317: Unconditional Love

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let's head back in time-- back to when being on TV meant you sort of half-shouted every single thing you said.

Ira Glass

The year is 1960.

Ira Glass

Now, the reason there even was a study asking this very basic question, back when CBS Television took a camera crew to Wisconsin-- well, that is actually the kind of thing that most of us today would find sort of surprising. You see, the researcher that they're filming-- a guy named Harry Harlow, was trying to prove-- I know this is going to sound crazy-- he was trying to prove that love is an important thing that happens between parents and children.

And the reason why he felt the need to prove this point was, at the time-- and, again, I know this is going to sound kind of out there-- the psychological establishment, pediatricians, even the federal government were all saying exactly the opposite of that to parents.

Deborah Blum

It's actually one of those things that you say, how could they have thought that? But psychology just didn't believe in love. And if you go back and you pull any of the psychology textbooks, really almost pre-1950, you don't even find it in the index because it was not a word that was used.

Ira Glass

This is Deborah Blum, the biographer of this renegade researcher, Harry Harlow. She writes about how psychologists at the time actually saw loving behavior towards children as a problem, a menace. At one point, the head of the American Psychological Association declared, "When you're tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument."

Deborah Blum

Yeah, that was John Watson. And he actually said there are serious rocks ahead for the over-kissed child, and then defined over-kissing as kissing your child more than once a year.

Ira Glass

Wow.

Deborah Blum

I mean, that was the message of almost everything.

Ira Glass

Yeah. At some point, there are government pamphlets, you write, that are warning parents not to touch their children, and you quote some. One says, "Never kiss a baby, especially on the mouth. Don't rock or play with children."

Deborah Blum

Yeah. Not to say that everyone follows what so-called experts do, right? But, certainly, you had an enormous effect of this affection is wrong, love isn't real-- trust us, we're scientists-- that greatly shaped those kind of perceptions.

Ira Glass

How is this possible? Well, first of all, psychology was still pretty young, and psychologists hadn't figured out how to measure love, how to quantify it, talk about it in a scientific way. So the thinking about love's role was incredibly crude.

And at the same time-- this is all at the beginning of the early 20th century-- medicine was still figuring out how bacteria spread infections. And pediatricians had noticed that, in hospitals, the kids who were picked up a lot by nurses seemed to get more infections.

Deborah Blum

So doctors were saying, don't pick up your child, don't pick up your child, don't pick up your child. So you had a kind of confluence going there. You had pediatricians saying, we're telling you for health reasons that you should never cuddle your child or indulge them. And guess what? Psychology says if you follow those rules, if you show your child no affection, you will make them a better human being. So back off.

Ira Glass

And this is the way it was for decades, until about the 1940s. Health care workers started to notice that some children in hospitals, in orphanages, who were treated this way never picked up, never loved, would wither and die-- literally die. But even this did not change the opinion of the psychological establishment.

So enter Harry Harlow. He sets out to prove that love is important-- in fact, love is a key to normal development in children-- and that what bonds babies and mothers is more than just the baby's need for food.

Ira Glass

This is Harry Harlow on CBS in 1960. In the cage with the baby monkey are two dolls.

Deborah Blum

What he did is he gave them two alternative dummy mothers. One was a wire mother with an ugly face, and one was a cloth mother. She had sort of a fluffy terry cloth body.

Deborah Blum

And in the simplest experiment, baby monkey would be put in a cage with both mothers, but wire mother had the milk. So by all the theories, the baby should bond to wire mother, because she's feeding him.

Ira Glass

The little baby monkey-- which, by the way, is the most insanely cute thing you have ever seen-- scampers under the wire mother, which is like a wire, mesh cylinder with a boxy head and eyes, apparently made from a billiard ball. The monkey sucks from a bottle that comes out of its chest, and then it runs to cuddle with the other mother.

