Does he know how to figure out when he needs help? I often have trouble with this. I have an aide and a lot of help from disability services and the counseling center at my school, but I have a lot of trouble initiating contact with them, so I often need help but don't know that I have to ask for it--I just don't think of asking, or I think of it and then forget it. And I'm in college; this is a little kid. Recently I've had to basically arrange for them to check up on me whether I ask for it or not.

Gifted kids with disabilities often get their giftedness held against them. It's like, "You're so smart; why can't you do--" some skill that they're really bad at... and then people think they're just refusing or being rebellious or mean or something.

Now that's interesting! See, this is something that happens with autism, so often--we have trouble juggling information about everybody's mental states, so we may forget that somebody doesn't know something, or assume that people have the same perspective we do; or conversely, make so few assumptions about people that we have to learn each person individually from the ground up! It's not uncommon for family members of autistics to have mild autistic traits themselves; I bet that's one of yours. It's probably a matter of processing stuff. We have kind of a one-track mind, a laser-pointer mind that's focused so intensely on one thing, to the exclusion of everything else.

I strongly advise you to not just teach your son how to do useful things, but teach him how to take advantage of the availability of various accommodations, including his IEP, any aides, any adjustments made to his classroom. If he can learn what he needs and how to ask for it, that will mean independence even when he still needs help with something, because he's the one controlling what sort of help he gets. Important skill for any disabled kid, there.

Hellion's caution about the possibility of abuse is pessimistic, but I have to admit that I've heard many people mention this problem: Support workers, caretakers, aides, taking advantage of the power gap between them and their clients to treat people badly, belittle or patronize them, or try to make their decisions for them. Probably one of the more important parts of learning self-advocacy is learning that you don't have to put up with that crap, and learning how to get yourself out of a situation where someone who has that kind of power over you is misusing it. In a perfect world, an aide would be an employee performing a service for an equal, but all too many of them seem to think that being an aide means being the boss, calling the shots, because the disabled person should thank their lucky stars that they're getting any help at all. You get one like that, you toss 'em; they're more trouble than they're worth.