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.