Ira Glass

The monkey rubs itself against the cloth doll until it seems to get some solace from it, and then it relaxes. In other experiments, it comes back to the cloth doll for reassurance when it's put into scary situations. When the cloth mom is nearby, the baby is curious. It walks around and explores. It's confident.

And this is how Harlow proved that the relationship between mother and child is more than just about getting food. The baby monkeys needed something else, something that had to do with being cuddled and touched and reassured.

Deborah Blum

It was clear that in this sort of cuddly feeling of affection came all kinds of really important developmental responses. You know, security, curiosity is essential or more essential than being fed.

One of the other Harlow experiments was one in which they took nice, cuddly, ever welcoming cloth mother, and they made her into an abusive mother or a rejecting mother. Harlow called these evil mothers. One of the cloth moms had brass spikes embedded that would shoot out when the baby monkey held on. I mean, they were blunt tipped. It didn't cut them to shreds but they hurt. And one was like a shaking mom.

Harlow wrote very graphically. He said the babies would be shaken till their teeth and bones rattled in unison. And one would just hurl the baby away. It was spring loaded.

But what they found was that when the mom quit-- spikes retracted or shaking stopped-- the babies came back and they did everything they could to make those mothers love them again. And then they cooed and they stroked and they'd groom and they'd flirt, and exactly what human babies do with their moms.

And they would abandon their friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them.

Ira Glass

Harlow spent years as an outcast, fighting for his ideas, before things finally changed. Though Harlow, he did so much to convince people that a parent's love for a child is one of the most important things that anyone could ever get or need, he did not have so much success with the love in his own life. He was notoriously cold.

Deborah Blum

He had a wicked tongue and everyone lived a little bit in fear of it. He was not at all a warm and fuzzy person, and he certainly wasn't a warm and fuzzy father. He had four children by two different marriages. Almost all of them, his children-- the ones I talked to-- remember him as being gone.

Ira Glass

Was he self aware enough to actually understand how publicly he loved the idea of love, but in his private life he wasn't carrying it out?

Deborah Blum

I don't think he was maybe until the end of his life. And he had difficulty in a lot of relationships.

Ira Glass

In a way, of course, who else would be so interested in how does love work, except for somebody who really needs to figure it out? Well, today on our program, stories of unconditional love. If you can get a monkey to love a terry cloth towel with a cue ball on its head, it doesn't seem like it should be so hard with your own kids, right?

We have two stories today of parents and children, and exactly what unconditional love gets you. We first ran today's show all the way back in 2006. Act One of our show, Love is a Battlefield. Act Two, Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One-- Love is a Battlefield. In this act, a family faces a kind of profound question. Can you teach love, even to a child who has all sorts of reasons not to learn love? Alix Spiegel has this story.

Alix Spiegel

Until he was seven years old, Daniel Solomon slept sitting up. This wasn't because upright was a particularly comfortable position or because some exotic medical condition prevented him from straightening at the waist. It was just because Daniel didn't have another option. For the first seven years of his life, he lived in a crib in an orphanage in Romania with another child his age.

Alix Spiegel

During the day, one set of adults would feed and clean Daniel, Niku, and the other 100 or so orphans who lived in the same room. During the night, there was a graveyard crew. But even though Daniel was there for seven and a half years, he can't tell you the name of any of the adults who took care of him. He didn't know any of them well enough to say.

He also can't tell you much about how he passed his time, what he thought about. He didn't go to school. He didn't go outside. He only left his crib to eat and go to the bathroom, so there wasn't a lot of material to draw from.

Alix Spiegel

One thing Daniel does remember is that he didn't spend a lot of his time yearning for a family, imagining some mother and father would drop from the sky to rescue him.

Alix Spiegel

In fact, the story of how Daniel came to have a family, whether or not he actually wanted one, begins with a kind of accident. His mother-- or anyway, the woman who would become his mother, Heidi Solomon-- got a magazine in the mail from the adoption agency that was in the process of evaluating whether she and her husband were fit to have children.

