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From Challenges to Purpose: Clain Udy’s Autism Parenting Journey · Inchstones with Sarah | Autism Advocacy & Caregiver Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the Inch Stones podcast. And today I am so lucky to have a new friend, new acquaintance of mine, Clayne Udy out of Golden, Colorado, one of my favorite cities in the state of Colorado. And Clayne and I connected, as do a lot of special needs parents, where the community might seem like it's all over the place, but we find each other. And so I, Clain and I connected. He is launching a book about his fatherhood journey as being an autism dad. And I would just love to have a conversation today about what led you to where you are right now, Clayne, and a little bit more about your book and as your experience being an autism dad.
• 0:45
  Speaker B: Well, yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Sarah. I mean, I think, you know, immediately I connected with your reels because there's a, there's a certain optimism and defiant optimism in that regard which I think is absolutely, you know, important for all parents of autistic kiddos to have and embrace. But that, that kind of defiance is, is something that, that has really kind of come about in my life. So I'm doing a couple things. Number one is writing this book. I'm about 80% done with the, the rough draft. Then I'll go into copy editing and all that stuff. But really it's broken into three, three parts. The first part is memoir and that kind of gives my, the story of my transformation, let's call it that, from having a starting out with a deficit mindset about autism, about my son, and then moving and then I'm kind of pivoting in a moment of time toward a strength based mindset which changed everything for us as a family, for Christian, as a person. And then I also started a cause based business, slide business, let's call it about 10 years ago, called First Ascent. And it was designed to help young autistic individuals transition into careers. And so I ran that, you know, evenings, weekends for a couple years. I was able to help a lot of families. And then I decided, you know, at one point when I'm at a certain stage in life where I can do this, that's what I'm going to do full time. So I, I'm, you know, starting restarting that, that business. I've got my first cohort that I'm taking through the first stage of the program, which is the align stage. And then I'm also writing this book and I'm learning a lot. Yeah, from writing this book just about things that I wish I had learned earlier, but, hmm, really are just coming into view at this Point in time. So, you know.
• 2:52
  Speaker A: Well, I always, I always say when it comes to things like that, where you're like, well, I wish I knew I'd learned that earlier. I think, well, when you know better, you do better, right?
• 2:59
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:59
  Speaker A: Like sometimes we didn't. We don't know what we don't know.
• 3:02
  Speaker B: You know, like, it's, it's a learning journey, and there are no shortcuts. You have to go through those learning experiences and, and you have to skin your knees once in a while, you know, to, to really learn and, and internalize that. You know, there's a famous quote, I think it was from, from Buddha, actually. It says, when the. The pupil is ready, the. The teacher will appear.
• 3:29
  Speaker A: Hmm. I love that.
• 3:31
  Speaker B: I think with, you know, as, as parents of, of kiddos, we experience our fair amount of, of pain and struggle, and we are fully engaged, you know, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, sometimes physically. And we are in the learning moment very often in our lives. So we learn together as a family unit, and it's a beautiful journey.
• 3:59
  Speaker A: Talk to me about when you pivoted from the acceptance of being Christian's, you know, dad and, and Christian being who he is, and that in that, in that pivot from the grief denial to acceptance and strength, what did that. What, what was it that made you turn that corner? And do you feel like it was this recognizing in yourself or was it your full acceptance about what was in front of you?
• 4:29
  Speaker B: It was, it was. That's a great question. I, it happened when Christian was around 12, and I've always been, like, super involved. I, I, you know, I. From, from, from the get go, I've been a very, very engaged parent. And, you know, so there's no, I guess there's no difference between my role as a dad and Jennifer, my wife's role as a mom. We are, you, you know, we've been partnered, joined at the hip from the very beginning. So I never, I never really experienced, you know, any denial that would cause me to, you know, dismiss myself.
• 5:13
  Speaker A: Disengage or dismiss. Right.
• 5:15
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I, I was always, like, hyper engaged. And there was one incident. So when Christian was young, we were very much in this, you know, deficit mindset of we need to fix more, more, more.
• 5:30
  Speaker A: Fix, fix, fix. Yeah, yeah.
• 5:32
  Speaker B: We need to close the gap somehow on, you know, where he is with neuronormal, I guess what's. What we would call it. And then, so we, we were looking for, you know, this medical narrative that comes down to us that explains what autism is and is very much Focused on finding deficit, finding disability, finding what's wrong. And they are in fix it mode. And that kind of puts that narrative translates down to us as parents to eventually translates into, into our children too.
• 6:10
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 6:11
  Speaker B: So that was very much the, the mindset that we had. Obviously we're full and loving parents, but we are in this deficit mindset, like.
