Helping Autistic People

I've seen parents come in to talk to the teacher about their autistic son. The mother forcefully wants her son "fixed",  made "normal", while the father just sits there in quiet blankness. Why? Because he recognizes that his son is very like him.

So how do you help an autistic child? What can you do to make it easier for someone who lives in a world of pure logic? I think of the old Star Trek 1 movie, V'ger, where a machine created a world in it's own image; completely logical and predictable. Of course the "biological infestations" of the machines had to be eliminated.