Alix Spiegel

Five months later, Heidi and her husband, Rick, drove from their home in South Euclid, Ohio, to the Cleveland Airport, and took an eight hour flight to Romania to pick up their new son. Heidi is a special education teacher by profession. And she says that she felt certain ever since she was a kid herself that she wanted to adopt children-- wanted to even though she knew that adoption could be difficult, that the kid might have developmental problems or emotional problems or physical problems, or all three.

Heidi believes strongly that people should do what they're capable of, and she says she felt capable of adopting a child. Rick, on the other hand, had started with a more conventional fantasy, that he would have biological children. But Rick loved his wife. And so even though it hadn't been part of his original plan, he agreed. And he says that when he and Heidi finally walked off the plane in Romania and saw the dark haired child dancing on the airport ramp, he felt certain that he and his wife had made the right choice.

Alix Spiegel

The family's early weeks back in Ohio were full of firsts-- the first time Daniel wore shoes, the first time Daniel slept alone in a bed. They played, and danced, and worked on English. And even though Daniel had some difficult moments, tantrums and fits of crying, both Heidi and Rick will tell you that, on the whole, the family had a good time.

This honeymoon, however, only lasted about six months. And then, Heidi says, came March.

Alix Spiegel

You see, until his eighth birthday, Daniel had never confronted the idea that he had been born, and therefore that he had actual parents, people who could have, had they elected to, provided a birthday party at some point before his eighth year of life.

This whole concept deeply disturbed him. And even though Heidi did her best to explain the difference between biological and adoptive families, it seems that Daniel didn't get it because he walked away from that conversation fundamentally confused about his relationship to Heidi and Rick.

Alix Spiegel

During this period, Daniel conceived a powerful hatred of his parents-- a deep anger that he couldn't shake, even after the difference between biological and adoptive parents had been explained again and again, and his actual relationship to Heidi and Rick became clear. At that point, it just didn't matter. His anger had taken on a logic of its own.

Once he learned about the idea of parents and what his had done to him, he needed to hate someone and Heidi and Rick were the people closest at hand. And so his tantrums became tornadoes of rage-- seven, eight hour marathons where he would throw literally anything he could get his hands on. Rick and Heidi say that he put more than 1,000 holes in the walls of his room until, finally, they had to move everything out of his bedroom except a mattress.

They called in professional social workers and specialists, several of whom left bleeding, needing medical attention. Remember, Daniel was eight. But, really, Daniel saved the worst of it for Heidi, the person who most wanted to help him. He hated her, appeared to take actual pleasure in her pain.

Alix Spiegel

And what did you think when you saw your son smiling after you--

Alix Spiegel

Did you get that? They essentially had to hire a bodyguard. And even so, Heidi found herself calling the police several times a month, until Heidi and Rick turned to the mental health profession. They ferried Daniel from one psychiatrist to another, and religiously followed their advice.

One man told them to put Daniel on medication, pills for ADHD, which greatly improved Daniel's handwriting, but otherwise didn't do much to help. Another woman counseled them to buy Daniel a puppy. This also didn't work out so well.

Alix Spiegel

Heidi was told by at least two psychiatrists that her son would never love her, that she should give him up to foster care. Worse, the situation with Daniel began to affect Heidi's marriage to Rick.

Alix Spiegel

But Heidi wouldn't give up on Daniel. Changing her son became a kind of singular focus, an idea that obscured all other considerations.

Alix Spiegel

Then one day after school, when Heidi was busy making a snack for Daniel in the kitchen, he grabbed a knife from the counter and held it to Heidi's throat. No one in the family likes to talk about this episode. It clearly frightened both of them. The only thing Heidi's comfortable saying about it now is that the experience convinced her to reconsider the way she went about Daniel's education.