• 6:22
  Speaker A: Catch, catch up mode. You know, constant catch up mode.
• 6:25
  Speaker B: Close the gap. Yeah, let's make things close. As close to normal and typical as we can. And then there's one kind of, there's one incident that, that stands out for me. I used to be at every single event with, with Christian, like birthday parties, even like when they would have a play date, I would be at the play date, you know. That's awesome. Making sure that nothing went, went wrong. Doing a little coaching.
• 6:54
  Speaker A: Right. And teach. And teaching. Probably. I know that there's a lot of just that teaching and that redirection of those behaviors at first, I'm sure.
• 7:02
  Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, that's an extremely stressful proposition to try to figure out, you know, when to do. I insert myself, when do I correct other, you know, kids or, you know, and so I would, I did a lot of volunteering. I would insert myself into these things under the, I guess under the guise of volunteering. So one, one time there was a scout camp and this was in the high mountains of the Uinta Mountains in Utah where I lived at the time. And I couldn't make it the first night, which was very rare because of my work. I couldn't, I couldn't be there. It was a multi day thing. I, I couldn't be there the first night and I worried that something was going to go wrong, that, you know, that either there would be some ugly incident or like a fight or, or he would be ostracized or whatever. So I worried that entire night about what was going to happen as he spent the night alone. So I got off work the second night and I drove up to this campsite, Scout campsite, and I, I came across the Scouts campsite and there was the couple of tents full of. I could tell they were full of boys laughing, telling jokes and you know, there's a warm glow of the light in there from the lanterns or the flashlights or whatever and they were having a good time. It was very warm and I wondered whether, whether Christian was in one of those tents. Yeah, Yeah. I turned out that I poked my head in the tent. I said, hey, is Christian here? No, he's not here. Poked my head in the second tent. Hey, is Christian here? No, I think he's in that tent over there. So I went and I saw the tent. It was dark, it was out in the pine trees. It was cold, it was isolated. You know, it was summer, but it was very cold still because of the altitude. And so I popped my head in the tent and, you know, Christian's never been like super expressive, but he greeted me, hey, dad. You know, he was really happy to see me.
• 9:28
  Speaker A: Right.
• 9:29
  Speaker B: And so in that moment, I, I understood that this situation was not designed for him, you know, to be in a tent full of kids, a. Who got to decide who was in the tent.
• 9:45
  Speaker A: Exactly. I was going to say, like within their own circumstances, stances, decide.
• 9:49
  Speaker B: Yeah. And then, and then also just the, the kind of the open swirl of jokes and teasing and, you know, ghost stories.
• 9:58
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 9:58
  Speaker B: You know, which would have been hard for him to, you know, be involved in track, you know, participate in. So I, I, first of all, I thought, why did this happen? What, where are the leaders here, you.
• 10:13
  Speaker A: Know, who could have recognized, easily facilitated that problem here?
• 10:17
  Speaker B: Right. We got this kid who spent the night in a huge tent by himself in the dark, in the cold.
• 10:26
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:26
  Speaker B: And so why didn't anyone have the awareness to do something, Intervene?
• 10:32
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 10:32
  Speaker B: And then the second thought I had was, you know what? I cannot control what happens outside of my, outside of our home, but we can control that. And so if, if we tried to engineer and design all these little friendships, then with one exception, it didn't work.
• 10:55
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:56
  Speaker B: So I, you know, basically said, if no one else is going to be his friend, I will be his friend.
• 11:03
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 11:04
  Speaker B: He can always, can always count on me to be his friend. And so that was, you know, that was the, the connection there. And that was my, you know, kind of solidified my commitment. The other thing that happened around that age was I was reading two books. First, Break all the Rules, which I love the title of because I'm, I'm a little bit that way myself. A little bit independent. A little bit less than the end.
• 11:33
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 11:34
  Speaker B: And then. Now discover your strengths. Don Clifton, Marcus Buckingham. I was doing this for a leadership, you know, series that I was preparing for work. And basically the premise is all of the great managers. It was a huge Gallup study written 30 interview, 130,000 interviews done to understand what makes a good manager, what makes the best managers. And the conclusion was the best managers are those that recognize strength, look for strength, don't focus on non strengths, but overwhelmingly try to find strengths, grow those strengths, put People in a, in a position every day where they can exercise those strengths. And so it was like an epiphany. I, I, I understood that this is supplies to Christian more than anyone, because, yes, we'd been always in the scales. His whole life had been tilted in the direction of deficit, you know, micro criticisms and corrections, all, you know, from classmates.
• 12:50
  Speaker A: It's guttural. It's guttural. Yeah.
