Book On Children With Disabilities- Teen with autism and severe ADHD thrives in workforce
It’s rare to see a fourteen-year-old working these days. The times have changed and priorities have shifted along with the times. A combination of unmotivated and/or overindulged youth coupled with overly-protective parents keeps too many teens inside their bedrooms playing video games, updating their social media, texting and watching TV, rather than working.
It is even rarer to see a fourteen-year-old with a disability working these days. If they do enter the workforce, kids with challenges typically do so in their late teens or early twenties. Rarely at fourteen.
And it is the utmost rarity when a fourteen-year-old with a disability is working at his own business he created, and earning good pay while doing so.
Enter my student Kyle (not his real name), a fourteen-year-old who is on the autism spectrum, and who also has severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Kyle’s divorced dad had read a news article about another student of mine and his success at the job I had found him when he was fourteen. Taking a proactive approach, he called me and asked if could harness his son’s boundless energy into something productive. He reported his son had an interest in starting his own dog walking business. Kyle loved dogs, had a few of his own, thoroughly enjoyed walking them, and didn’t mind cleaning up after them. Plus, his dad reported, it kept him moving and burning energy, which was great. He just didn’t know how to get his business idea off the ground.
When I first met Kyle at the initial intake, I saw he was in perpetual motion. The short and slender young man with shaggy brown hair and a crooked smile never stopped moving. When seated at the kitchen table and in the midst of conversation, he’d suddenly pop up from his chair and continue talking while moving about. Despite his lack of impulse control and his constant inability to focus on the topic at hand, he was an exceptionally bright young man and demonstrated that he was willing to work hard to succeed. That’s pretty much all I needed to know.
After our meeting, Kyle’s father privately contracted with me to work with his son to turn his ideas into reality.
With my assistance, within a week Kyle had a business name (Kyle’s Dog Walking), business cards, flyers, a day planner, a business plan, and a working resume to hand prospective customers. The business motto he came up with: Don’t let dog walking cramp your style—Just call Kyle!
To help him sell his services, I wrote a sales script for Kyle and had him memorize it. I taught him how to canvass his neighborhood and prospect for business. I coached him how to estimate jobs by the size and amount of dogs to be walked, and I showed him how to organize his work by maintaining customer records and bookkeeping to be kept neatly in a binder. Most importantly, I taught him how to always be safe and to never enter anyone’s home under any circumstances no matter who answered the door—be it a character from Doctor Who (his favorite TV show), a comic book superhero, or even a longtime neighbor he knew and trusted—unless he was accompanied by his dad or me.
When Kyle began securing customers, I initially worked with him to show him how to conduct business matters. I let him know that it was more than what he initially believed the job to be—just walking dogs. His business would entail sales, marketing, scheduling, time management, customer service, bookkeeping, billing, maintaining inventory (disposable latex gloves, bags for waste, dog treats), and so much more; all of this on top of the actual physical work of walking dogs, picking up after them, properly disposing of waste, and making sure he kept the dogs, the neighbors, and himself safe at all times.
After school and on weekends, Kyle worked tirelessly walking dogs in his upscale, suburban neighborhood. His prodigious efforts won him an entrepreneurial spirit award from my company. When awarded his certificate of achievement and a $50 gift certificate, Kyle took all of one nanosecond to look at it, thanked me, put it down, and then excitedly told me about how this woman down the street has two Weimaraners that she wants him to walk every day, and this guy a few blocks over wants him to walk his Pug and Beagle on a set schedule, and so on.
Between January and June, Kyle earned just over $3,800 from his dog walking business. I’d say that’s about $3,800 more than 90 percent of kids his same age without disabilities made during that same period.
How’s that for someone classified with “multiple disabilities”?
For more success stories on children with disabilities, visit https://www.specialstoriesbook.com to learn about the new book, “Special Stories: Short Stories On Youth With Disabilities And My Adventures Working In The Disabilities Field” by Mike Kelly (2017, Vendue Books)
