Christopher Cornelius, an 11 year - old autistic kid from New Jersey, wrote on his assignment that he has no friends. In the section of his assignment that questioned, "Some of my friends are", Christopher had listed: "No one."
Christopher's dad, Bob Cornelius, shared a photo of the homework to his Facebook account. He said that he visited his son's school and saw the homework on the classroom wall of his son. He took a picture of his son's homework and at first saw better-off responses to questions such as sport and favorite foods.
Later, however, he noticed the query about names of friends. Christopher briefly answered: "no one."
"I couldn't sleep when I saw it," Cornelius said to InsideEdition. "I was up all night," he added.
In his Facebook post, Cornelius spoke of a story about a football player from Florida befriending an autistic boy during lunch. From that moment, other people started to sit with boy too. However, Cornelius asked why nobody sat with the boy beforehand. Cornelius supposed that it was due to kids were not taught to accept and embrace the differences of other people.
He then reminisced a moment where Christopher asked for a sleepover as his older brothers have many times over the years. When Bob asked him with whom, Christopher did not have a reply. "Because he didn't have a friend," Bob explained. "He's never had a friend. Ever. He just turned eleven." However Cornelius never knew that his son is aware of his lack of friends till he saw that homework.
He also says that Christopher is very smart and has a great sense of humor. He also told fox29.com: "Christopher has autism and although he is verbal, he is very surface-oriented. It's tough to speak with him when it comes to emotion but this was his way of communicating that he's lonely."
Meanwhile, Cornelius has a plea for parents with autistic kids. "There has to be a conversation with the families about children being empathetic to others," Cornelius said. "It starts at home."
