Autistic Parenting

This week's post is just a short one because of things that are going on in the family, so I haven't had much time to write. I wanted to talk this week about autistic parenting. What I'll do at the moment is briefly discuss my main struggle with being an autistic parent, then I might come back to add some other points to it at a later date. Being an autistic parent isn't to be confused with being an autism parent. Let me start by clarifying the difference between the two:

Autistic parenting: Being both autistic and a parent, regardless of your children's neurotype.
Autism parenting: Being the parent of an autistic child.

I needed to clarify that because autism parents have a reputation of misunderstanding their child's autism to the point of viewing it as a horrible disease that needs to be cured and eradicated from the world. I'm not trying to tar all autism parents with the same brush as I've seen evidence of some autism parents embracing their child's autism as well as the autistic community by actively reaching out to us for help so that they can better support their autistic child. But the reputation remains, and is one of the reasons I write this blog; in an effort to ease the misunderstanding and the stigma, and so that people can better understand their autistic loved ones, autsim/autistics as a whole, or even themselves if they're on the spectrum (with or without a diagnosis).

Anyway, it's autistic parenting that I'm looking to focus on here because I'm a dad of 2 young toddlers, and obviously I'm autistic. This brings its own unique set of challenges compared to neurotypical parenting because of the way we think and process the world. The main thing I struggle with (at least as far as I can tell) is picking my battles. By picking my battles I mean determining which arguments with my kids are worth fighting for even though it may upset them and cause lots of drama, and which arguments are worth just giving in to give everyone an easy life. An argument that's worth sticking out is for example if your child wants to play with a knife. If you say no your child will most likely get upset (or at least mine will) that they can't have what they want, but it's dangerous for them to play with knives so the answer is a firm no before they even get a hold of one. An argument that's not worth fighting might be like the other day when my daughter wanted to wear a pullup instead of a nappy. Initially I said no because the pullups are for her brother to help him potty train and I don't want to waste them. My wife's input then was to just let her wear the pullup because they're about the same price as nappies anyway and it just saves a lot of drama. So Girl Child got her way.

I'm very much an all or nothing kind of person in that I either go to one extreme or the other in most situations. So I try to do/get my kids to do everything "the right way" as much as I possibly can. With the example above, should the nappies be kept for my son because that's why we bought them? Yes, they should. But thinking about it, does it really matter if my daughter wants to wear one instead? Not really. It's still covering her for when she wees or poos. All it means is we've got 1 less pullup and 1 more nappy than we would normally have had.

I'm going to leave it there for this week because I'm short on time, but don't forget to follow with the button in the side bar, subscribe with the button under the header, and follow me @DepictDave on Twitter to keep up if I post any updates later on in the week.

UPDATE
I've got lots of spare time over the next few days so thought I'd pop back and talk a bit more on autistic parenting since I didn't have much time before. This lack of time is common for all parents, but it severely limits how much time you can set aside for self care, which is often needed more by autistics than neurotypicals. In my particular case it's difficult because my wife works during the day while I look after our 2 kids, then I work from tea time until midnight which means I'm pretty much on the go all of the time except for the 6 hours or so that I'm sleeping. Self care is needed by everyone from time to time, although it's absolutely crucial after things like autistic meltdowns, burnouts etc, and I've had a couple of incidents where I've been burnt out over the last year and a bit. Admittedly, the burnouts were caused by lots of different things happening all at once (the car needing repairs family illness, work and a few other things) but the way the kids were acting in the period leading up to me burning out seriously didn't help. They were just toddlers being toddlers - they all have good days and bad days - but this was just a couple of really bad days with them being grumpy, clingy and generally difficult to handle. I think I mentioned this in my previous post about burnout but I had to just spend the day at home on my own either in bed or laid on the sofa to recover while my wife took the kids out somewhere for the day.

A lot of autistics have sensory issues that can make parenting difficult. These can be to do with any of the senses. The most obvious one being noise because children are really, really noisy, especially when they get over excited. The lack of sleep that comes with parenting young children also doesn't help. I personally find myself much more sensitive to the cold when I'm tired, and the sound of my screeching 3 year-old hurts my ears and head more.

There are always things that can help with any sensory issues, but one issue that might not seem so obvious is an aversion to being touched, and this can cause issues with breastfeeding. Having supported my wife through 2 births and the breastfeeding journeys that followed I can absolutely agree with the saying "breast is best". But that doesn't mean that your baby absolutely has to be breastfed because it may or may not be right for you, especially with a touch sensitivity issue. While breast might be best in general terms, you can only do the best that you can for you and for your baby. I understand from experience with my wife that some women might be absolutely adamant on breast feeding (especially with an all or nothing personality like mine that I discussed earlier) but there is always bottle feeding that you can try if breastfeeding doesn't work for you. Nobody will demonise you for bottle feeding - in fact, quite the opposite here in the UK where it's mostly deemed more acceptable to bottle feed, at least in public. As long as you're doing the best you can for yourself and your child, then that's all anyone can ask of you. And that applies to all aspects of parenting, not just breast/bottle feeding.

