I am all about helping parents learn from my mistakes, so they don’t repeat my mistakes. Here are five bonks I made during the early years of parenting my autistic son, and how you can avoid repeating my fails.
This is what keeps me up at night: Would people really sympathize with me if I hurt my autistic son? Would they write off his murder as a burden being lifted?
Full normalisation of autism would require a substantially broader concept of ‘normality.’ It would mean acceptance of autistic people who are non-speaking, an understanding of meltdowns, and general awareness of the dangers of sensory overload.
I wish people would stop saying things that pin autistic traits to a wall and imply they are permanent. They’re not. Autistics can have nuanced, complicated relationships with humor, empathy, social needs and so on.
I regret that I didn’t give my non-speaking son the opportunities to display an interest in things that I assumed he wouldn’t understand. I regret that my assumptions limited him when they should have been expanding his world.
Autism acceptance, for the author, means recognizing that her autistic daughter “already is happy; she has a good life. So do a lot of people who go with their humanity unrecognized and unacknowledged.”
So what’s going on here? Does my autistic son lack social skills or does he not? The answer is that context matters. Socializing costs a lot of tokens. When he is in a situation that is already difficult for him, he won’t have those tokens to spare.
