
What does it really mean to prepare your autistic child—or yourself—for a fulfilling, dynamic life?
In this episode of Autism: A New Perspective, RDIconnect® CEO Dr. Steven Gutstein dives into two critical ideas often overlooked in autism interventions: the importance of agency and of lifelong growth.
If you’re a parent or professional, you’ve likely seen the emphasis on external achievements in traditional therapies: hitting developmental milestones, mastering specific skills, or adapting to structured environments. While these accomplishments matter, Dr. Gutstein invites us to consider a deeper question:
What happens when those external supports are no longer there?
Will your child—or the families you work with—have the tools they need to grow, adapt, and thrive independently?\
Fostering Agency and Confidence in Autistic Children
Many autism interventions unintentionally foster dependence on external supports, which can lead to anxiety, helplessness, or stagnation later in life.
Think about it: If someone has spent their entire childhood relying on external prompts to succeed, what happens when they enter adulthood?
This is where the Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®) approach stands apart. It focuses on helping individuals build a sense of agency and self-confidence, ensuring they can face challenges and embrace opportunities with more hope and resilience.
For parents, this shift means less stress about your autistic child “fitting in” and more confidence that they’ll thrive on their own terms. For professionals, it’s about seeing your clients move beyond skill acquisition to achieve deeper, more transformative growth that will far outlast the time you work with them.
Creating a Foundation for Lifelong Success
Traditional measures of success often focus on static achievements, like being included in mainstream activities or reaching specific milestones. While these can provide short-term reassurance, Dr. Gutstein encourages us to consider the bigger picture:
What happens after those goals are achieved?
RDI® shifts the focus to creating a foundation for lifelong growth. Imagine your child waking up each day not feeling dependent or overwhelmed, but curious and confident—ready to engage with the world around them.
This approach empowers individuals to continually adapt, learn, and expand their capabilities, not just during childhood but throughout their lives.
Rethinking Autism Intervention
Whether you’re a parent, teacher, or therapist, RDI® offers a hopeful and practical way forward. It’s not about meeting external expectations or checking off milestones. Instead, it’s about nurturing the inner drive that enables autistic individuals to lead rich, meaningful lives.
Dr. Gutstein’s vision for RDI® is more than a method—it’s an invitation to redefine success in autism treatment. It’s a call to focus not just on where someone is today, but on who they can become tomorrow—and for the rest of their life.
Take a moment to reflect: What does growth look like for your family or the individuals you support? How might intrinsic motivation change the way you approach their future?
This episode offers both inspiration and actionable insights to help you move toward a more hopeful, dynamic vision of what’s possible—starting today.
Find out more about the RDI® approach and connect with a certified consultant here.
Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, a podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child, and we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee, and in this week’s podcast, I continue my discussion with Dr. Steve Gutstein on RDI and autism in 2025. Let’s listen in.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: For many people with autism, they’re not treated as real people, you know, who have their own individual desires to grow and develop and their own autonomy and their inner strength. You know, there’s such a focus on delivering external services. I’m not suggesting that those are not at all necessary or important for people, but that type of dependency can be very, very dangerous.
There’s a difference between what I call an affordance, which is giving someone an opportunity to grow versus the compensation, which prevents them from growing or creates an unhealthy dependency for that person. And I think in autism, that’s been a real problem, that many of the services wind up becoming dependencies, and the person with autism, especially the teenagers, the adults, the adults start to believe that the only thing that’s going to happen positively in their lives is if something externally happens to them, something’s given to them, something’s done for them. And that’s a very, very, that’s not a very healthy way to function.
It’s a very limiting way to function. It doesn’t give you what we call a sense of agency or self-efficacy that you have within yourself, the ability with what we call affordances, if you can find affordances, to allow you to keep growing and becoming stronger and becoming more capable on your own, even if it’s little by little by little. You know, I know we have some clients who are now in their 30s and 40s, and they’re not living perfect lives.
They’re not, you know, they haven’t been to college. They’re not going to. They have some real neurological limitations, but they’re real people in the sense of they’re growth seekers.
