Despite the abundance of research and data, the autism field often fails to ask the most crucial question: What’s actually working for individuals and their families?
Instead, many traditional approaches focus on teaching isolated skills and calling it success—even when those skills don’t lead to a better quality of life.
In this episode, Kat Lee talks with Steven Gutstein, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and creator of RDI®connect, about the future of autism treatment. Together, they challenge outdated methods and present a hopeful vision for 2025.
Change in the autism field has been slow, but Dr. Gutstein sees hope for a breakthrough. More families and professionals are seeking approaches that prioritize long-term progress over short-term fixes.
A Fresh Perspective: Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®)
RDI® remains a groundbreaking approach in a field that often feels stuck. Unlike traditional models, RDI® prioritizes dynamic intelligence: the ability to adapt, problem-solve, and build meaningful relationships.
At its core, RDI® centers on the parent-child relationship. By strengthening these bonds, families can create a solid foundation for lifelong growth. Instead of offering quick fixes, RDI® fosters ongoing development, helping autistic individuals connect more deeply with their world in meaningful and lasting ways.
If you’re searching for a fresh approach to autism — one that empowers families and fosters lasting growth — this episode is for you.
You can learn more about the RDI® approach and connect with a certified consultant here.
Autism: A New Perspective is available on iTunes!
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 encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Cat Lee and in this podcast, what a pleasure to visit with Dr. Steve Gutstein and discuss RDI and autism in 2025. Let’s listen in.
Last time we visited, I reminisced some about knowing you over 20 years and where things were for the kids and their parents all those years ago and I know RDI has been longer than that, you know, but where do you see autism in 2025? What are our challenges? How have we gotten better in helping families?
What needs to improve? What do you think?
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Unfortunately, if we look at the literature of what’s going on, there’s not much change going on. It’s still a very static, rigid way of operating in autism, even though the data is getting clearer and clearer that the old methods, the old paradigm, the old story just isn’t working for people with autism. One thing that the researchers or the people who study the adults and they study the difficulties they’re having and when they study those who have been successful, they never ask the question, why?
What have you gone through? What treatments have you had? What’s helped you?
What hasn’t helped you? They just look at the people sort of cross-sectionally as they are now and you think one of the easiest things to say would be look at their history. They ask their history and so there have been studies done with thousands of adults who have been diagnosed as children and who obviously have been through many, if not all, have been through some kind of services and programs and interventions and one of the simplest things would be to find out what did you do?
What did your parents do? What services were delivered for you? And to try to collect that, that’s an invaluable piece of information and in fact if you think about designing any kind of a treatment, that’s where you’d start.
You’d try to find what worked, ask people what’s worked and what’s not worked. When you think about any kind of medical issue, that would be the first thing you’d ask for is people who have had a problem or an illness or disorder and have been able to do better versus people who aren’t and say well let’s look at those people who are doing better and find out what distinguishes them. And yet not one study or one person in the field has asked that question and so they continue to deliver services and I wish this would stop without any kind of feedback.
The only feedback is what we call circular feedback. In other words, I teach you certain skills and then I find out whether you learn those skills and if you learn those skills, I consider my treatment a success. Even though the skills I taught you may not in any way impact your future.
Being your future well-being or your future ability to have a job or do anything. So we continue to see those circular types of things and I’d love to see this being able to make a difference even in a small way and starting to ask those questions, looking at people who have been able to establish some degree of well-being and find out what helps you. Not that necessarily they’ll know all the answers but from a good history you can tell what happened and see if you can find commonalities.
People years and years ago thought it was IQ scores were going to make the difference but they don’t at all. Because for instance we find that the higher IQ populations have a higher rate of depression, suicide, anxiety disorders. That they may even graduate from school but they can’t hold jobs.
And so that’s obvious yet for many years that IQ, you know, raising IQ scores was seen as the gold standard for an outcome measure. And yet there’s the same types of things that continue to go on in the field. I periodically, you know, I gather up all the research.
I have a Google search that delivers everything with the word autism to me and it’s an enormous amount of data. And periodically I go through it as it very hesitantly and with a great deal of apprehension to see if there’s anything new. And it’s very depressing actually to do that because I say, well why is there nothing new?
You know, I have to wade through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of papers that have been written and it’s the same stuff. It’s what they call the old wine and new bottles, right? It’s the same, same stuff over and over and over again.
And people make claims that, oh we’ve learned so much more and we’re doing so much more. But they’re just claims. There’s no evidence.
There’s no data to support the claims. So, you know, what I hope, you know, I hope we can only do what we can do with RDI. We can’t influence everyone else but we can start to make a difference.
One is we can be, try to continue to be clear about what model we’re delivering. I’m trying to do that. I’m back to writing my book again and in that book I’m trying to be clear about what specifically RDI is and the concept of dynamic intelligence being something that we start working on right from the beginning.
And it’s not a separate thing. It’s something that is critical to work on right from the start and continue and develop. And it takes years but we can continue to develop that.
And that’s the missing link for people with autism is the inability to develop dynamic intelligence because they’re not able to participate in that experience-guiding relationship to no fault of anyone. But what we’ve learned is we can provide that for them. We can provide that experience-guiding relationship with their parents, with their family members.
And so they can enter that dynamic intelligence development pathway. But I’d like to be able to be clearer about that. What I’d like to see in 2025 is that we have enough influence.
You know, you think about when we talk about emergence or the concept of a threshold that sometimes things don’t look like they’re changing but they’re about to change. And one or two small things can push them over the edge where there’s a rapid change. You never know.
We may see that in 2025. We may see that there is a paradigm shift starting. I know there’s a lot of people frustrated with the old ways and the way things continue to go.
There’s no new breakthroughs. Nobody’s, you know, nobody’s claiming anything new. And they just keep going and doing more of the same, more of the same, more of the same.
But that can change and it can change rapidly.
Kat Lee: We’re all energized when we hear you speak. For me, you know, over my many years on the journey myself, your passion for helping the children, the adults, the parents, the families, always comes through in everything you say, every time you say it. And I like to think, too, of what Dr. Shealy has said to me several times, to always remember, you know, we’re not giving pie-in-the-sky hope, like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice, or we can kind of dream of. It’s real help to help children grow up and have full lives.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: And that’s the key, that word full lives. We’re not gonna, you know, cure every co-occurring problem that people with autism may or may not have. It’s such a diverse group of people.
But, you know, I met some of the people I met at the annual conference who I’ve known for years, had children with some pretty significant other issues aside from their autism. But what they were excited about, what they thanked me for, which was really a blessing for me, was that their children were people. They had lives.
They had, and they were continuing to grow and develop. They weren’t stopped. They weren’t hiding out somewhere in a room, you know.
They were continuing to become who they were going to be.
Kat Lee: 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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