Ryan is 16 and on the autism spectrum. He participated in AbilityPLUS’s ski program from age 10 through 13. At that point he could outski all the instructors and ‘graduated’ from AbilityPLUS to the Attitash Seasonal program; he’s been a member of the seasonal program for three seasons with a great bunch of boys on the mountain every weekend.
He’s strong, good-natured, will take on anything and give it his all-out effort. But one worry from the time he was young has been the development of his internal leadership skills. He’s had to take so much direction and facilitation from adults over the years that we’ve always been concerned about his ability to handle finding himself in an unfamiliar situation. There is so much that a “typical” child will learn through absorption – things that just seem to be automatically ingrained. These are things that he’s missed along the way due to his language struggles and overall learning delays; skills and the associated reasoning that now have to be deliberately taught with the hope that he’ll remember to use them when he needs them. As a parent, it’s scary to try and give your teenager independence while not really knowing if he’ll be able to handle a situation gone wrong, or being afraid that he’ll do whatever anyone tells him to do because he’s so used to taking direction.
So many opportunities have opened up for him because of AbilityPLUS – training for and hiking Mt Washington; backcountry skiing; volunteering on trail maintenance days for different stewardship organizations; meeting more and more people in Mt Washington Valley who know him as “one of the ski kids,” versus “the kid that needs help;” and making true peer-level friends. These things have helped build his confidence in himself and his own judgment that he can carry with him into his daily life in school and beyond. That internally developed confidence is critical to his success in adulthood; AbilityPLUS has had a huge role in helping him tap into that part of himself and is a big part of the young man he’s become.