They want to continue to explore. They want to continue to live their lives and expand their lives. They’re not contracting.
They’re not hiding from the world. And that’s the fear. You know, when we think about the suicide rate, the depression rate, the anxiety rate being so high, it’s because for some people with autism, that’s what’s happened is they’ve become dependent on in their belief that only something from the outside is going to make a difference.
And when those outside things don’t work, which most of the time they don’t, then they feel helpless and despondent and they get despair or they retreat, they hide, they become insular and contract their world more and more, right? And that’s not what we want to see happening. So we’re not concerned as much with, you know, exactly where that person ends up as much as giving them the opportunity to continue to grow.
It’s that opportunity, the affordance, the sense of self, what we call becoming self that I can continue to become. I can continue to grow. I continue to find new things, explore things.
And, you know, the world is not closed to me or it’s not a frightening place that I have to hide from. And I don’t have to keep going out and failing and feeling like a failure or feeling like nothing I do is going to help or make a difference. I have those resources within myself.
I think that’s more than anything else. What I think we can do in RDI is we can imbue people, imbue people with that. And yeah, we can give them a lot of other things as well.
But I think more than anything, it’s that sense of it’s okay. I’m a person who can explore, can experiment in new things. I don’t need to run away from a dynamic, from the complexity or the dynamic qualities of the world.
I can adapt to the world and I can continue to adapt. And I want to see new things and I want to try things out and I want to see what I’m capable of. And it’s that sense, I think, that is more than anything else, the key, the central piece of RDI.
And again, each person is going to have different unique individual things that they accomplish or levels of growth and development. But I think every person can have that. Every person that we work with can have that sense of self.
And I’m hoping that we can convey that message to the community too, that that should be an outcome. That should be the goal, that self-efficacy, that sense of agency, that sense of growth imbued within us that we have potential for growth. Again, everybody’s not going to be as fast as everyone else.
Everyone’s going to have a different trajectory. But the idea that I can wake up in the morning and I might think of something new or try out something or see what happens, even if it’s on a small scale, doesn’t have to be a huge thing, I think is very close what I believe the essence of RDI is and the essence of what we should be doing for people with autism is giving them that, not so much hope. Hope is really important, but that inner sense of hope that comes from knowing that you have the internal resources to make your life better, more interesting, to be able to not be afraid to get up and move out into the world in different ways.
And I think if we succeed in something, that’s what I hope we succeed to do. And if you ask me about where I hope the field of autism is going, that’s what I hope it does. It’s not reflected in the current quote-unquote intervention models that I see.
They don’t think that way, which is so odd. Because if you look at people with other problems or issues, people like with Down syndrome or hearing or speech or whatever, severe issues, and you hear about the advocates or the researchers or the people trying to make a difference, that’s what they’re trying to do for them. Somehow in autism, there’s some voices, but they’re lonely.
They’re still pretty lonely. And I’d like to see that become the majority of voices out there is that is the long-term goal for any child or any person who is diagnosed is to say, how are we going to give you the resources, the internal resources to make, to continue to grow in the world and continue to want to be out in the world and to be able to face challenges? And what a challenge is is different for different people.
You know, what’s challenging for me may be easy for you, right? And vice versa. But the key is to know that you want to face those challenges and you want to master them and you want to look forward and you want to look into your future and feel a sense, know that you’re not going to solve everything and you’re not going to be perfect, but that you can make things work for you and you can see what’s down the road.
You can go down the road and be interested and not be terrified of seeing what’s in the future for you. And to help parents to see that as their goal, because it’s very confusing when your child’s diagnosed or when you’re in that autism where you don’t know what, where should your focus be? Should it be running around getting services and therapies and this and that?
Should it be getting into mainstream inclusion or this or that? Everybody has these different, I don’t know what you’d call them, but progress markers, I guess, or things which don’t necessarily equate with self-efficacy or agency or the sense of, and part of that agency is interpersonal. It’s wanting to be with other people.
