Are we doing the right thing by keeping our autistic child in a mainstream school despite all the support and expenses?
I have a 7-year-old son on the spectrum and lately I've been losing sleep over whether we're even doing this right anymore.
He's a smart boy. Reading is good, math is good, academically he's actually ahead of his class. The diagnosis is somewhere in the mild to moderate range. Where he struggles is the stuff that doesn't show up on a report card. Reading social cues, handling his emotions when something doesn't go his way, sensory overload, figuring out how to be part of a group of kids without either melting down or shutting down.
For three plus years now, we've followed the playbook. Every therapist, every counsellor, every well-meaning relative said the same thing. Inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. So we put him in a mainstream inclusive school. In India that doesn't come cheap.
Our spending right now looks something like this:
Therapies outside school: around 25k a month Shadow teacher: another 25k a month Special support inside school: 18k per quarter Regular school fees: roughly 55k per quarter
That's been the pattern since pre-nursery. Then nursery. Then UKG. Now Grade 1, and the numbers just keep climbing.
I'm not really complaining about the money. I'm questioning what we're getting for it. Some days I look at him and I'm not sure he's actually included so much as he's being managed. The teachers know his needs, they accommodate him, sure. But is he part of the class? Real friendships? Birthday invites that aren't from kids whose parents probably felt awkward not inviting him? I'm honestly not sure anymore.
Grade 1 has been particularly hard. School runs 8:30 to 2:30. Six hours. By the time he comes home he's running on fumes, completely dysregulated, and most evenings half of it goes into just bringing him back to a baseline state. Then we wake up and do it again.
So I wanted to ask parents who've been further along this road than us a few things.
Does this approach actually pay off later, or are we just convincing ourselves it will because we've already invested so much into it?
Does mainstream schooling get easier as the kid grows up, or does it actually get harder when the social gap widens?
Are we doing this for him, or are we doing it because we're scared of how it'll look to family and society if we move him to something more specialised?
How did you figure out the line between school helping your child grow vs school slowly draining them?
Did anyone move to a different setup later on and wish they'd done it years earlier?
The question I keep coming back to. Are we helping him grow, or are we just wearing him out trying to fit him into a system that was never built for kids like him?
Would really appreciate hearing from parents who've walked this. The honest version, not the optimistic one we all tell ourselves.