be afraid, very afraid!
As soon as you start down this road, you will be faced with a series of nightmares. Will your child be ridiculed in school? how will this impact his relationships with peers and siblings? Will your life ever be the same again? All of the rules you had dreamed of, or live by, are crumbling! We need help to build these 4 walls back up again. Your child needs therapy. Your child needs intensive intervention. You need to be prepared to lose yourself to the machine of forms, charts, checklists, data collection and paperwork.
If your child is already sick, you may begin to wonder what more this will add to his and your plates. What IS autism?! Why us?! The series of concerned yet hollow faces you will see over the years begin to haunt you already. In public you may be doing alright with social perceptions if your child is young, but as they get older..? When a tantrum over a toy is no longer cute..? what will you do..? How much can ABA really change this..?
In 2013, Canadian statistics are at 1 in 88 people are diagnosed with autism. If you do not have a business-inclined mentality, then please take a moment to breathe that in, and abruptly make a horse sound and spit it out again. It means nothing for you. Is your child part of that number? who knows. Where did all these kids come from? well, either its something in the water, food, or lifestyle; or maybe its just a new craze. What does all of this mean for YOU? How other children are doing in school will be very different than yours, I assure you. What services other children receive, and how effective they are, is purely subjective and circumstantial. What are YOUR goals? How does autism interfere with those? What can you do to bring the two together? Because you see, I don't think autism interrupts our hopes or dreams, I think how we learn to deal with differences, this is what changes our reality.
The scariest part of your child being diagnosed with autism, is that you are slowly and methodically given the option to let your child be segregated from neurotypical peers, or to pull the plug on your own dependency on the social construct that is the popular culture.
Personally, henceforth, you will read of how I choose to pursue integration, not in school, not in extracurricular activities, but true integration. If we are at 1 in 88 individuals on the autism spectrum, then a few years ago we were at 1 in 100, a few years before, 1 in a few hundred, there has always been autism, and aspergers, but never before has there been such a rush for fundraising to prove a cure, therapy, or intervention like there is now. Be wary of any sponsored ads or specialists.
Right now, my greatest fear is really whether my child likes dinner tonight or not, what's yours?
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