It’s not being afraid of them. It’s not feeling like you have to be, that you can use your own mind with people, that you don’t have to be worried about everything you say or saying exactly the right thing or following some kind of a script or some kind of a static thing, but that you can actually meet other people’s minds with your mind, which is really what relationships are about, right? And giving them that type of interpersonal agency.
So it’s not just the sounds of self, but the sense of self with others that I think we want to provide. And I think we want that to start early. When we think about early on, when we establish frames for children, we first begin working in RDI and we say, look, you can see it.
You can live in a dynamic world. We give them that experiences. We create simple enough and you can feel some mastery in that world rather than avoidance.
When you look at the infant research in autism, it’s so interesting because if you look at the research in the first few months of life, whether prospectively or retrospectively, it’s very hard to tell the difference in most cases between children who are going to be diagnosed eventually and those who aren’t. Very difficult. But as you move past the first year, it starts to become more clear.
So what do we know? And by 18 months, it’s very clear. What do we know?
We know that something happens that leads these infants, these young infants to turn away from the world. They’re not born that with autism. They’re not born with that.
In other words, if you look at six month old smiles, looks at faces or smiles, you can’t really make a significant prediction based on that, but who’s going to wind up with autism? But if you look at the same type of thing, social observation, initiating joint attention, we look at things in about 12, 15 months, you can make very good predictions. So what do we know?
Something happens that takes away that sense of looking towards the world, looking towards others. Remember, we’re talking about social things. We’re talking about looking towards others to guide us.
That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about attachment. Kids with autism have attachment.
That’s not the issue. It’s why do we look? We look to learn.
We look because you’re going to challenge us. We look because there’s new things out there. You’re going to be giving us new ideas.
And we look away. It means we can’t handle that. We’re afraid of that.
We’re overwhelmed by that. So what five and six months seems to be, right? Somebody who’s still looking at the world by 12, 15 months, 18 months is someone who’s stopped doing that, is now looking away.
And it’s not because something immediately happens in their brain or some chemical gets released. We know that’s not true. It’s because they’re unable to form what we call an experience-guiding relationship, which really starts to form the second half of the first year.
What do we see with typically developing children? We see two things that one is they shift from wanting stability perceptually to wanting novelty. By seven months, novelty is the primary motivation.
By 12 months, what really turns them on is what we call incongruity. When they see something that doesn’t make sense, you know, suddenly a table’s floating in the air. They don’t look away from that.
They look towards it. They’re interested in it because they trust themselves. Now they trust their guides.
They’re able to handle those types of what we call emergent events with a sense of interest, curiosity. We start to see the difference with children who are going to be dying of autism of looking away, of not wanting to see new things in the world, but wanting to tune them out, being overwhelmed by them, right? So what does that tell us?
It tells us that that’s the beginning of that loss of sense of self-efficacy, of that sense of, I want to master my world. I want to go out and face challenges. I’m interested in what’s new out there, right?
But it’s not only they’re born. It’s because they lose that ability to access their guides. You know, if you think of it that way, when we look at that research, it shows, oh, here’s what an reversing that for people with, for young children with autism, for anyone, by helping them to experience that they can look towards the complex dynamic world, right?
That they don’t have to look away, that they can make sense of it. That’s sense-making, that they can find meaning, that they can be, they can master it. They can perceive it as same, different, but also same.
They can, we have to provide experience bridges for them until they learn to internalize that and go out in the world, because that’s how we manage novelty. That’s why we go and look at growth and new things. We don’t just jump out into, we don’t jump off cliffs, right?
We use our experience to bridge into something new. And once people with autism learn that they can do that, then everything changes for them. They don’t become perfect.
They still may have neurological issues and different problems and whatever. We’re not curing it, but they start to look out in the world and they start, it starts to change. And you can really see that in even young children who we’ve worked with, you can see that change.
Hey, I want to try something new. You know, I want to go to this new place. I don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Right. And it’s amazing when that change starts to happen. You can see that.
Kat Lee: And thanks for joining us for autism, a new perspective, the podcast show, where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child. And we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee.
See you next time.
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