Culture around Autism.

 One of the goals of this blog was to chronicle our families struggles as well as the lessons learned in our journey in dealing with our child's condition and to that end, I am refocusing the blog to that end.

I recently sat down for lunch with my wife and asked her about her writing aspirations, and as it turns out, she wanted to write about the experience with autism that we had as parents as well;  it came as no surpise since we deal with autism every day in some form because our child has autism(as well as several other issues).

Without going into a rant;  here are a few highlights of the challenges that seem to be fairly common although most of them are actually dealing with other people rather than the child with autism:  In this case the challenge is one of perception such as

• being perceived as a bad parent because you can't control your child
• being perceived as a neglectful parent for similar reasons
• having child services come to your home because someone has perceives you as not providing for the child's needs.

Expect this to happen.  While it is possible that there are some areas in the world where autism is more understood and a supportive environment, but this is often not the case.  

In our experience,  we have received dirty looks from people because of our child's condition in various public places.  

Unfortunately, one such public place is public school and there are some extra reasons why they give us dirty looks

• The state in which we live tends to treat autism not as an actually medical condition to be treated but some sort of behavioral issue that needs to be ... well punished(as in,  "they just need a good whoopin!" or "they need to go to the alternative school for bad kids").
• Public education as a whole is generally underfunded and understaffed and most county commissions will do their very best to cut the funding every year.

So the school is basically being pushed into this scene by both the parents of the neurotypical children, the parents of child with autism and government entities that prefer to operate out of some form of ignorance and lots of times tend to view the realm of education with suspicion anyway.

As a result, the parent of the autism child is left alone in this multifaceted battle for their own child and it is a battle and with that in mind, it's important to find help where ever you can.