Parenting an autistic child in 2026 means living with more information, more opinions, and more pressure than ever before. From social media feeds to online programs, autism conferences, and endless “must try” therapies, parents are flooded with advice about what to do next. It is no wonder so many families feel overwhelmed, rushed, and unsure how to make good decisions for their child.
In this episode of Autism: A New Perspective, host Kat Lee talks with RDI® consultant and parent Lisa Palasti about what it is like to be an autism parent today. Lisa shares honestly about her own journey, from doing “all the things” and managing multiple therapies to discovering Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®) and finally being given permission to slow down and do less. Together, Kat and Lisa explore what it means for parents to be in the driver’s seat, rather than feeling like passive passengers in their child’s intervention.
As they reflect on parents in 2026, Kat and Lisa name the realities that many families face: decision fatigue, conflicting recommendations, and the quiet fear about the future that keeps parents awake at night. They talk about how easy it is to hand over authority to professionals and lose sight of your own role as the expert in your child. Lisa describes how RDI® helped her reclaim that role, learn how to guide her children in daily life, and focus on long-term neural integration and well-being rather than just short-term skills.
This conversation is full of hope for parents of toddlers, teens, and adults alike. Lisa shares stories from her early years as a mom, her turning point when she chose to do less, and the encouragement she now offers to parents of twenty-two-year-olds who worry they have found RDI® “too late.” Drawing on work in neuroplasticity and lifelong brain growth, Kat and Lisa remind us that change is possible across the lifespan and that growth for your child is always possible, whether they are two, twenty-two, or eighty-two.
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Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child, and we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee, and in this week’s podcast, I visit with RDI® consultant and parent Lisa Palasti, and we talk about Lisa’s journey as a parent and about the need to have parents in the driver’s seat for the future of their children. Let’s listen in.
Lisa, I want to talk with you about today’s sweet parents, and as you meet so many parents, we were just talking about conferences and presentations, and you just have an opportunity to meet so many wonderful parents and professionals in all the work you do. How are you seeing parents of today as we go into 2026? What are some things that strike you?
Lisa Palasti: The massive amount of information that is out there in the world today, and not just about autism, but constantly just bombarding our brains and taking up our bandwidth from our smartphones to the signage to just massive amounts. And I feel that families are overwhelmed with this information, and so it’s difficult for them to be able to slow down and to reflect on what it is that they truly want for their child, what their role may be in their child’s lives. I’m sure we’re going to delve into that topic with respect to the recommendations that they get that can be overwhelming, so I think that they’re finding it hard to really navigate what makes most sense for their child, and they’re just turning to what’s most popular or what’s most recommended, which I did as a parent. And in fact, I put blinders on when I did it because I thought it was the only way, and it wasn’t until I found RDI that I actually came out of crisis.
Kat Lee: I was thinking about what you were saying about voices and how overwhelming that is and how everything’s speeding up, they’re moving really fast. What’s interesting is how voices can make your whole life lose pace. I think it’s such an interesting thing to think about.
There’s so much information that that fact alone can make us feel like we’re rushing at a fast pace.
Lisa Palasti: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, like we have to do everything all at the same time, and I remember one time I was trying to do three different things, and I felt each one of them was really almost a full-time job. I was managing a team of six people in our ABA program. I was doing biomedical intervention, and then I started trying to learn about, and this was before I had gotten an RDI consultant, but I was trying to figure out how to do RDI. And at one point, I just stopped, and I said to myself, “Lisa, you are doing too many things at one time, and you can’t do any one of them well.”
Kat Lee: Yeah, that’s the truth, though. I mean, yeah, I mean, I’m such a hypocrite. I think that’s the story of my life, having to go through that cycle.
It’s kind of funny. I was thinking about that very thing this morning, so we’re all, as they always say, only human, and it’s kind of recognizing that’s going on in your life. One of the issues is that when you’re in that space of doing so many things, decision-making becomes very challenging, and I think anyone, but including our sweet parents, can find themselves making decisions without giving themselves time and space to make the decision.
What do you think?