Alix Spiegel

Heidi says the only time she did question whether or not she should keep Daniel was when she thought about the possibility of Daniel hurting someone else-- a fear that became more pronounced in the wake of an outside incident that happened around Daniel's 10th birthday. By that point, Daniel had been given the diagnosis attachment disorder, meaning his primary problem was that he was unable to feel connected to other people.

Heidi knew another kid who had been diagnosed with attachment disorder. She'd met him through her work, and had been so impressed with him that she actually asked the kid, who was slightly older than Daniel, to be his Big Brother.

Alix Spiegel

Heidi was coming to believe something that frightened her. She was coming to believe that because kids with attachment disorder couldn't connect to other people, they couldn't feel empathy. And without empathy, they didn't possess a really important human quality.

Alix Spiegel

Heidi wanted her son to have a conscience. She didn't want him to be dangerous. And so she began to call around to find out more about aggressive treatments for the problem. The treatment of attachment disorder has a long and controversial history-- such a controversial history that many of the people who practice versions of the therapy decline to use its name.

It was started in the mid '70s by a psychiatrist named Foster Cline, who felt that children who acted out because of an inability to connect to their parents should be forcibly regressed, made to feel helpless and hopeless so they'd return to a baby-like dependence. Early versions of the therapy involved berating children, poking them, and physically subduing them by holding them down.

Therapists would sometimes direct profanity at a child, and also have the child direct profanity at them. Cline himself acknowledged that this was so harsh it was often difficult even for professionals to watch. But when outsiders criticized the treatment as sadistic, Cline responded that, quote, "These children need the kind of love that forces them to love others."

After the '70s, though, the therapy changed substantially, particularly after a couple of children died from being smothered in blankets. And by the time Heidi started hunting for something to help Daniel, most of the extreme methods of attachment therapy had been abandoned. So when Heidi heard about a doctor in Virginia who appeared to have had some success with a highly intensive program related to attachment therapy, she leaped at the opportunity.

According to the doctor, Ronald Federici, mother and child needed to spend several months side by side, literally no farther than 3 feet apart.

Alix Spiegel

But it wasn't just being side by side. There were other elements to the program, like eye contact. Federici felt that because mothers and their babies spent a large amount of time just staring into each other's eyes, it was important for Heidi and Daniel to do the same. Daniel was required to look into Heidi's eyes during every interaction they had, and neither of them were allowed to move onto the next activity until Daniel did it correctly.

Alix Spiegel

Predictably, Daniel resisted the program.

Alix Spiegel

Problem was every time Daniel resisted treatment, he was subjected to yet another program-dictated activity-- time-ins, the alternative universe version of time-outs. The idea is that since kids with attachment disorder prefer to be alone, every time they do something bad the response should be to make them spend even more time, even closer together.

Alix Spiegel

Like he said, at first Daniel hated the treatment. And at least initially, his behavior actually deteriorated. But then something happened.

Alix Spiegel

Daniel says he actually came to understand, maybe for the first time, that his mother loved him. The realization just dawned on him in a different way.

Both Heidi and Daniel will say that after eight weeks, Daniel was cured of his violent behavior. It was gone, done. No more tantrums, no more throwing, no more threats. But there were still problems. Instead of acting out against his parents, Daniel started stealing-- at first, just small items from the local store, but it got worse.

After one particularly bad episode, where Daniel nearly ended up in juvie, Heidi decided it was time to go back to therapy. There was a center near their home called The Attachment and Bonding Center run by a guy named Greg Keck. Keck proposed a program that was in some ways similar to the three feet plan.

In addition to regular counseling, Daniel, who was now 13 and larger than his mother, would participate in holding therapy. That is, every night for a year, 20 minutes a night, Daniel, Heidi, and Rick were supposed to hold on to each other and talk, Rick and Heidi cradling Daniel like a newborn child, which is exactly what they did.

Alix Spiegel

For the first time, Daniel really talked about his experience in the orphanage, opened himself up. And maybe it was the holding, and maybe it was the fact that The Attachment and Bonding Center gave Daniel a therapist he says he actually trusted, who led him through the process, but for one reason or another Daniel began to transform.