• 12:52
  Speaker B: Yeah. And even in our own home, as, you know, with all the love and the support and the optimism that we provide, we were still doing that.
• 13:03
  Speaker A: We were still adding totally the expectations of catching up and normalizing their path and correcting whatever course it is.
• 13:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, Jennifer and I, we talked and we said, again, we can't control what happens outside of our home, but we can't control what happens in our home. So we are going to find strength. We're going to look for strength, we're going to see strength, and we're going to start celebrating that. And it was, to be honest with you, it was hard to see. We had to look for clues. But when we started looking, then we started to see straight.
• 13:49
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 13:50
  Speaker B: And so we started to develop that, and we, we, every day was a high five day. We, you know, we, even if it was, you know, something fairly inconsequential, we celebrated it right. Simply because we were trying to tilt the balance right in his, in his favor. And that's what, that's one of the things that I, you know, I, I see in your reels and seeing your approach, that you'll find what you're looking for.
• 14:19
  Speaker A: You will.
• 14:19
  Speaker B: So if you look for deficit, you'll find it. Yeah, it's pretty easy to find. And you'll amplify that, you'll grow that. But if you look for strengths, you'll find that too.
• 14:31
  Speaker A: Well, there's, you know, there's psychological studies that say, you know, have you seen a red car on the road today? And you say, no. But then you start thinking about red cars, and you're gonna start finding red cars.
• 14:43
  Speaker B: You're gonna start finding red cars, you're.
• 14:44
  Speaker A: Gonna start finding red cars. And, you know, the same exact mindset shift for me, it seems very similar. And it wasn't obviously the same with Christian or for Millie and Mac with me. But at some point, I was getting the message over and over again. I'm here to make and lead my children to become the best versions of who they actually are. Not who I want them to be, but who they actually are. And in doing that over and over again, choosing to just support and guide their path into being who I believe they are meant to be or to the greatest potential of who they're meant to be. I needed to start doing that for myself. So it gives, it gives you this internal reflection too. I'm sure that you felt that you and Jennifer, your wife as well, like, oh my gosh, like not only doing this, but as you do it more and more, you internalize it for your own self as well and the strengths that you have as a parent and as a person.
• 15:38
  Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Right. And that's kind of where, you know, that healthy dose of defiance comes in because you have to step away from normal. You have to, in a way, reject that. And you have to say, I need to put normal aside and I need to. Even the world, the world is not designed. Many situations in the world are not designed for my child or for me either. For that child.
• 16:11
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 16:12
  Speaker B: So I need to find that environment or that situation where it is well suited, where I do thrive. And there was a, you know, so on the. Once we started to recognize that environment matters. Ooh, yes, you know, it matters. And so our job is to try to find that well suited environment that plays to their strengths, place to our strengths. And that might mean that, you know, what, this might not match up with, you know, the neuronorm or the normal or society's expectations or what have you. I don't care.
• 16:56
  Speaker A: Right. Like, I reject that with extreme prejudice because that wasn't working. And we got validation that that really wasn't working. So when you do the opposite and you defy, even though, you know it's not working for you, it's still really hard because of our conditioning.
• 17:14
  Speaker B: It is. And, and our, our own need to, for acceptance.
• 17:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
• 17:23
  Speaker B: You're at, at one point you have to just say, you know, creating an environment, a situation where we can thrive and where our children can thrive more specifically is that is all that matters. Another kind of, you know, application of that is in this First Ascent program. I have, you know, I take a very progressive approach. So the normal, you know, career transition track would be, I'm a high school senior. I go into the counselor's office. We, we talk about which school to go to, we talk about what majors we might, you know, then we go to school on our own and we, we might change majors here and there, but we kind of figure it out. And then we, we graduate and then we get a job and we make it work. Right. Because we can adapt to and we have, you know, the ability to be able to step into a broader field and, and make it work or whether we're going to be happy or not.
• 18:31
  Speaker A: Nah, you know, we kind of accept, like, society's version of the next step and we sort of say, okay, they're more adaptable to it. Yeah, it's the model. And I see everyone doing it and, okay, well, you know, I guess this.
• 18:45
  Speaker B: Is what we do with our daughter, you know.
• 18:48
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 18:48
  Speaker B: So just take that same playbook and that. I, I equate that with. I'm not a climber, but I equate that with, like, free climbing. I don't know if you've seen the movie, you know, free solo.
