RAISING A CHILD WITH AUTISM

In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control reported that approximately 1 in 54 children in the United States is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (that’s roughly 4.6 million children in the United States alone). Due to the fact that we live in the United States, we’ve mainly looked at the statistics here, but there are various websites giving the numbers of autism diagnoses in children all over the world.

Although there are many websites, organizations and resources giving more information about the subject of Autism itself, we haven’t been able to find much in the way of the day to day life of raising a child with Autism. At the same time, we’ve noticed that people who are raising or caring for children with Autism often don’t talk about it with people outside of their immediate family or close circle. We experienced this ourselves for a few years.

While there may not be many readily available texts on how to help your child with what they experience on a day to day basis, there are so many people who are raising, or have already raised children with Autism. A veritable gold mine of information exists in the minds of each and every one of the millions of people raising and helping their children with the challenges that may be experienced with Autism.

When we started to reach out to others, we found that some of the most valuable information, resources and advice came from others who were raising children with Autism. Not only that, but they were also incredibly understanding of what we were having trouble with in our day to day life. While every autistic child is different, as Autism is a spectrum, we’ve found that there are many similar challenges they experience in their day to day lives. What they’re willing to eat, physical discomforts, toys and activities they’re interested in, sensory difficulties, how to find a school for them, etc.

Now this may or may not be your experience, but when we first began to notice that Bella was developmentally delayed or a bit different than others at her age, we turned to Google to see what we could find.

We felt very alone, not wanting to bother friends with things we knew they weren’t experiencing and assumed they probably couldn’t help with. You can begin to feel inadequate when you see the photos of a child plastered all over a Facebook friend's page, who's already reading Shakespeare while riding a horse backwards on top of an airplane. Social Media often paints a false picture of peoples' lives, but whether true or false, it can certainly make you feel bad about yourself as a parent - not to mention your body, style or anything, and pretty much everything else.

When we decided to start talking about it, we realized that in our efforts to not “bother” others, or to spare ourselves that feeling of inadequacy by trying to figure it all out on our own, we were missing out on all sorts of things we could’ve already been doing for Bella - which would’ve made day to day life so much easier and so much more fun for her and for us.

In this website, we’re going to talk about our experience thus far so that people who wonder about or are raising a child with Autism may find some information they didn’t already have. It is our hope that we can begin a movement in which parents, relatives, friends and caregivers will start sharing their knowledge, experience and successful actions with others and not only raise Autism awareness, but also help each other.

We are raising some of the most incredible, loving and gifted children in the world. As with raising any child, there are some challenges, but let’s not attempt to reinvent the wheel by figuring it all out alone.

We are Allison and Jeanie, mom and grandma to our beautiful Bella who just turned 5. We look forward to hearing from you and hope we can help each other in this journey.

• Allison & Jeanie