There wasn't a specific moment anyone can point to. If Daniel had gone bad in one month, the going good was a lot more gradual. Without anyone quite noticing, he began to help around the house. They were able to move furniture back into his room. He started to make friends his own age.

By that point, the rabbi of their synagogue called Heidi to tell her that Daniel had won something called the Brickner Award. The Brickner is given to the valedictorian of the confirmation class, and it's a huge honor for anyone. But in the case of Daniel, it had particular weight.

Heidi had taken Daniel to synagogue initially because she thought that it would help him to develop morals, but the training didn't take. Daniel spent several years being removed from the temple in police cars. At one point, he was actually banned from going to services. So as far as everyone, including Daniel, was concerned, the fact that he got the honor constituted a minor miracle.

One element of the award is that the winner gets to make a speech in front of the entire congregation. And Daniel told Heidi and Rick that he wanted them to think of his speech as a gift. And so when Daniel took the stage, the whole family was there.

Alix Spiegel

Daniel talked about his early life, and all the trouble he'd gone through since. And during most of the talk, he was smooth and composed. But then he got to the end, and even from the audience it was clear that Daniel was shaking, struggling to keep his voice under control.

Alix Spiegel

It was, Heidi says, without doubt the most spectacular moment of her life. The question of whether or not it's possible to teach love is not an academic one. There are plenty of people who will face this issue. Adoption these days is on the rise. Most of these children will be fine, but some of them won't.

And at least on its face, the story of Heidi and Rick and Daniel seems to offer an encouraging example. Heidi and Rick were able to take a seven-year-old with no direct experience of adult affection and, with a certain amount of pain and suffering, turned him into a loving son. The only problem is that the actual participants in this story see things differently.

Alix Spiegel

See, Heidi actually has a very humble view of what is and is not possible, what should and should not be expected as far as love is concerned. In fact, she tells me that, in her own mind, what she wanted from Daniel all along was very, very modest.

Alix Spiegel

Heidi seems utterly practical about the whole thing, even about whether or not her son now loves her.

Alix Spiegel

"I don't think he wants to hurt me. I don't worry about that at all." It's a very unsentimental view of her relationship with her child, but that is probably exactly what has made Heidi so successful.

That is, Heidi is an unusually pragmatic person. She's not a flowering earth mother with a wealth of love to give. She is fundamentally realistic, tough minded, and these are precisely the characteristics that are needed in this situation.

If you're the kind of person who actually needs love-- really needs love-- chances are, you're not the kind of person who's going to have the wherewithal to create it. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business.

Ira Glass

Alix Spiegel-- she's the co-host of Invisibilia, a show on NPR about human behavior. Season 5 of Invisibilia starts this weekend. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

[MUSIC - "LOVELESS TOWN" BY SARAH BLUSTER]

Coming up, another story that's going to make your job as a parent seem way easier than you felt about it at the beginning of this hour. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- unconditional love, stories of parents and kids and how hard love can be sometimes in daily practice.

Today show was first broadcast in 2006.

Ira Glass

We've arrived at Act Two of our program. After a bunch of cases where parents of autistic children murdered their own kids, a parent named Cammie McGovern wrote an editorial in the New York Times about all the pressure that she and other parents of autistic kids feel. They hear about these amazing success stories where kids end up at Brown, at Harvard.

But those kinds of recoveries can't happen for every kid. This is the nature of autism. "In mythologizing recovery," she wrote, "I fear we've set an impossibly high bar that's left the parents of a half million autistic children feeling like failures."

For these parents, the regular parenting rulebook is out the window. There are all these different kinds of treatments. They worry about doing every possible thing. Dave Royko's son was diagnosed with autism at the age of two.

Things have gotten harder and harder over the years, and he and his wife recently had to make a decision. They had to decide whether or not to place her son in a facility for the rest of his childhood. Here he is.

