Living with Autism: A Parent's Perspective

In my life i have two big things that involve my time. One is my family and therefore our autistic son and the other is Politics. As a general rule i tend not to involve the two blogs however there is a point that needs to be made not only to those who follow my blog here in Canada but also those who read my blog in the US.

The point is simple. It is your child the government is neglecting both by minimal or no funding for treatment as well as minimal to no funding for research into the causes of autism and its possible cures.

The only way to make this inequity go away or at least reduce is to get involved. Talk to your politicians when they come around looking for your votes, Go seek them out in their offices, listen to what they have to say and see what they follow up on. When after you exhaust all options to the best of your abilities ask yourself this. What have i learned about how much these politicians care about me and my child. Now once you have your answer, and in very few cases will it be anything but they care little or nothing for us beyond my vote, then decide what can i best do to get my child the care and help s/he requires and how do i get the research that we need.

The only answer is GET INVOLVED. Choose a party that most closely represents your views and get involved. Offer as a candidate. If you feel it is the only way you will get properly represented go as far as to create a new party (remember to come up with a full platform not just autism) though this is a lot of work however, or even run as an independent. Remember 1 in 91 children born today will develop autism that will affect a large number of people and if the governments of our day are not willing to do what it takes to advance autism research then we must make the effort to make our voices heard loud and clear.

We are the voices of the parents with autistic children and we are the voices of those children as well. Together we can get involved and together we can make significant changes to the research and treatment of autism. If they will not help us then it is time for us to do it ourselves

As Summer vacation continues we find more and more we are having to make  greater efforts to find things for our son to do. He is as summer continues becoming increasingly bored and harder to please. Early on in the vacation we were caught with the dilemma of the fact that he was basically confiscating either my wife or my computer the moment we moved from the desk so we quickly came to the conclusion that it was necessary to haul my old computer up from the basement for his and his older sister’s use. Didn’t really work of course as now one takes their computer and the other still tries to use ours.

We do find he enjoys time in the vehicle regardless or where he is going as there is few problems when travelling either short stints to the store or long trips out of town. This means that when possible we do try to take him out as much as possible to give him the best possible option of time out and about. We are also finding excursions to various play parks do wonders to chill his mood and so take him there as often as possible as it is helpful to him to be out playing and is still a generally fun outing for the whole family. Water play parks also seem to catch his fancy most of the time.

We are finding that on occasion he is hitting out and there is a bit more frequency to his hitting though as a general rule he seems to avoid hitting his baby sister and the worst seems to be leaning on her high chair (which she extremely vocally tells him she does not like). His older sister does get some degree of his frustration though in many of the cases it is not much different then normal brother/sister disagreements on who is going to get to do what when and instigated by her as much as by him so while we do discourage it we also acknowledge that if he was non-autistic we would still be subject to the majority of the disagreements anyway.

All said I find the summer is progressing along nicely and will (like any normal parent) be quite happy when Sept the 8th rolls around and we are back to a nice quiet and peaceful household for a good part of the day.

On one side note we are finding that as summer progresses he is getting increasingly vocal while still not near what would be considered normal talking for his age range he is definitely not where he was when school ended so we can very much be pleased with the progress made there this summer

The first week of the summer break is over and it there were many interesting details come out of the week

For one the week started with all of the kids wound up completely an our son climbing on everything in reach including computer desks and tables, walking along the top of the back of the couch etc. So all signs point towards a lively and energetic summer with almost no listening skills.

What was of particular interest is that on Monday he took over my wife's computer and went digging for games. And he found them (take into account he is only 6) and proceeded to start playing them and taking the computer over to the point of us deciding it was time to haul my old computer out of the basement.

We have now set him up with a computer to share with his sister and at least my wife gets on the computer some now.

We have also seen signs of certain things we were looking for.  Our son has started to mellow out a bit (at least this am when his sister was in day camp) so hopefully that will continue and as well he has started to make progress again in his autism so we are hopeful that will continue over the summer break

We are watching the next few days to see what happens on that front