Once your child has been diagnosed with autism, you might not know how to react. With the condition being as varied as it is, it’s difficult to say exactly how autism will manifest in any particular example, but you might be using references from what you’ve seen elsewhere to imagine what will happen.
Instead of spiraling into your own thoughts and assumptions about the situation, it might be more constructive to take steps toward a more factual understanding. Not only might this help to keep you calm, but it can give you a clearer idea of how this diagnosis will affect your child.
Have a Discussion with Your Doctor
If you’ve gotten a diagnosis, it’s likely that you’re in contact with a licensed healthcare professional. Talking to them and establishing the full scope of the situation can provide you with a solid bedrock of information, and they’ll likely be expecting you to have plenty of questions that you want to ask. In many cases, they might even be able to point you toward other sources of information that can help to answer any other queries you might have.
One of the more important points that you should discuss here is the exact form of autism that your child has. The severity of it, what you can expect, which symptoms might be experienced, etc. These points can help you to construct how you’re going to handle parenting from here on out, and might help you to think about how to respond to certain behaviors, as well as what you should potentially avoid.
Think About Their Education
Of all the questions that you might have, the ones that relate to how they develop moving forward might be most pertinent, in particular, how this diagnosis can affect their education.
It might be that the autism they’ve been diagnosed with isn’t severe enough to require too many major changes, and in this instance, you might find that they’re able to attend school as in any other instance. That said, there might also be circumstances where this isn’t realistic due to their behavior, making it necessary for them to attend other facilities or institutions that are more geared toward education that works for them.
It could also simply be that a more traditional education structure isn’t as helpful as it could be for helping them to learn, which might mean that it might be worth seeking out some alternatives.
These alternatives might come in the form of supplemental activities, such as educational games, that better align with their strengths. Alternatively, you could investigate platforms like Autism 360 that host a wide variety of resources for parents in your situation, both for the direct benefit of your child and also for giving you a more in-depth understanding about how you can improve their situation.
Being aware of all the useful tools and technologies that have been made available in recent years can help to guide you toward solutions that might not have been available a couple of decades ago when the medical understanding of autism wasn’t as advanced.
Supporting Any Siblings
There’s also the chance that your child who has been diagnosed with autism isn’t your only child. Not only does this add to your stress as you have to parent them both, but it can mean that their siblings begin to feel as though they’re not getting enough attention, or the kind of attention that they feel they need.
If you and a partner are both actively parenting together, you might find that it’s easier to occasionally split the responsibilities this way, but it won’t always be as easy as that, with certain aspects of care taking both of your full attention.
As with other aspects of parenting autistic children, there’s guidance available for this particular difficulty. That’s not to say that you can simply follow the guidance toward a perfect solution, there will be individual aspects that do or don’t apply to your situation, but at least having a form of guidance to turn to can make you feel as though you’re not completely alone.
It’s important not to underestimate the value that your own developing experience has here as well, as what might feel completely alien to you at first might see you developing an effective rhythm with how to parent further down the line.