Dave Royko

People say all kinds of things to me and my wife, as parents of an autistic son. And they mean well.

Dave Royko

That sounds harsh. Here's what it's like for us. On a typical day, our son, Ben, empties the contents of cereal boxes and egg cartons onto the floor. He opens car doors while we're driving. He walks into traffic. He throws himself up against the sliding glass door in our den. Luckily he's never smashed through, though he has put his hand through the windows in his room.

And by the time Ben was 12, he was nearly six feet tall and 250 pounds, a toddler in a giant's body. He dwarfed everyone in our house but me, which is why my wife, Karen's, arms are covered with bruises, scratches, and scars. I've come to call the various wounds he inflicts, "Ben-juries."

Almost daily, we experience things that other parents would recount for the rest of their lives as their biggest parenting horror story. Recently, Karen found herself in a toy store with Ben. The store owner complained about Ben's behavior. He looked her right in the eye and unloaded in his pants, which was nothing new. Crap is Ben's trump card, useful in all sorts of situations.

Dave Royko

Ben was only nine when we got the first serious suggestion that he needed more than we could provide at home. Two of his therapists sat us down and said that we should consider placing him in a residential program-- and the sooner, the better. As he continued to grow in size, it would only get harder to find a good program that would take him.

As grim as it was to imagine sending Ben away, I also found myself agreeing with them and, frankly, feeling relieved at the idea. Life had become an exhausting and sometimes frightening daily struggle to manage what was becoming unmanageable. Hearing them talk about the need for residential treatment felt like validation that, yes, things really had gotten that bad.

But Karen had a very different reaction.

Dave Royko

When I realized Karen felt this way, I found myself questioning my own values as a parent-- hell, as a person. What kind of person wants to ship his kid off to an institution? And how would Karen view me for the rest of our lives together if she ever felt like I pushed her into it?

So I resigned myself. I decided that if we had to get through another decade with autism before Ben reached adulthood, so be it. And to avoid dropping dead from exhaustion and stress, I better get in shape. I lost 90 pounds. I exercised. I was determined to get through this and come out on the other side alive and able to enjoy life again.

As a parent, you want to believe that there is a cure for everything with your child. In the world of autism, there is no shortage of treatments, only a shortage of results. We were providing Ben with as much one-on-one stimulation as humanly possible, and it wasn't working.

The summer before sixth grade was the toughest yet. Ben's toileting had regressed badly. He'd become increasingly aggressive. You could be sitting comfortably with Ben, looking at a book, or a TV show, and before you had time to react, his hand would dart out and put a deep scratch into your arm, or his elbow would land a hard blow to your chest, or smash your nose and send your glasses flying.

It wasn't clear where these violent outbursts came from. Was he mad, just trying to get a reaction, playing, trying to connect? Worst of all, he would often refuse to go to sleep. Or he'd sleep, and then be up for the day at 3:00 AM. The only time Ben doesn't require direct supervision is when he is asleep, which means if he's up, one of us is up, usually Karen.

In 13 years, Karen hadn't had one night of unbroken sleep. Summers were the worst. With no school, Ben was bored, which led to more tantrums and destructive behavior. It also meant no chance for Karen to grab an hour or two of sleep in the afternoon to make up for the night. It was this crushing exhaustion that finally did it.

Dave Royko

Then Ben started doing worse in school. He was regressing. His behavior and toileting were worse than the year before.

At last, we were together on this-- the single biggest decision ever in the life of our family. But there was one more person in the house whose opinion mattered, and that was Ben's twin brother, Jake. And we still had some convincing to do.

Jake explained to my producer--

Dave Royko

It was a good point. Were we doing this for Ben or for ourselves? Karen and I had asked ourselves this question too. And if sending Ben away had only been for the benefit of the three of us, we wouldn't have done it.

Instead of being bothered by what Jake said, I was actually touched. Because after all he'd been through, all the plans canceled and events ruined, you'd still empathize with Ben, who could be so hard to empathize with. But even Jake's empathy had to take a back seat to the reality-- that it was time for Ben to go.

