-winning film, Dustin Hoffman’s character of Raymond Babbitt — who had prodigious gifts with numbers and memory — was probably the extent of my knowledge about autism.

But since Lucien was diagnosed with autism four years ago — and his younger brother Felix not long after — the learning curve for our family has been steep.

Antiquated attitudes

I now know that a narrow notion of what autism looks and sounds like is terribly outmoded.

Go back in time, and you quickly realise that our knowledge about autism has undergone an incredible transformation since it first appeared in the medical literature in the 1930s and ’40s.

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