Please don't give up. My son is 16. He still shows fairly severe symptoms of autism. In all these years, I have longed to have one conversation with him, but th

Please don't give up. My son is 16. He still shows fairly severe symptoms of autism. In all these years, I have longed to have one conversation with him, but that has never happened. However, to my surprise, he is also doing well academically through home schooling. He started out with a lot of prompting but now he can demonstrate his independent skill and mastery on fairly complex tasks - for example multiple choice tests in high school Algebra or English. By now, we know he is highly intelligent, but he has so many repetitive and OCD behaviors it is hard for him to function in the real world. He is learning to program and he shows some aptitude for it - he seems to be somewhat good (not yet surprisingly good) at finding bugs in short pieces of code. Our hope is that as he grows older, he will gain control of himself enough to be able to function in some assistive setting.