Last week was the first time in a long time that I missed an episode of Hi Pod! I’m Dad. The reason was simple: I lost my voice.

At first I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal. My son Lucas is nonverbal, and I’ve always believed we don’t need words to communicate with each other. But once my voice was gone, I realized pretty quickly that we actually rely on those words more than I thought.

That experience led into something I wrote about this week on the blog: autism appreciation. I talk about why appreciating my son’s autism doesn’t mean pretending life is easy or ignoring the real challenges that come with raising a child with severe autism. Those things are real. I just choose not to make them the focus of our story.

Lucas is honest in a way most people aren’t. If he’s happy, he’s happy. If he loves you, he loves you. There’s no pretending, no manipulation, no trying to be something he isn’t. That honesty is part of what makes him who he is.

I also talk about how surviving a quintuple bypass in 2012 changed the way I see life and parenting. It made me realize that the moments we have right now matter more than the worries about the future.

Lucas doesn’t need a movie ending to be a hero. He doesn’t need hidden powers or some big milestone to make his story meaningful.

He’s already Lucas. And that’s enough for me.

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This week, I talk about a word that comes up far too often when you’re raising a child like my son Lucas: “fix.”

For many people, it sounds logical. If a child is nonverbal or has autism, they must need to be corrected, changed, or fixed. But as Lucas has grown, I’ve learned something very different. My son isn’t broken. He never was.

In this episode, I share how my perspective changed over time, from trying to correct the way Lucas played and communicated to realizing that teaching and fixing are not the same thing. I talk about the moments that helped me understand his world, why I would never want to change who he is, and how acceptance, trust, and patience shaped the bond we share today.

It’s an honest conversation about parenting, expectations, and what it really means to love your child unconditionally.

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When Lucas was little, some of the things we worked on felt almost ridiculous.

They didn’t seem urgent. They didn’t feel important. And at the time, everything else felt like it was on fire. If it wasn't language, it wasn't a priority in my mind. Yet, we worked on them anyway.

Now he’s almost 15. He’s bigger than me. He’s growing into himself. And some of those early moments, the ones that didn’t seem to matter yet, suddenly do.

This episode isn’t about puberty, or milestones, or “getting it right.” It’s about what happens when you accept who your child is early, keep working anyway, and realize years later why it mattered.

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This week, I talk about a moment that made something click for me as a dad.

For years, I thought understanding why my nonverbal son does things was the key to helping him. But raising Lucas has taught me something different.

I don’t always need answers. I need awareness. I need trust.

In this episode, I share how learning to respect what my son does, even when I don’t fully understand it, has reshaped the way I parent, the way I protect him, and the way I see my role as his dad.

This is about trust, transitions, and what happens when you stop trying to decode your child and start meeting them where they are.

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This week, I’m talking about trust.

Not just the trust we work to earn from our nonverbal kids, but the trust they place in us every day, often without us realizing it.

It starts in the middle of the night, when my 14-year-old son Lucas wakes me up the way he always does. What I walked into wasn’t the part that stayed with me. What stayed with me was how easily he trusted me when I told him what to do, even when he didn’t fully understand why.

In this episode, I reflect on the responsibility that comes with being someone your child trusts unconditionally, and why autism appreciation means acknowledging both the weight and the beauty of that role.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about showing up.

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This week’s episode builds on Monday’s blog about talking to my nonverbal son even when I didn’t know it mattered.

I reflect on trust, not just the trust my son has in me, but the trust I’ve learned to have in him. When Lucas was little, I assumed most of what I said wasn’t landing. He had significant delays, no words, and very little visible response. It would have been easy to stop talking.

Instead, I kept going.

I share how bedtime was the first concept Lucas ever truly understood and how something as simple as him running and hiding changed the way I viewed his comprehension entirely. Not because he followed instructions, but because he understood meaning.

This episode isn’t about drills, milestones, or breakthroughs. It’s about repetition, familiarity, tone, and learning to trust that understanding can form quietly over time. It’s about believing that a child is always trying — even when you can’t see the results yet.

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Some mornings don’t announce themselves.

You wake up tired, have a cup of coffee, do the same things you always do, and then suddenly you realize that the years you spent believing you could teach your son everything might not be enough.

In this episode, I talk honestly about what it feels like to raise a 14-year-old boy with autism while carrying a deep love for who he is and a growing fear about what I may never be able to give him. I share why I avoid labels, why I protect my son’s privacy, and how lonely it can feel when the people around you simply cannot understand the realities you live with every day.

This is not about despair. It is about the quiet grief that lives inside love. It is about the guilt that shows up when progress stalls. It is about the relief of finally saying the unspeakable to someone who already knows.

There is no tidy ending here. Just the truth of being a father who adores his son and sometimes forgets that not everyone else knows what this life is really like.

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I used to think being helpful meant being loud. That if I could just explain things clearly enough, I could turn frustration into understanding. But I wasn’t helping. I was trying to rescue myself from the discomfort of not being understood.

In this episode, I talk about how that instinct followed me into parenting, how it nearly cost me the connection I was trying to protect, and how my son Lucas taught me that trust doesn’t come from clarity. It comes from staying.

This isn’t about techniques or fixes. It’s about presence. It’s about learning when to put things down, stop performing understanding, and actually listen.

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In this episode, James Guttman reflects on the quiet shift that followed his decision to adapt communication for his non-verbal son, Lucas.

What began as a practical change soon became something far deeper. As Lucas realized that his father truly understood him, everyday moments stopped feeling like emergencies. Instead of panicking, he began checking in. Instead of fighting for attention, he started trusting that his needs would be met.

Rather than focusing on techniques or behavior strategies, this conversation explores how trust transforms a child’s entire world and why the real breakthrough wasn’t communication, but connection.

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In this episode, James talks about something he hasn’t addressed before: what happens when the communication tools everyone recommends simply don’t work for your child.

When James’s nonverbal son, Lucas, couldn’t physically use American Sign Language due to dexterity challenges, it felt like yet another failure in a long list of “solutions” that sounded good on paper but didn’t work in real life. Instead of forcing Lucas to fit a system that wasn’t built for him, James made a different choice. They changed the system.

This episode explores how gesture-based communication evolved in their home, why being understood matters more than doing things “the right way,” and how connection, safety, and dignity often come before progress charts and programs.

If you’ve ever worried you were doing it wrong, this conversation is for you.

It's Here! Get the book – “Hi World, I’m Dad: How Fathers Can Journey to Autism Awareness, Acceptance, and Appreciation” on audio, digital, or print.

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