Neurotypical Teachings

As an autistic person navigating through life there have always been neurotypical people trying to teach me how to be, even though nobody knew I was autistic until recent years. I'm sure this attempted guidance is something that a lot of autistic or otherwise neurodiverse folks have experienced, so this week I thought I'd run through the main ones that I've been told by neurotypicals in their vague effort to help.

Eye Contact

This is probably the big one that neurotypicals try to advise on. We autistics struggle a lot with eye contact. As a whole, the reason is that looking at somebody's eyes and trying to work out the subtleties in their facial expressions and so on is very distracting. So if we're looking someone in the eye we're often struggling to take in what they're verbally saying because of everything else that we're trying to process at the same time. For me I think it's also a confidence thing (or at least that's what I've always been told by neurotypicals) and I can never quite work out where I should be looking, when or for how long. One of the notes made in my autism diagnostic report was that when I had my session with the Occupational Therapist there were periods where I hardly made any eye contact, and then other periods where I made lots of overly intense eye contact. This was my atypical (note: atypical, not wrong - realistically there is no right or wrong) attempt at gauging my level of eye contact. Something else that I noticed in myself a long, long time ago that was also mentioned in my report was that I never really make eye contact when it's my turn to speak. I quite often look down and/or to the side when I talk because I find it much easier to concentrate on the words I'm saying and the point I'm getting across if I don't have the other person's face to look at. This is very similar to my point a moment ago about concentrating on what the other person is saying, but obviously from the opposite side of things.

Head Up

Maybe this is more of a confidence thing rather than autism as such, but linking into the eye contact and learning how to "be" confident (more on that later) is the fact that when I was at school my teachers and other adults would often tell me to stand straight, keep my head up and stop looking at the floor. I tend to keep my head up almost instinctively nowadays just because I've had it drilled into me when I was younger and developed it as a habit that I barely have to think about any more. I'm not sure that there's any actual reason for me to have not kept my head up other than a lack of confidence which would have been a result of being an autie in a neurotypical social environment. With that said, I do wish that the adults whose care I was in would have looked deeper into why I didn't fit in and why I had a lack of confidence rather than just teaching me how to mask and thinking that the problem was fixed.

Contribute More

Moving into adulthood I obviously entered the world of work where I actually struggled a lot more than I realised prior to looking seriously at the possibility of being autistic. Since starting my very first job in 2005 I've had a grand total of 15 different jobs. Some of them were at the same company and one of them was the same job twice, but still it's a lot more than I ever would have preferred. I often left jobs on bad terms as a result of neither me or my employers understanding that I'm autistic, or even that I'm different from my colleagues. For the first year and a half of working for my current employer I had a team leader who strongly advocated for the team being a tight social unit and taking part in social activities outside of work together. This isn't something that works for everyone and while I didn't get in trouble for it I was often encouraged to join in more socially with the team and to participate more in team meetings. I found that just our normal half-hour team meetings left me drained and needing a break. I did try occasionally to go out and socialise with them outside of working hours but as usual in social situations I tended to feel awkward and out of place. It's not that I didn't like the people in the team - in fact far from it. It's just that I don't feel comfortable being around people when I don't have to be. Luckily for me, when it comes to socialising out of work I had the excuse of living in York while the office and most of my colleagues were in Leeds so it was a long way to go if I wasn't working that day.

Talk To Them/Us

This was always THE big one for me personally when I was younger and struggling with being single while all my friends were meeting people and pairing up. I've always been told to "Talk to her" when I was trying to either meet somebody new or get to know somebody that I already had contact with. This advice came despite me having already said multiple times that I don't know how to. I've always likened it giving somebody a guitar who's never played one before and telling them to play Master Of Puppets. The instructions which amounted to no more than "Just do it" were too vague and unhelpful as they didn't give any clear indication of what actual actions to take. I remember one specific incident in the Stone Roses pub where I was out with some friends and they tried to get me to talk to this one specific girl who was at the bar. Their "encouragement" went as far as physically pushing me in her direction and telling me to go for it. That was the point that broke me that night. I panicked, walked off and hid somewhere quieter while I tried to pull myself back together from being a teary, nervous mess. Not helpful at all from the group I was with, nor was it constructive in any way. I've had similar struggles when trying to build platonic relationships with friends of friends, although not to the point where I've been physically forced to do something like that night in the Stone Roses. I've been in situations before where I've been trying to talk to people that I had mutual friends with, the conversation dried up with me not knowing what to say and they suddenly seemed annoyed and said "I'm trying to have a conversation with you." In reality it's not that I didn't want to talk to them and I was definitely still listening to them, it's just that I didn't know what to say that would constructively keep the conversation going.

Be Confident

The final bit of advice that I want to cover quickly is similar to "Talk to them" in that I simply don't know how to. This advice is "Just be confident." This was something that I was told mostly by one particular friend who I went to college with at the time. She was the kind of person who can happily and confidently talk to just about anyone, so in a way I can see why she didn't understand that I couldn't but at the same time she needed to understand that not everybody finds socialising as easy as she does. I did respond at one point by explaining that just telling me to be confident doesn't mean I can magically become confident. The answer I got to that was simply "Yes it does" and I couldn't be bothered arguing any more after that. This wasn't too long before she fell out with me and I never really understood why, although looking back she was probably fed up of trying to help me and me just not getting it (again, something I've experienced from other people as well). We're on amicable terms now and we've exchanged the occasional bit of online small talk over the last few years. We autistics do all develop masks that help us to navigate the neurotypical world, but everyone's masks are different and they all have some cracks where they're not quite as good as they would hope to be. The weakness in my mask just happens to be holding a conversation.