• 19:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:01
  Speaker B: Just harrowing. But that, that's the equivalent of, you know, because you can fall and that fall could be very, very costly. You know, a lot of, you know, if you go out and you fail in the workplace, you fail over and over again, eventually you're going to end up in. In the basement and unemployment rate of 85%, you know, or thereabouts. So with our son, we took a much more progressive approach. It's like aided climbing. Climb 10ft, lock in, climb 10ft, lock land, and just make sure that you're climbing the right mountain and take a very progressive approach. So if you fall, you're falling, you know, a short distance. And so, so we, with Christian, we started out by saying, okay, can he go to college? Can he take one class at college? And he did. He did great. And then the next semester, can he take two classes? We just worked our way up until he was taking a full load at university. And then one of our biggest questions was, can he have a full time job? And so we took a break from college and we had to take a side door into this, you know, because he did some interviews and not his strength. So he, we got him in a temp agency and he started by, you know, packaging pills at this nutrition supplement, you know, manufacturing facility. And he had the night shift. And at the time we were like, you know, we were in Mexico on a trip at that point, and I was just, you know, I called him to see how things went. The first night, you know, I had all these nightmares, of course. Of what, how it went. And finally I got a hold of him and I said, hey, bud, how did, How'd your first night at work go? That went all right. Went fine. Like, hey, so he worked there for like two or three months. And let's find another situation. It's not a night shift. It's. And he. So he got on with an airbag manufacturing place and, and he did fantastic. He was one of the highest performers there because. Because of his strengths, because of his eye for, you know, detail attentiveness, for his precision. You know, he could, he could see and hear defects in the airbags. And very often he would come home from work with, you know, a mug or a T shirt, you know, because he had found an error, you know.
• 21:51
  Speaker A: You know, we're going to go a completely different route here only because it's going to come back to what you just said about his ability to find these details and the precision. There's a man by the name of John Boyd who is a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. He's a developer, creator of the OODA loop. Right. Which is orientation. Observe, orientation, decide and act. Right. The OODA loop itself actually is much more complex than just that one circle. But there's a lot of different, you know, the, the complexity that are injected. But one thing I know for sure in learning about this is that autistic individuals have a faster OODA loop in certain manners that allow for that to be celebrated. And you capitalize on just that with, with Christian, he was able to be in a situation where that strength of his, the recognizing of the small default in an airbag on a line, he was able to, because of him just being who he is and encouraging that strength, he was celebrated for that. I mean, that is the coolest. That's the coolest thing ever. Because it doesn't change him. It just celebrates and strengthens the things that make him him.
• 23:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 23:06
  Speaker A: I love that. I absolutely love that.
• 23:08
  Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, I guess just to finish the story, he's. He's 28 now. He's in his senior year it in a CU Denver in mechanical engineering.
• 23:23
  Speaker A: So he, it's amazing.
• 23:25
  Speaker B: And, you know, he's. He pursues his. His passion here in his room. So, like, he, he's very interested in obviously engineering, all things science, but he's really interested in renewable energy. So he's. He's trying to convert different forms of energy from this form of energy to that form of energy to that form of energy. And he does this all in his room. So he'll go out on his awesome weekend searches through thrift stores and he'll find little like vacuum cleaners and pressure cookers and he'll try to, you know, his. He'll steal my tools out of my garage and he'll create these, you know, run these Experiments up in his room. So that happened because we at one point said, we're going to find his strengths and we're going to celebrate them and we're going to grow them and we're going to amplify them. So going back to when he was 12, you know, we started to see. Looking for clues. We said, what does he pay attention to? What is he interested in? Cars, Cars, cars, cars all day long and then Legos and anything that you constructed, physically constructed. And he had an IQ test and he, he was like in a 99th percentile in visual spatial skills. So.
• 24:49
  Speaker A: Right.
• 24:49
  Speaker B: He just, Just got it. And so we said, you know, I planted a little seed in his head and said, bud, you know, the. There are people who design cars for a living. That's what they do. You could just see him kind of thinking about that. And then we got him Google Sketchup and we said, hey, Bun, what about if he started to just kind of create 3D models of stuff of maybe cars? And then he immediately started to spend hours and hours on Google Sketchup, you know, designing cars, you know, designing pistons and camshafts and. Yeah, engine parts. And then, you know, we. The next step was to put him in. There was a charter school that was on the campus of a technical college. And so half of the curriculum was high school online with a lab there, and the other half was technical college. And so he went through their drafting program, you know, Ian, as part of his high school. So he graduated with his high school diploma, but also graduated with this 1200 hour, you know, certificate in computer aided design. And his teachers, you know, told us at one point he said, you know what, your son, he just, he's going through the curriculum at, you know, at least 40% faster than most of the adult people in the clowns.
• 26:23
  Speaker A: Right.
• 26:25
  Speaker B: He just gets it.
