Thank you for your post and thank your wife as well. There is a photo of my special little girl in my profile and at 2.5 years old and after 10 months of therapy, she is nearly "indistinguishable from her peers" as her doctors now have stated. I have no doubt in my mind that she will eventually thrive in a normal school setting, possibly as early as kindergarten and become a functional and productive adult with perhaps some "quirks". However, along the way I have met some profoundly autistic children and it's a sad situation. To make such comments without having walked a day in these parents's shoes is plain cruel, as you said. FReepers have autistic children too and none of us asked to be here. Many of us pursue outside private therapy and are not solely relying on the government alone, just to clear THAT up. It's times like these where I think the Demilibs may be onto something when they spout that we conservatives "only care about children when they are inside the wound".