April rolls around every year and Autism Awareness Month fills the feeds, but the harder conversation isn’t happening on social media. It’s happening at the Kroger checkout, outside the gym, on the park bench where a stranger’s look lands like a verdict.

Meg Raby has been on the receiving end of that look. She’s a Speech Language Pathologist based in Salt Lake City, the author of the My Brother Otto children’s book series, and an autistic person raising her own voice about what public judgment costs families. When she says the scrutiny is constant, she’s not working from theory.

She was 23 years old when it hit her full force. She was with a teenager in her care, outside a Lifetime Fitness, watching him walk across the pavement in a shuffling movement that clearly felt good to his body. He wasn’t in distress. A woman walked past, looked directly at Raby, and said, “Ick. Aren’t you going to teach him some manners?” The teenager hadn’t bothered anyone. He was just moving differently than the woman expected.

That moment didn’t shock Raby. That’s what made it stick.

Because it wasn’t an outlier. Because families who live inside this experience know that moments like that one aren’t rare, they’re routine.

Parents of autistic kids describe spending enormous energy on a world that wasn’t designed for their children, and then having strangers judge the gaps in real time. Somewhere in our collective wiring, a very specific template for acceptable behavior got locked in. Quick responses. Eye contact held at the right length. The right volume, the right stillness, the right script. Step outside it, and people don’t ask questions. They don’t, in most cases, offer any grace. They just react.

Scary Mommy covered in a recent piece on autism and public judgment how wide the gap can be between what an autistic child is actually doing and what an observer decides it means. A kid who doesn’t hold eye contact isn’t being defiant. A child who flaps, hums, or shuffles across pavement isn’t performing bad behavior. Their nervous systems are doing real work in sensory environments that ask far more of them than of neurotypical kids the same age.

Raby’s point, the one that deserves a moment of actual stillness, is this: autistic doesn’t mean unaware. That teenager outside Lifetime Fitness understood what the woman’s tone carried. He didn’t need spoken words to read her meaning. He didn’t need to return her gaze to feel the weight of her disapproval.

Nonspeaking isn’t the same as unknowing. Kids absorb these moments whether caregivers want to admit it or not.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 36 children in the United States is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. That’s a number large enough to mean that most people have either a family member or a neighbor, a classmate or a coworker, who lives inside this experience daily. It isn’t abstract.

The Autism Society of America has documented for years how isolated families of autistic children can become, and the isolation doesn’t start in the clinic or the school IEP meeting. It starts in the cereal aisle when someone scoffs. It starts at the playground when a pointed look comes your way and you walk back to your car feeling like you’re failing a child you’d burn the world down for.

Parents carry these moments. They stack. And the caregiver who’s already managed a morning of sensory negotiations and schedule adjustments doesn’t need a stranger’s disgust to cap it off. What Raby’s work, in the My Brother Otto books and in her public advocacy, keeps returning to is a simple ask: slow the reaction down. What you’re seeing likely isn’t what you think it is. The kid isn’t rude. The parent isn’t checked out. The teenager walking differently across a parking lot isn’t in need of your correction.

He’s just moving through a world that wasn’t built for him, trying to feel okay in his own body.

That woman outside Lifetime Fitness delivered her verdict in about four seconds. Raby has been turning it over for years.