Each year, approximately one child in every 150 is diagnosed with autism. Eleven-year-old Andrew Skillings is one of those children. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism.
For Andrew’s older sister Marissa, her brother’s diagnosis has affected every aspect of her life from the time he was born. She was almost 5 and shared a room with Andrew. Marissa says she remembers those first few weeks he was home.
“I decided he needed to go back where he came from, because as a baby he never, ever stopped screaming,” she says.