Dave Royko

I remembered it. It was a long, nasty tantrum late one night, where Ben lunged at me over and over with all his weight, and I ended up bloody and bruised, holding his bedroom door closed while he smashed himself against it for hours, trying to get out.

Dave Royko

The one thing that likely never will be resolved in all of this, the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night, is what is Ben thinking right now? Does he know he will see us again, that we still love him?

An autistic child can't conceive of other people's subjective inner life, and that means he probably can't really wonder if we still love him, because the idea that we feel anything at all is inconceivable to him. But he certainly can wonder why the people he loves most in the world, that he has always known and relied upon and trusted, have abandoned him.

In June, we drove Ben to his new life. We were extremely lucky to live near a facility that was perfect for him-- an hour and a half drive from us in Wisconsin. After our meeting with staff and unloading Ben's stuff, it was time for us to go. It was quick. A long goodbye would only make things harder.

I gave Ben a big bear hug, said I'll see you soon, and headed out the door, as Karen said her farewell, which I couldn't watch. Very briskly, we walked down the hall and out of the door, accompanied by the sound of Ben's wailing. It was a strange feeling to leave an unhappy Ben with strangers.

The familiar urge to swoop in and try to calm Ben down, and protect others from any potential behavioral shrapnel, was hard to resist. We felt terrible. But at the same time, we felt liberated.

When we got home that evening, we were so calm that it felt foreign. It felt like we were on muscle relaxants. We hadn't realized just how tense and jangled our nerves had been for 13 years. We sank into the couch and looked at each other. Karen said, this must be what it's like to be let out of prison.

Jake and his friends were upstairs, and Karen got the idea to take them for ice cream. My immediate reflex was we can't do that. And then incredibly, three minutes later, we were in the car getting ice cream, like we'd gone through a tunnel and came out in another universe. It was even stranger for Jake. He had never known life without autism.

Dave Royko

When weekly visits with Ben began after his first month, we immediately knew we had done the right thing. Ben was happy. In fact, it is very possible that Ben is happier than he's ever been. His days are jammed with activities and tasks from morning until night.

Every minute is scheduled. Even the downtime is structured, with rules and responsibilities. That's what Ben needs, and we could never have given it to him. And for us, that's what the choice boils down to.

Dave Royko

Last weekend, we had our first home visit with Ben, and it was a joy. Ben walked into the house and stared momentarily at things that had changed, like the new couch in the living room. Soon we were in the backyard, and he swung on the bench swing for two hours, as happy and relaxed as I have ever seen him.

He spent the rest of the day with us. And when it was time to go, Ben and I got in the car and headed back to his new home. A half hour into our drive, Ben said, "The letter D." That was my cue to say, "And D is for?" Ben countered with, "D for a dump truck." And then he said, "D is for daddy."

I glanced in the rear view mirror and Ben was looking right at me, a rarity, and smiling. I reached back and, patting his legs, said, "That's right, Ben. D is for daddy, and daddy loves you so much." He beamed and, choking back tears, I said, "You'll always have daddy."

It's very possible Ben was oblivious to the meanings I was laying on our conversation. But I swear, it felt to me like we were on exactly the same page.

Ira Glass

That's Dave Royko. He's a psychologist in Chicago. His sons, Ben and Jake, are now both 25. Jake is a therapist at a mental health center. Ben is living in a facility in Cleveland. David and his wife, Karen, are still living in Chicago, but plan to move full time to Cleveland to be with Ben.

[MUSIC - "I WANNA BE LOVED" BY BUJU BANTON"]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Music help today from Mr. Terry Miller. Additional production help from Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Kathy Hong, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. Or you can download as many shows as you want, watch our videos, and do other stuff using This American Life app. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our programs co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who I tried-- I tried talking him into starting this radio show for years, until that one night--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.