Respecting My Son’s Individuality After His Diagnosis

It took me a while to realize that my son was not his diagnosis. Like many parents of newly-diagnosed children with autism, I worked relentlessly with my son after finding out that he had autism, thinking that it was only a matter of how much time and effort I put in for my son to be able to overcome his challenges.

Before I knew what was happening, I had turned my son into a project to be worked on instead of a child to be loved. It was only when the both of us ended up burnt out and miserable that I realized that this was not working. My sweet, cheerful, lively, bubbly, happy-go-lucky boy was no longer any of those things. He was sad, tired, frustrated, defeated and withdrawn. I was so mad at myself for having done this to him. I hated myself for losing sight of who my son was in the process of trying to get him to “fit” into society.

Handling Challenging Behavior

I strongly believe that behavior is communication. Challenging behavior is a symptom of a problem and not the problem itself, just like fever is a symptom of a problem and not the problem itself. You can control the fever by taking fever-reducing medication. However, to treat the fever, the doctor has to identify and address the root cause of the fever. Similarly, you can control challenging behavior in the short run by superficial methods like reward and punishment, but in order to rectify the behavior in the long run, you must identify the root cause of the behavior and address it.

Handling Sensory Meltdowns

We experience the world through our senses, namely, the sense of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. What happens when these senses don't make sense? They distort the way you experience the world.

Sensory processing issues fall under two categories - hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity. Hypersensitivity causes sensory overload. Imagine experiencing everything much more intensely than you do: imagine the clothes rubbing against your skin feeling like your skin is being scraped by sandpaper, imagine people chatting with each other sounding like they are shouting through loudspeakers, imagine the lights in the room feeling like floodlights blinding your eyes. It would be torture. In fact, such methods ARE used as means of torture around the world.

Helping My Son Develop His Speech and Language

My son was non-verbal until the age of three and need-based verbal until the age of five. He is eighteen years old now, and speaks fluently. Here are ten things that we did to promote his speech based on doctor’s recommendations:

1. Exposing him to one language. Our mother tongue is Marathi but we chose English so that he could communicate outside the home as well. We spoke in English, read books in English, listened to songs in English, and watched English cartoons. We made it a point not to expose him to any other language while he was learning.

Helping My Son Manage His Emotions

My son used to have emotional meltdowns when he was younger. I realized that there were three things causing this:

1. Inability to recognize his feelings and emotions.

2. Inability to express his feelings and emotions.

3. Inability to manage or cope with his feelings and emotions.

Once I realized this, I began teaching him to identify, express, and manage his emotions. I taught him four emotions to begin with - happy, sad, angry and scared. I explained these emotions to him using words, pictures, and actions. I told him the name of the emotion, showed him pictures of faces expressing the emotion, and acted out the emotion in person. Once he learned the emotions, I showed him pictures of people's faces expressing different emotions and asked him to guess the emotion. We did this until he was able to identify the emotions on people's faces easily.

Helping My Son Communicate His Needs

When I set about teaching my son to communicate his needs, I realized that there were two distinct processes involved in communicating needs:

1. Recognizing the body's needs

2. Communicating these needs

Recognizing Needs

We experience the world through our senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are the five basic senses. There are three additional senses that are recognised now, bringing the total number of senses to eight:

Dear Parent of The Newly-Diagnosed Child with Autism

Dear parent of the newly-diagnosed child with autism,

I know how you feel because I have been where you are. I know how lost, confused, scared and overwhelmed you might be. 

I cannot tell you that your child will be cured, because there is no cure for autism as of now. I cannot tell you that it will be an easy road, because it is not. I can tell you, though, that your child's condition will improve with a lot of hard work and patience. There will be ups and downs. There will be new concerns and challenges, but you will get the hang of dealing with them. You will become an expert in all things autism, but more than that, you will become an expert in your child. You will know how to help him and you will know how to teach him to help himself. Life will not be how you envisioned it to be but it will be a fulfilling life if you let it be.