The Spark

by Kristine Barnett

  So every morning, I’d open the daycare as usual and work a full nine-hour day there. But twice a week, after the daycare children went home, I’d vacuum the room and set up a mock kindergarten for autistic kids. I called the program Little Light.

  From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to approach autism differently. Typical therapy focused on the lowest skills. Most of the parents who came to Little Light had spent years trying to get their kids to hop up to the next skill on the ladder, usually without much success. I had seen my share of these sessions, hours spent trying to get a kid to put three rings on a post or to feed a cookie to a puppet, all to no avail. I’d watched my own son nod off in a session, still holding a therapy putty ball. So instead of hammering away at all the tasks these kids couldn’t do, I thought we’d start with what they wanted to do.

  This approach was far from standard practice. Most therapists would move a beloved toy or puzzle off the table so that a child could concentrate on their therapy goals; some would go so far as to hide it. We’d done the same thing with Jake’s alphabet magnets during his evaluation. Just as Jake’s whole body had strained toward his magnets and away from the task at hand, I saw many a therapy hour pass with a child too distracted by a missing toy to make even a tiny bit of progress that day.

  Harnessing the children’s passions may not have been the conventional way to work with them, but it was very much the way I’d always worked with my daycare kids. I believe this approach had a lot to do with the way my sister, Stephanie, and I grew up. Stephanie, younger than me by just fourteen months, was an art prodigy as a child. At age three, her art looked like work done by an adult. By the time she was six, she had the skills of a professional.

  Stephanie’s talent opened up huge creative worlds for both of us. We had store-bought toys, but we rarely played with them. We were far more interested in the toys Stephanie made. The paper dolls and the hundreds of intricately colored outfits she crafted for them while she was still in preschool were better than anything we could buy. I’d invent elaborate scenarios, and Stephanie would paint fully realized, detailed backgrounds to go along with my stories: enchanted castles, book-lined libraries, lush jungles. When I wanted a dollhouse, I didn’t tell my mother; I told Stephanie.

  Unfortunately, Stephanie’s extraordinary art skills didn’t help her much in school. She did poorly in all her classes except for art, and she had very few friends. Mostly, she was comfortable when she was alone or with me.

  Remarkably, my mother never tried to turn around Stephanie’s dismal academic performance. She wasn’t in denial about the problem (Stephanie was barely passing, so denial really wasn’t an option), but she stayed upbeat. “If you can’t do art, nobody cares. But if you can’t do math, everyone’s up in arms,” she remarked once to me. “Why is that?” I found the comment a little surprising, given that she was an accountant and loved numbers herself. But she knew Stephanie.

  In third grade, Stephanie took one look at the questions on a reading comprehension test and realized immediately that she was out of her depth. She drew a little frowny face on the front of the paper, right where the teacher would put her grade, turned the test over, and spent the remainder of the hour drawing a beautifully shaded landscape on the back. When my mother found out what Steph had done, she laughed.

  I was perplexed by my mother’s response. How could she take this so lightly? “Because your brain works this way,” she said, pointing to the reading comprehension questions, “and Stephanie’s brain works this way.” She flipped the test over to show the landscape drawing. “And you know what? You’re both going to be fine.”

  Of course, at the time I had no idea there was anything remarkable about my mother’s reaction to Stephanie’s differences. It was just the way things were. But I believe it was from her example I learned that everyone has an intrinsic talent, a contribution to make, even if it comes in an unexpected form. And I began to believe that each person’s potential to achieve great things depends on tapping into that talent as a child.

  Maybe my mother would have been more worried if Stephanie’s gifts had been less pronounced or less immediately apparent. As it was, the beauty of my sister’s work awed adults, more than once bringing a casual observer to tears. In any case, instead of browbeating Stephanie over her failings, my mother focused instead on her gifts, choosing to do what she could to nurture Stephanie’s passion. My grandparents were generous, but not ones to splurge, so we didn’t have a lot of money to spare. Yet Stephanie didn’t have just one paintbrush; she had ten, of every size and thickness and type, as well as an enormous box of expensive European colored pencils.

  When Stephanie turned eight, my mother had some kitchen cabinets installed in the laundry room at the back of the house, and that became Stephanie’s studio, an area where she could store her art supplies and draw and paint to her heart’s content. Most important, these gifts were given freely, without any expectations. Stephanie never felt that she had to churn out masterpieces in her studio; my mother was simply giving her a place to be herself.

  Stephanie is an artist today, and she teaches the subject for a living. Her portraits of my children are among my most treasured possessions. My mother’s approach to Stephanie’s challenges showed me how viewing a situation that seems bleak under a different lens can reveal a gift and a calling.

  I had always encouraged the children in my daycare to lean into their passions, and over the years I saw how astonishing the results could be when they had the opportunity and resources to do so. When I noticed Elliott, one of my daycare kids, putting his fingers into the screw holes at the back of Michael’s brand-new television, I drove straight over to the nearest electronics repair store (remember those?) and told the guy behind the counter that I’d take all his hopeless cases—all the radios and televisions he couldn’t fix. “As long as it’s not radioactive or broken in a truly dangerous way, I’ll take it,” I said. What looked like a gigantic pile of junk to most people became hours of fun for Elliott, especially when I presented him with the brand-spanking-new, candy-apple-red, six-head screwdriver he’d need to take everything apart.

