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“My Son Hasn’t One Friend. It’s His Birthday Today. Please Wish Him A Happy Birthday.”

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Julia
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Kev Harrison and his 15-year-old son, Daniel Harrison, who is a.u.t.i.s.t.i.c. On the son’s birthday, on Twitter his father asked for people to send Daniel birthday wishes. Thousands of strangers, including many celebrities immediately responded.

Source: Kev Harrison

The dad had two desires: to drive a car and to make friends. While the boy’s still too young to get his driver’s license, his other wish seemed to come true. Accordingly, after a tweet his father shared on Daniel’s 15th birthday unexpectedly went viral online.

The dad wrote: “Daniel’s my son. Profoundly Autistic. Hasn’t one friend. It’s his birthday today. In his ECHP he wrote that his two wishes were to learn to drive and make friends,” Kev Harrison, who lives in Nottingham, England, wrote in a tweet on Sept. 28. “Please wish him a happy birthday. Please show him you care. Please share.”

What happened next made Harrison, 52, completely amazed. Thousands of total strangers — including a few celebrities — sent birthday wishes for Daniel and then offered their friendship. His tweet has been viewed millions times, and thousands people have liked the original post.
The overwhelming reaction, Harrison said, “blew my mind.”


The man was compelled to post the tweet after he and his wife, Catherine, read Daniel’s education, health and care (EHC) plan, which is part of a government program helping determine levels of support for young people with special needs.

In response to a portion of the document that read: “Things that are important to me or things I would like to do…,” Daniel wrote: “drive a car” and “make friends.”

Harrison said,: “It broke our hearts,”. he added that his son attends a special-needs school, but he hasn’t formed any friendships. “He walks around the playground on his own, in his own little world.”

Daniel is on the more severe end of the autism spectrum, his father explained, and for several years as a child, he refused to consume food. He is verbal but gives “standard responses only” and struggles to engage in conversation.

Harrison continued: “He has been through a lot in his 15 years. He is a lovely, kind, sweet boy. He does not have a nasty bone in his body.”

In the hope of raising awareness about a.u.t.i.s.m and making his son feel loved on his special day, father Harrison decided to post on Twitter. The man thought a handful of people, at most, would respond. Little did he know that his tweet would become the #1 most trending post in the United States.

Harrison said: “It was astonishing,”
“I didn’t think for one minute that the response would be anything like it was.”

Source: Kev Harrison

Within only a few hours of sharing the tweet, high-profile people with large followings began retweeting Harrison’s post, and thousands of birthday messages for Daniel quickly flooded the father’s Twitter feed.


An 11-year-old called Olly shared a poem for Daniel in a video message, and Lennie, 9 played happy birthday on the piano. A group of students in Indiana made a special birthday sign just for Daniel. Autistic adults also reached out, sharing messages of hope and offering reassurance that things will get better.

While thousands of people called Daniel their new friend, one Twitter user pointed out something that Harrison found especially heartwarming: “You definitely have a great friend — your amazing dad!”

Harrison is still sifting through all the sweet messages and doing his best to read them to Daniel and respond to each of them.

He said he hopes the huge reaction to his tweet will encourage people to show kindness to those with special needs.

“If I have reached one person and made them look at another child differently, I’ve done my job,” Harrison said.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/10/05/autism-twitter-birthday-celebrity/

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