These are just a few examples of the things that neurotypical people try to teach autistics and other neurodivergents. I'm sure that in most cases their effort comes from a place of genuinely trying to help, but it often doesn't help due to a lack of public understanding about autism or other conditions. If you're autistic or similarly neurodivergent please let me know of any other examples that you've had either in the comments or on Twitter @DepictDave. I try to reply to all comments. Also don't forget to hit the follow button in the side bar and the subscribe button at the top. That helps you stay up to date with new posts each week and it massively helps me too.

[Image description: 5 phrases written in multiple colours related to the points made in this post, scattered randomly around the image. The phrases are "Take part!", "Be confident!", "Talk to her!", "Eye contact!" and "Look up!" The background is white with a red "No"/crossed out circle sign. This is the image used on my Instagram account to promote this blog post.]

Stimming: Why I Chew

First of all, sorry for not posting last week. There was too much going on for me over the course of Friday and Saturday so I didn't have time to commit to blogging. But that kind of leads me nicely into what I want to talk about this week, which is why I stim by chewing.

Let me start by explaining what stimming is. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
"The repetition of apparently purposeless movements as a pattern of behaviour seen mainly in persons with autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders" 

That's only the external, neurotypical point of view and doesn't explain the reasons behind it. The purpose of stimming is for self-regulation. Everybody stims in one way or another because we all need a certain degree of sensory input to be able to function. The difference in autistics is that we find that we have to create or seek the sensory input ourselves. This could be for various reasons depending on the individual, but for example they might need more input than a neurotypical person, or they might not respond as much to whatever stimuli is in their immediate environment as a neurotypical person would.

So one of the many things that kept me busy last weekend was that we thew a surprise 60th birthday party for my aunty. All the family was there, and as usual I wore my chewer which is a button necklace from Chewigem (you can check them out here). I was playing around with my kids to keep them entertained when my dad noticed my chewer around my neck and asked about it, so I explained what it is. He didn't say anything about it but his look and his tone were very disapproving. Thinking about it, I'm not sure what he disapproved of more - the chewer itself, or the fact that I said the words "I'm autistic" out loud in public. I'm fine with what happened because people are always going to have their own opinions however closed minded they are. It's just annoying that my dad shrugs his attitude and ignorance off about this and lots of other things as just "old fashioned".

I've been inclined towards chewing for a lot longer than I realised until recently. It's only when looking back the other day that I realised how long I've displayed a tendency to chew. The earliest I can remember was when I was in primary school. I can't remember what school year I was in, but at primary school age I must have been between 5 and 11 years old. I was sat in lesson next to a small bookcase and I must have had an urge to chew something because I found myself trying to chew the corner of this bookcase. The teacher noticed and said if I'm hungry it's not long till dinner time. I also used to bite my nails quite badly when I was younger and I think this was more for the chewing action than anything to do with my nails.

Over recent years I've found myself chewing my fingers whenever I've been stressed. That ended up ruining the skin on my fingers, which is why I then bought my first chewer from Chewigem at the start of this year once I discovered that you could buy things like this. We spent last Christmas at my in-laws' house, and because my wife's got such a big family there were too many people there for me, there was too much going on and it was too loud in parts so I found myself later on in the day sat in the conservatory away from everyone else and biting my index finger to shreds. This is what finally prompted me to have a look online and see what I could find in terms of adult human chew toys, and once I got my first chewer it really saved my fingers. Going back to the situation with my dad, my wife tried to explain about my fingers to him as well, but it still didn't make any difference.

I really like Chewigem as a sensory shop but there are lots of others that were suggested to me when I asked around online in the hunt for my first chewer. I've only ever used Chewigem so far so I can't comment any any others, but it's always worth searching online and most stores who sell this kind of thing seem to have an eBay and/or Amazon store that you can find easily. The problem I've got with chew toys (which isn't even an issue with the actual toys) is that I'm a much heavier chewer than I first realised so it's not as long before my chewers get damaged as it would be for other people. My first chew toy was a hand fidget (pictured below), which isn't as durable as I need it to be so I soon ended up chewing right through it and having to get the button necklace that I've got now. Even that's starting to wear down now but it's taken much longer to damage this than it took to damage the hand fidget. That would be my advice if you're looking for a chew toy for yourself; be aware of what kind of chewer you are (light, heavy etc) and make sure you check each toy for its flexibility, durability and firmness which are all displayed clearly on the product page for every item from Chewigem.

[Image description: Me chewing my hand fidget with a thoughtful expression on my face. My hand fidget is a small, circular silicone toy with a black, grey and white camouflage pattern, and it has a bar in the middle which holds a black ball intended for spinning and fidgeting with. I'm holding one end with my hand while chewing the other end.]