  My foraging habit turned into a family joke. By the time I’d been running the daycare for a couple of years, everyone knew that I couldn’t pass by a garage sale or a thrift store without finding some present for the kids. Michael would roll his eyes and pull over before I’d even ask. At the Salvation Army, I found old alarm clocks for Elliott to take apart and fix and an expensive but never-used watercolor set for artistic Claire.

  I’d seen the attention the kids in the daycare gave to the activities they loved and the way they flourished when they were given the time and space to pursue those interests, so it was never a surprise years later to field calls with updates from grateful moms. That was how I learned that so many of the daycare kids had flourished as they’d grown older. Claire, for instance, moved on to art classes and a probable internship at a museum in Indianapolis. Elliott began building computers from scratch at age ten and spent high school “hackintoshing” in his parents’ garage, using PC parts to build hybrid machines that ran the Apple operating system. During an internship at a clinic in our community, he designed a piece of specialized medical equipment that is still used by the doctors there today. He did all this before leaving high school.

  Over and over again, I noted how doing what they loved brought all of the children’s other skills up as well. Even as a very little girl, Lauren’s favorite thing to do was to “play house” while at daycare. She’d happily help me fold laundry or put the smaller babies down for their naps, but she wasn’t very interested in what might be considered more academic pursuits, such as reading or counting. Her mother continued to send her to me for after-school babysitting even as Lauren got older, and I began teaching her to make some of the pastries that Stephanie and I had learned to make in my grandmother’s kitchen. We spent hours together measuring and stirring, making more cookies and cakes than we could possibly eat.
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  Lauren’s mother had the idea to drop some of our extra treats off at a food pantry one day, but it was Lauren’s idea to begin volunteering there. Her mom was understandably worried that the hours of baking and serving in the soup kitchen would get in the way of Lauren’s schoolwork, but I felt confident that her other skills would naturally improve if she was encouraged to do what she loved, and her mother was convinced. By age eleven, Lauren was a fixture at the soup kitchen on weekends and had won a number of community service awards—all while maintaining straight A’s in school, as well as starring in school plays and in local theater productions.

  Mostly, I think the approach was effective because it helped us to build crucial relationships with the children. Long before Little Light, eight-year-old Jenny joined my daycare for the summer. Her mom warned me over the phone that Jenny had trouble paying attention and doing what she was told to do. My daycare was, as usual, the solution of last resort, after two day camps had sent Jenny home.

  That first day, Jenny and her mom arrived quite late. Her mom, visibly harried, started right in. “This morning, I sent her to her room to get her sneakers. Half an hour later, down she comes talking some nuttiness about elves and an enchanted ring—and she’s still not wearing any shoes! That’s why we’re late. She doesn’t ever listen.”

  That morning, I let Jenny be, but when my daycare assistant was putting the smaller kids down for their nap, I asked Jenny to join me in the living room. Her mom had been very dismissive about Jenny’s storytelling abilities, and I didn’t blame her. It sounded as if it had been a frustrating morning. Still, I knew that this child had an incredibly fertile imagination and once she trusted me with her gift, there’d be no trouble getting her to listen or to be on time.

  I showed her an illustration in an old children’s book I’d bought for a nickel at a yard sale. In a sun-dappled forest, a beautiful woman with long, flowing hair held an infant, both of them cradled in the roots of a massive, moss-covered tree. It was a beautiful picture, but more important, it cried out for an explanation. Who was this enigmatic woman, and what on earth was she doing with her baby in this ancient and magical place?

  When I showed Jenny the picture, her whole face changed, and she instinctively reached out to touch the page. I handed her the book to hold and closed my eyes. “I wonder if you’d be interested in telling me a story about that lady,” I said.

  We sat there for a while in silence, and then Jenny began to talk. I could feel her checking my face, trying to gauge whether I was going to sit up and rein her in. But I kept my eyes closed and a slight smile on my face, and as she built up steam and the story began to twist and turn, she forgot to worry about what I thought.

  The story Jenny spun for me was filled with magic and monsters, wild adventures and terrible misfortunes. There were double-crossing villains, misunderstandings with dreadful consequences, and, of course, true love. In ten minutes, Jenny created a world so elaborately fantastic and yet so convincing that it was almost a shock to open my eyes and find myself back in my own living room, with CNN on mute and Michael’s cold toast still on the sideboard.

  I had been recording Jenny’s story on my phone, and that night I typed it into the computer. Before I hit Print, I went into the craft closet and found a few sheets of creamy, luxurious heavyweight bond paper I was saving for a special occasion. I wrote Jenny’s name on the cover page in calligraphy, punched three holes along one edge, and bound the “book” with gold satin ribbon left over from a Christmas present. The next day, when she came in, I said, “I wanted to thank you for the story you told me yesterday. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I made it into this book.”

