Dealing with an autistic child during the summer months is always a challenge. No school. No structure. No routine. Yes, there is a local program that helps, but summer is still, by far, the toughest time of year for our son and for us as we struggle to maintain some sort of structure and routine in his daily life. And kids with autism love structure and routine. They love predictability. And we hate summer.
Follow up:
The only thing that’s routine in our house during the scorching hot days of summer are behavior issues. Although behaviors are routine, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are predictable. Yes, I can predict that my son will have some sort of behavior outburst today, but I can’t predictwhen during the day.
During the school year discipline seems more effective. During the summer nothing works. We’ve tried it all and all of it gets the same response; non-compliance. If Braden is throwing a fit and hitting us (or kicking us, choking us, or take your pick of popular frontal assaults) ignoring him is just as effective as running away from him, which is just as effective as spanking him, which is just as effective as screaming in pain, which is just as effective as playing dead. OK, we haven’t really tried to play dead yet. But the big question is; Will our discipline have the long term affect of curbing his behaviors? We can only hope because we can’t raise a child without discipline. The trick in altering our son’s behavior is to alter our own behavior. We’re working on it.
During my writings on this blog there are some things I’m not going to reveal. Heck, even if I wanted to reveal them, this blog couldn’t express them. What are those things? Details about our struggles raising a child with autism. If you don’t have a child with autism you’ll never truly understand how much of a struggle it is to raise one. I cannot express my grief in writing. I cannot express the ‘bottomless pit’ feeling that sometimes overwhelms me when I see typical children my son’s age that are developing fine and have a large vocabulary. But I also cannot express the joy I feel when we’re all at our private little spot at Whiskeytown Lake and Braden is so happy that he cannot hide his smile and he cannot stop his arms from flapping like a bird’s wings. Seeing him doing his happy dance is heart warming to me and my wife.
Sometimes those close to us say things about our “situation” that hurt us pretty bad. Family or friends have said things like raising our son isn’tthat hard. We love them, but they haven’t seen more than a quick glimpse into a seemingly happy, easy world of autism. And then there’s the family that all but ignores us and never communicates with us. Sometimes that hurts more than the comments. Maybe they don’t know what autism is or they don’t know about our struggles so they just figure ignoring us and never speaking to us is the safest route to take. It’s not. It’d be really nice if they asked how they could help us once in a while.
We struggle with finding ways to keep our son included. We struggle to keep our family included. Sometimes his worst behaviors occur when we have friends and family over to our house. Last night was a pretty good example of that when we had the Butler Clan over for dinner. I’m not going to elaborate, but just know that we can’t let Braden isolate us. We can’t leave him isolated either. As my wife puts it, “We can’t let him live life in his room.” What she means is that we can’t keep sending him to his room when he misbehaves and leave him there. We’ve got to adapt his/our routine into everything. We can do it.
God will give us the patience, the strength, and the wisdom to raise this kid. And we’ll keep praying for those things. God is reliable and when everyone else fails us He won’t let us down. And summer will end soon and 3rd grade will begin.