About the Clinical Intensive Day
In this heartfelt and empowering talk, Tiffany Hammond—autistic writer, disability advocate, and mother of two sons on the spectrum—speaks directly to caregivers and parents navigating life on the spectrum. Drawing from her lived experience parenting one speaking and one nonspeaking child, Hammond invites families to rethink what communication, success, and connection really look like.
Through storytelling, honesty, and humor, she shares how moving beyond compliance-based parenting and deficit-focused systems opened new ways of understanding her children’s autonomy, needs, and brilliance. Hammond encourages caregivers to trust their instincts, honor all forms of communication, and resist narratives that center fixing rather than supporting autistic children.
Parents will leave with renewed permission to slow down, listen differently, and embrace creative, relationship-centered approaches to advocacy—at home, in schools, and within medical and social systems. Above all, this talk offers solidarity: a reminder that caregivers are not alone, that the journey is rarely linear, and that joy, connection, and belonging are possible even in the messy middle.
Objectives
Participants will analyze how deficit-based and compliance-focused parenting models influence perceptions of communication, success, and autonomy in autistic children.
Participants will evaluate alternative, relationship-centered approaches to caregiving that honor diverse forms of communication and prioritize connection over conformity.
Participants will apply strategies that support advocacy across home, school, and medical settings by fostering trust, embracing neurodiversity, and promoting individualized, strengths-based support.
Tiffany Hammond — an autistic mother, writer, and advocate -- tells stories that center the messy, beautiful, hard, and deeply human parts of being neurodivergent, Black, and raising autistic children in a world that often forgets to listen.
Tiffany is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and disability advocate. Her work centers the voices of autistic people and celebrates all forms of communication. She is the author of A Day with No Words and the upcoming picture book How Do You Spell Belong (2027). Tiffany is also the voice behind Fidgets and Fries, where she shares stories of advocacy, identity, and raising her two sons with autism. She has a master's degree in Developmental Psychology.
Through books, essays, and public speaking, Tiffany works to challenge how the world sees disability — and how we see ourselves within it. Whether she's writing a picture book, unpacking the politics of masking, or simply sitting with the hard truths of parenting, everything she does is rooted in love, honesty, and liberation.