Lisa Palasti: I think that’s very, very common. To be granted permission to slow down and evaluate whether or not the thing that you’re engaging in is making sense for yourself, for your child, for your children. So I had enrolled my children in this kinder music program, and my one son was two and a half, and the other one was five and a half. And when I was in the room with my son for about, it was about 30 to 40 minutes, I’m with all these other parents of kids that are two to three years old, and my son, I can’t get him to do anything. He just wants to go and open and close the cupboard doors, and I can’t get him to drum on the drums or, you know, even stay with me, and all the other moms are watching.
Then there’s a handful of parents that also had older children in the other room, so we would join as a family. I would take my two-and-a-half-year-old and go join my five-and-a-half-year-old in the other room, and now they’re both bouncing off the walls going bonkers, so I’ve got these same eyes that are staring at me in the other room that are now going, “Holy cow,” in this room. So we did this about three times, and then I had a meeting with the director of the program, and I said, “This just isn’t working for me. It’s just far too stressful, and I’m just letting you know that we’re just not going to continue.” And so she understood, and she was very compassionate.
And so anyway, that particular day after I’d had this conversation, we got into the car, and my five-and-a-half-year-old said to me, “What’s wrong, Mommy? You’re not crying today,” because I would cry on the way home after the first three sessions. But once I made that reflective evaluation that this isn’t working for me… So I guess as parents, too, we have to consider what’s working for me and what’s not. And on that topic, I was over-reliant on all of these wonderful therapists that would come into my home, but yet I still lost sleep at night worrying about my children’s future.
Were the goals that they were working on, was it going to help them long term to be able to grow up, to be the very best versions of themselves, to be able to live life with well-being, you know, with ease? I mean, to some extent, I don’t know if any of us live with ease, but we can try to find that place of calm and happiness and, you know, whatever that brings people. So yeah, I was over-reliant on these professionals, and I was scared, and I was disempowered. I did not know how to help my own children, and it was when I began RDI, the very first thing that I was granted permission to do was to do less, and that was music to my ears, because prior to that, I was running them from therapy to therapy.
I didn’t know how to spend time with them. I didn’t know how to help them, and that’s all I truly, truly wanted to do. And so yeah, so I learned how.
Kat Lee: When you learned how, and you gave yourself time to make decisions, and gave yourself time to think, and gave yourself time to be restored, which is huge for parents, and I wonder how much… well, we talk in RDI about empowering parents. You and I have talked about that many times in podcasts. We talk about putting parents back in, or in for the first time if they’ve never been in, the driver’s seat with their child. But I wonder sometimes if parents, some of these voices, well-meaning, are informing them they shouldn’t be in that driver’s seat, and that concerns me.
Lisa Palasti: Well, yes, because we’re not afforded that opportunity. We’re “just the parent.” We’re not the expert in whatever the challenge is of the child, and I think that that really discounts us, because we are the best suited. We know exactly, you know, we’re the experts in our kids, and we have these day-to-day opportunities that we can help to anchor the learning experiences, and then we know how to bridge them or make those connections to the next experience. We learn how to seize opportunities to help build the neural integration in our kids’ brains, and this ability comes in part from empowerment, from the doing, and then from developing the competency to be able to be essentially the architect of our children’s brains, helping their minds develop.
But I didn’t step into RDI without having received a fair bit of education first, and it was through a conference, and I believe that I read, you know, what I could read about on the internet back in 2003. There was a book. You know, now we have a few publications. We have tons of information on the internet. There’s lots and lots of ways to learn about RDI. I think every single RDI consultant offers a free consultation. But I think that what’s important, too, is when families take the time to research what the programs offer and to match that to what they hope and dream for their child’s future.
And I know when I saw Dr. Gutstein speak in March of 2003, and he came to Toronto during the SARS epidemic when the WHO was saying, “Don’t go to Toronto,” and Dr. Gutstein did, and I was so thankful. He talked about the long-term implications and the research, and he had done all the research, and it was pretty dismal. But I’m a pretty quick processor, because I thought to myself, if he’s talking about it, that means he’s doing something about it, and that’s the thing that’s keeping me up at night. That’s the thing that really concerns me: the long term. It’s the prefrontal cortex neural integration to develop those processing centers, which are the things that we need in order to be able to navigate the crazy world that we live in today.