  I didn’t have any trouble getting Jenny to put her shoes on after that. Each day that summer, I brought her a picture I’d found—a page I’d torn out of a magazine, a photo I’d taken of something I thought might pique her interest, or an illustration from a book—and she’d tell me a story. Her talent blossomed, and after her mother learned to see Jenny’s storytelling as a gift instead of an impediment, there were no more behavioral issues at home. All it took was a little encouragement and the ability to recognize this precious talent for what it was.

  Knowing that the parents felt that my humble daycare had had a profound impact on their children’s abilities and accomplishments later in life was really exciting for me. I had believed for years that any child will outperform your expectations if you can find a way to feed his or her passion. Every story like Lauren’s, Elliott’s, Jenny’s, and Claire’s fueled my belief that this approach could have the same impact on kids with special needs as it had on all the typical kids I’d worked with over the years. Those powerful examples were in my mind as I set out to help the Little Light kids get into mainstream kindergarten.

  Every one of the children at Little Light who had been labeled a “lost cause” had some subject area (often quite a few!) that engaged him or her passionately. I just needed to find the proper lens to magnify it, just as I had done with the daycare kids. That concept was the inspiration for the charity’s name. I was going to find the little light inside each of these children, and we were going to let it shine.

  Very often these special gifts were the first things the parents said about their child when they brought him or her to Little Light: “Oh, Billy knows the earned run average of every pitcher in the major leagues,” or “I hope you don’t mind if Violet keeps her wings on; she loves butterflies!” But while the parents might have recognized their child’s talent or passion, they didn’t necessarily think of it as a way to connect with him or her or to advance the child’s progress.

  Meaghan loved anything that engaged her senses. She’d bury her face in the laundry I pulled out of the dryer and loved to pet the supersoft blanket I kept draped over the couch. How could I use touch to draw her out? I thought of where baking had taken Lauren, and so I led Meaghan into the kitchen. Despite having an IQ of only 50, she’d measure the ingredients for homemade play dough along with me and then play with the huge mass we made while it was still warm to the touch. Then we’d go together to choose a cookie cutter from the two hundred I keep in a deep drawer in my kitchen. She’d choose a color, and we’d mix it into the dough, then we’d add a scent.

  “Purple peanut butter penguins! You’ve got to tell me the story behind that,” I’d say. And she would.

  Meaghan and I made cinnamon-apple-scented play dough, rosemary-scented play dough, and lavender-scented play dough. I added tiny beads to one batch so that it had an interesting, bumpy texture. We cut out the alphabet together and then made some short words, including both our names and those of the other kids in her Little Light session. We explored how two rectangles can become a square when they’re squished together, or how two stacked triangles make a star. We used the cookie cutters to make living things such as dogs and people, then contrasted them with inanimate objects such as boats. We worked hard the whole time, but there are worse ways to spend a rainy evening than at a kitchen counter, elbows-deep in warm, lavender-scented play dough.

  Every Sunday night, I went out shopping, using what I bought to completely transform the little garage. On Monday night, the Little Light kids (and their parents!) couldn’t wait to see what I’d done in their absence. Michael never knew what he was walking into either. Once it was a full-fledged archaeological dig, complete with different-colored sand to represent different geologic eras, leather-bound journals to record our observations and sketch the artifacts, and buckets of plaster of Paris in the yard so that we could make casts of the dinosaur bones (the bones from a chicken dinner, boiled and bleached) that we’d unearthed. The kids who hadn’t started out crazy about dinosaurs certainly were after that—and the ones who had started out loving them were in heaven.

  The over-the-top “muchness” of my schemes was a big part of the way I worked, a holdover, perhaps, from my own childhood. Years before Little Light, I’d had a little boy named Francis in the daycare. Francis loved to play with a set of
giant cardboard blocks designed to look like bricks. I soon came to see that he was frustrated by the fact that the set contained only fifteen blocks, which was enough to make a short wall but not any kind of a proper structure.

  I instantly understood the problem. In my grandfather’s shop, whatever odds and ends were left over from a woodworking project got sanded and polished and turned into blocks for us grandchildren. These weren’t boring cubes either. We had triangles, arches, half-moons, cylinders, long planks, and chunky rectangles, along with lots of funky, irregular shapes to keep it interesting. Grandpa John also made us architectural accent pieces such as corbels, gables, bay windows, and mullions. By the time the thirteenth grandchild had arrived, the set was quite substantial—all different sizes, ranging from tiny sugar cubes to bricks the size of cinder blocks—and the number of them meant that we could build a structure big enough to go inside. These weren’t blocks to stack into a little tower. They were blocks to build with, and we played with them long after most other children had outgrown theirs.

  I may not have inherited the woodworking gene from my grandfather, but I still thought I could help Francis. I took some money out of the grocery jar and bought seven more sets of those gigantic cardboard blocks—so many that I couldn’t fit them all in my car. When I finally managed to get them home, I immediately knew that I’d done the right thing. Francis finally had enough blocks to work with. He made bridges and pyramids. He built Jenga-style towers straight to the ceiling and experimented with low, cantilevered Frank Lloyd Wright–style longhouses.