the kid with autism

For practically my whole life I had no real clue what autism was. I always thought of autism as people who refuse to speak and are smarter than 99% of the rest of the world, yet are unable to accomplish simple tasks. It is a confusing disorder and I have a hard time accepting things that confuse me. One of my biggest worries in life is that my son Aidan will spend his whole life fighting to be understood and accepted. I have been his father for almost 9 years and just in the last few years am starting to understand him. Here’s a look at my life with my son so far. Hopefully it will help others to understand him the way I am beginning to.

So I’ll just get this out of the way first, I know my son does not have full blown autism. When I first started learning about it I was kind of surprised to learn that there is a whole spectrum of behavioral disorders ranging from autism at one end to people like my son who fall toward the other end. We have been taking my son to the doctor regularly for the past 3 years. They all have their opinion of what condition on the spectrum he has, but whether it is Asperger’s Syndrome, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or something else I could care less. The important thing to remember is that his brain does not operate like most peoples and he is not in direct control over it.

Sandra and I were the first of our circle of friends to have a child. By not having a lot of other children to compare our child to, I guess it was easy to assume he was normal. But from the time Aidan could walk and talk, Sandra and I knew something was a little bit different with him. He has always been very loving, he laughs a lot, he is independent, and is one of the most naturally intelligent kids I have ever been around. Most of the time he seems to be a “normal” child. But then out of nowhere comes his other side.

Here are just a few of the “normal” things we have dealt with over the past few years. Aidan went almost 2 years without wearing jeans because he did not like the buttons on them; he still will not wear a shirt with buttons. He has several times torn apart worksheets in school not because he didn’t want to do them, but because he could not get over the frustration of having to ask his teacher a question. He punched through a window when he was 4. He sometimes runs and hides when he is not sure how to deal with a situation and he has done this for the past 5 years. He flipped over a desk in the principal’s office in 1st grade. He won’t brush his teeth most of the time without his mom present. He gets so angry after falling off his bike that he still will not even attempt to ride it. There was a long period of time when he not only had to sit in the exact same seat in the car every day but also required everyone in the car to put their seatbelts on in a specific order.

For people that are not around him everyday, it is easy to dismiss one of these actions as normal behavior problems, every child has behavior problems. Every child gets angry sometimes, throws things sometimes, yells sometimes, misbehaves in a store sometimes, hits sometimes, or refuses to do things asked of them sometimes. So how do you deal with a child that does these things almost all of the time? When Aidan first started showing problems I just figured he was going through a phase, like the terrible twos….only it kept going. When the behavior continued I just thought maybe it was a parenting problem. When you have a child who misbehaves there is no shortage of suggestions to improve their behavior, and my wife and I heard all of them. You aren’t strict enough, you aren’t punishing him right, he needs time outs, you give in to him too much, time outs are useless, my parents would have given me a spanking, he watches too much TV, and on and on. The problem is what do you do when your child fails to respond to any type of punishment? What do you do when you feel you have tried everything people have suggested and you start to doubt your own ability as a parent? Oddly enough the thing that helped me through it the most was my daughter Alyssa. For all the problems we were having with Aidan and all the “parenting mistakes” we were making, Alyssa had no behavior problems whatsoever. She was arguably the perfect kid which made it obvious that there was something more to Aidan’s behavior issues.

Kindergarten was probably the pinnacle of problems we had with Aidan. I think in a lot of ways I was in still in denial that he even had a problem. Having a child in school made it a lot easier to realize I was wrong. Having a class of 30 kids and the years of experience of his teacher forced me to reevaluate my opinion. Throughout Kindergarten Sandra spent most days in Aidan’s classroom with him just trying to help him get through his day without any problems. The days she was unable to stay with him and had to drop him off at school usually resulted in about an hour of him begging her not to leave, running away, crying, and refusing to go to his class. She was basically forced to stay there because in a lot of the schools was not prepared to deal with these situations. Aidan was able to get an 504, but there is not a lot of individual help available when your child does not have a “learning” problem even if they have failed to learn common behavioral skills most people take for granted. Social and behavioral skills are probably more important at a young age than any other skill a child learns, but as long as your kid gets good grades and scores well on tests it is easy for them to be ignored by people that are not with them on a daily basis. We were lucky to have amazing teachers that were able to work with Aidan in addition to everyone else in their oversized classrooms. It was through the help of these teachers we learned about the Autism Spectrum Disorder and finally sought professional help in dealing with our child.

There have been 4 different child psychologists that my son has seen in the past 3 years. The first one retired, the next one was less than helpful, but the third doctor really helped me understand what my son was going through. She was also the first one that made me seriously take a look at medication for my child. Prior to speaking with her I was adamantly against any kind of medication for my child. I don’t even take Tylenol for a headache, but my thoughts about trillion dollar pharmaceutical companies and how much they actually care about improving our health is another story. The way she explained it to me was that when Aidan faces adversity his brain turns to a fight-or-flight response. The fuse attached to this response is short. His medication will not cure him or make him behave how we want him to; it will simply lengthen this fuse and allow him more time to consider how he wants to respond. Sandra and I debated for months over whether we should medicate Aidan, and eventually chose to. I’m not sure if it was because we felt we had no other options and had just given up, but it wound up being one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Within a few weeks we started to notice a considerable difference with Aidan. He was his usual misbehaving self at home, but his behavior at school started to improve a lot. Instead of celebrating the days he did not have a meltdown we were celebrating the weeks. The medicine was only a small part of what has helped him, most of it revolves around figuring out what exactly triggers his anger and trying to proactively solve problems with him prior to him becoming angry rather that reactively trying to figure things out. Our goal is to eventually get his behavior to a level where he does not need medication to work through his frustrations.

Although we have gone through and will continue to go through a lot with Aidan, I am glad for the opportunity he has given me. I am a very opinionated person, but he has given me perspective about the different types of people there are. Not every person mentally accepts things the same way. No specific type of punishment works for all children, no specific type is right or wrong. Not everything is as black and white as I usually perceive things.

Dealing with my son led me to a book called The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene. There are tons of books about different behavioral problems in children, but this was the first one that I read. I would encourage anyone to read this book regardless of whether they have kids. Most everyone is at least around children enough to form opinions of them and their behavior. Raising my son has caused me to think differently whenever I see a child misbehaving. It is also nice to see TV shows such as Parenthood giving awareness to these types of issues. These are real issues and I they can have a strong negative impact on the way a person lives their life. Autism Spectrum Disorders and other behavioral problems with children are sadly misunderstood. It’s important to remember that Autism Spectrum Disorders are in fact disorders. They are not diseases or viruses that can be confirmed with a blood test. They are not the result of kids with bad parents or children who watch too much TV. These disorders are difficult to diagnose and easy to misdiagnose which causes a lot of confusion and controversy.

I don’t blame people for not understanding my son. After almost 9 years I am just beginning to understand him myself, I just hope that recognition of these problems continues to rise. The hardest part of having a child with behavioral problems is dealing with people who do not understand him. I know he will always be a little different, but that's why I love him. Raising a child is a never ending learning opportunity. Hopefully those around him are able to learn as much from him as I have and can gain a new understanding for the everyday struggles some children deal with just so society can label them "normal".