• 26:26
  Speaker A: Well, I have to, you know, take pause and hopefully you and your wife do so enough as well, because he wouldn't do that and wouldn't have been in that space to be recognized for that if it wasn't for your recognizing that. And like you said, slowing down, defying what was supposed to be his, His. His journey or his path, you know, that takes an exorbitant amount of inner strength to do so. You know, I know so from my own. With. With my little ones. And I know so deeply that that is not easy to push the things aside that say that. That Christian or Millie or Mac, they're not doing xyz. You know, I literally just before coming on to record, you know, the Public school district envelope came and it has, you know, to the parent of, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you open it up, it's, it's these, you know, assessments that are done and all these buckets that they don't fill and there are zero out of 10. And you know, it's. I used to really get so clam down, clamor down on those and think like, you know, how dare they. Like, I was so angry about it. I was so, like, this is not who, like they're not even taking in the whole child of who my, my kid is. And at some point I realized that reaction was mine too. I was able to like, okay, cool. I don't, I don't judge my child off of those. And if someone who has a typical child does, that's great because that informs them of their child. That doesn't give me anything about Millie or Mac.
• 27:56
  Speaker B: Right.
• 27:57
  Speaker A: And so I think that you, again, I think, I hope you're giving yourself enough credit, enough pats on the back because you led him, you, you both led him to be able to be in the situation where he would strengthen, where his strengths would be, would be applauded and celebrated. So it's a great story and it's a great reminder and it's very inspirational for any special needs autism parent to hear.
• 28:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, I, I just want, I want other parents to, you know, to realize that they start looking at strengths. If you see, if you look for strengths, you'll see them and you'll have a whole different appreciation for who your whole child is. Right. And you'll put them on a path that is fulfilling, satisfying. And so that's, that's really what the book is about and that's what the First Ascent program is about for, for those who are seeking a career. They both have the same core message.
• 28:57
  Speaker A: Right.
• 28:58
  Speaker B: And I think that we, what's true is that we have tremendous power as a parent community. So we can wait for all these, whoever up here is going to create the narrative for autism to trickle down somehow.
• 29:16
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 29:16
  Speaker B: But that message, really, despite some very good efforts, that, that message is still not forming. It's still not even with neurodiversity, it's still not amplified, it's still not full, full throated in any way form. And so that transitions just like you read, you know, you go to an IEP with your school or you read a scientific article, you leave that experience deflated and inadequate and insufficient and it puts you in a mind of, of insufficient. So yeah, I think that as parents, what we can do at a grassroots level in the individual families is start to change that narrative for our own families, for our own kids, and then create a grassroots movement upwards to say we are redefining autism. We're not accepting, you know, the narrative that is out there in the world.
• 30:22
  Speaker A: Right.
• 30:23
  Speaker B: That is full of misconceptions. It's full of enigma. So we're chang. We're changing that narrative as a parent.
• 30:31
  Speaker A: And it's like, you know, it's like full stop, the whole child, not just the parts that make him stick out or her stick out from the norm, but the whole child. If Millie and Mac and Morgan, my oldest Morgan, were all sitting together and regardless of how they communicate, my son, the only boy in the baby of the family, is so aware that he is the baby of the family. I mean, that's not autism. That's just like, he's the boy, he's the baby boy. And I probably give that in whatever I do, you know, and how I lead and how I mother. But, like, there's so many different parts to each child within the family unit, too, that make them whole as well. And it's not just these traits and circuitry and their intellect. It's the personhood of them. And that's not just autism. That there's deeper parts to that.
• 31:22
  Speaker B: Exactly, Exactly. Right. I think what's true for me at least, is, yeah, autism has shaped us in very profound ways. And I will say in. In beautiful ways, too.
• 31:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 31:39
  Speaker B: It's not everything.
• 31:40
  Speaker A: Nope, it's not.
• 31:41
  Speaker B: It's not everything for them. It's not everything for us as a family. So.
• 31:46
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, Clayne, thank you so much for sharing your story and your family's journey and about putting the strength back not only into Christian, but into what you said, like, within your family walls, in your family home. And it reminds us all that that's where it begins. That's 100% where it begins. You know, we can talk like this and have conversations in the cloud, but it be. It really does begin. And that's, I think, what aligns so much with, you know, my own in stones over milestones mentality is that it starts with one small thing. And that one small thing for whatever line or path you're on is to be celebrated. Your son is so lucky to have you as a dad, and I'm proud to have you part of this community. And just thank you for sharing. It's very loving, wonderful. All right, Clay Nuti, thanks again. And until next time on Inchtones, thanks, sir.