Well, why are you talking about the crazy world now? Unpredictable, uncertain, emotionally charged, problems with not all the right answers, fast-paced. All the things we face.
Kat Lee: So I was thinking about what you were saying about Dr. Gutstein and myself also hearing him the first time, and the thing I would love people to know is he’s still that person. I mean, he’s still thinking about our children and their future, and he’s still always moving forward, looking for the next answers. In other words, improving and moving forward, and I think that’s so exciting.
It’s a passion, and those who are involved with him and RDI have caught that passion.
Lisa Palasti: Yes. I always say that RDI is cutting edge because he’s always learning from the best, most current consensus research and then putting that into clinical practice, and also we learn from our experiences. We’re learning from our experiences with our families. I learn so much all the time from the clients that I work with, from the schools that I go into. I guess that’s kind of a cool way of thinking about RDI in that it’s so experiential, and we learn from our experiences. It’s not about getting it right or wrong. It’s about learning how to step in, learning how to guide. So parents learn how to guide so that they can step into those experiences with their children, and it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be perfect. We have to help families not judge themselves.
I remember I was supposed to send my first VHS tape back, way back when, through snail mail, and it was my first one, and I was a week late on my deadline. Then I was two weeks late, and then I was three weeks late, and one day I just said to myself, “Girl, get over it. It’s not like you’re paying her to say good job. You know you’re on this process of learning. You are on a journey.” I think that if that is true for me, that that would probably be true for a majority of parents, because I’m not a perfectionist by any means. I’m a good-enough thinker.
Kat Lee: Well, I could always talk to you forever, Lisa, but let’s think about: I’m a parent of a two-year-old or the parent of a 22-year-old. What would you say to those parents?
Lisa Palasti: Well, I think that to the parent of the two-year-old, I would say, “Wow, I’m really impressed that you found me so soon,” if they wanted to talk to me, because that’s pretty remarkable. I would have to say I find that parents that do land in RDI, either they’re looking for all the answers and they want to do everything, so we have to help them understand that sometimes less is more. But for that parent of the 22-year-old, often they may say, “Oh, I wish I would have found out about this sooner,” but what I tell them is one thing that we know to be true is that brains continue to change over our lifespans, that neural integration continues to grow.
And I’m assuming that they’re still growing as people. I often ask them, “Are you still learning? Are you still growing?” And yes. “And making new discoveries?” Yes. And I know that I am. But I would say that I had the great experience of seeing Dr. Norman Doidge, who’s one of the neuroplasticity doctors in my area in Toronto. And he wrote the book that is called The Brain That Changes Itself.
And he really shared this remarkable story of a man who started studying neuroplasticity in the 50s when they thought that the brain was hard-boiled and that there’s this idea that if you don’t get kids before the age of six, then it’s too late. And that’s absolutely not true. So anyway, this doctor ended up having a massive stroke.
And his son, who’d also become a doctor, knew about his father’s work in neuroplasticity. And he said, “Oh, your father’s, you know, he may live another few years, but he needs to go into an institution and he’s probably going to live in a vegetative state.” Well, the son brought him home because he knew that that wasn’t true.
And they did a lot of, I’m sure, repatterning work or neurodevelopment work—I don’t know exactly what the work was—but they did a lot of work with him. And what was so fascinating was that elderly doctor that had that massive stroke ended up climbing Mount Fuji many years later and dying of a massive heart attack. So the story goes on that the son then did a brain biopsy on him, because he wanted to look at what happened to Dad’s brain. And sure enough, that area where the massive stroke had hit, the lesions were still there. But what they were able to ascertain then was that new neural integration occurred in other parts of the brain.
I’m not a statistical person, a statistician, but I mean, have you ever heard that we only use 10% of our brains?
Kat Lee: Yes.
Lisa Palasti: Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t think that we can ever put a window on what is possible for somebody and that growth—what is it that you always say?
“Growth for your child is possible.” Yeah. And it is.
Kat Lee: Yes.
Lisa Palasti: Yeah. And whether that child is 22 or 42, I think the oldest person that I think came to seek out RDI services was 82.
Kat Lee: Yeah. I think it does sum it up well, because that hope of growth is something that we often find isn’t there or even thought about. And hope for your child, your adult, yourself, is possible.
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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