ABSTRACT
A colleague and I, researching with families in a local government area that had adopted a radical inclusion policy, heard professionals use ‘autism’ occasionally of a small proportion of the children who were transferring to ordinary schools from a segregated one designated for severe learning difficulties. This was the 1990s, just ahead of the diagnostic explosion. 1 Under the circumstances we did not need to pay much attention to it, nor at that stage did the families themselves appear to do so. They used the label rarely, if ever, among each other. It was irrelevant to the most important things in the home environment. We took for granted the unconditionality of the relationship between parents and children, especially in a working-class community that shrank from the violence of naming.
