Autism isn’t a superpower — or a dead-end: A story of tough love

In the modern world, a diagnosis is often worn as if it’s a badge of honor.

But not everyone sees it that way. And Leland Vittert, an American journalist and anchor for NewsNation, certainly doesn’t.

Vittert, who is diagnosed with autism, tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey that the adversity his diagnosis caused him did not hold him back, but rather helped him become the successful journalist and reporter he is today.

Vittert didn’t speak until he was “well past 3,” and he had “lots and lots of problems in typical school.”

“If a kid touched me or looked at me the wrong way or whatever, I’d turn around and slug them,” he tells Stuckey, explaining he was “pretty aggressive” and had “big sensory issues.”

“Dad’s idea was to hold my hand through the adversity. And I think what he realized was that I was going to face that adversity later in life, which I did. … I had to learn how to adapt and how to interact with the world as the way the world interacted, not as the way I wanted to interact with it,” he explains.

And it was a struggle, he tells Stuckey, noting that he “couldn’t figure out how to relate to people emotionally the way they were emotionally.”

“I couldn’t figure out how to, you know, read a room, when to stop talking. All of these things I was going to have to learn,” he says. “And if you’re put in bubble wrap and told how wonderful you are all the time, you’re never going to learn that, right?”

That’s when Vittert’s father decided to prioritize self-esteem.

“So, when I was 5 or 6 years old, I was doing 200 push-ups a night. And after a couple months of doing that, you get some kind of reward. But my dad wanted to teach me that self-esteem is earned, not given, which is a very different philosophy, I think, than what we see now,” he tells Stuckey.

After self-esteem, Vittert’s father prioritized teaching him “how the world works socially.”

“So, my dad started spending hundreds of hours with me. Thousands of hours. Still is my best friend. … We’re recording this a little before noon, and I’ve already talked to him, I think, three times today,” he tells Stuckey.

“So, he would then take me out to lunch, and we’d go out to lunch with any of his friends. And because I spent so much time with him, I could sort of talk about business and politics and news and those kinds of topics,” he recalls.

“But as soon as we’d sit down at some diner for cheeseburgers and milkshakes, as soon as his friend sat down, I would either start blasting him with questions or blasting him with stories about my push-ups. And my dad would tap his watch. And that was my dad’s way of saying, ‘OK, be quiet,’” he explains.

“And the idea was, later on, as we were driving home, it was like, ‘OK, when Mr. so-and-so was talking about his weekend and you interrupted it to talk about your push-ups, why did you think he would be interested in that?’” he continues, telling Stuckey that he and his father would then role-play how Vittert could have asked the friend more questions about himself.

“It was this very minute-by-minute teaching of the emotional and human dynamic,” he adds.

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