u/MotherMaryDconstruct

I recently shared my son’s autism diagnosis with my extended family which brought on a lot of very annoying conversations about vaccines and the chemicals in the water, and all the things that RFK (and my family) theorize are autism causes. And I kept trying to explain to my family that my son was born preterm and had a few weeks in the nicu. It’s widely known that nicu babies are more likely to have autism along with other issues. If you look at the numbers on the rise in autism, it’s rising at the same time that preterm baby deaths are going down. If he’d been born a hundred years ago, he probably would’ve just died. Now obviously not all autistic people were nicu babies, but then I thought more about the life I live with a high support needs kid. He eloped and requires me to watch him constantly. If I just sent him out to play with the neighborhood kids like was so common in the past, he would very likely end up wandering off into a dangerous situation. Even with a lot of supervision he’s still injured himself in a lot of very creative ways. Not to mention all the non edible things he will attempt to eat. If I were a 15th century farmer I wouldn’t have time to keep up with this stuff. But this never gets brought up, people just talk about genetics or crazy fringe theories.

I have a five year old and a six month old. With my baby I feel like I’m noticing the good things so much more than I did with my first because I’ve already experienced having a baby so it’s not as hard. I want to appreciate my oldest more by focusing on the good stuff, but in the moment it can be hard when I’m dealing with behavior issues. So I’m wondering, what preschooler things do you remember fondly from when your kids were little?

I was raised in a very traditional home where the thought was “if you teach your kids right and discipline them right, they’ll turn out just like you want them to” As I got older I kind of replaced that in my mind with ”if you do things according to the recommendations of modern child psychology, they’ll turn out just like you want them to.“ I assumed environment was everything. Which was really dumb in hindsight. As a kid I had many struggles that I assumed my kid wouldn’t have because I would just be so loving and perfect that I could just erase those issues. And I know people will say “well that’s stupid, obviously kids aren’t perfect”, but sometimes the advice given on the internet makes it seem like doing things the right way just erases all the normal childhood issues.

I was talking with another mom the other day who has a kid with a pretty severe speech delay. And she was telling me how she feels like she must have done something wrong that caused it. But in reality the two of us did all the right things- we read to our kids, we “narrated“, we talked with them- and I got a kid who has advanced speech, while she got the opposite. Another friend of mine did oh crap potty training and had her two year old potty trained in three days. She told all of our friends how oh crap is the perfect potty training method. I did the same for three weeks straight, and my two year old was just peeing and pooping everywhere. He wasn’t ready to potty train till three, and wasn’t fully potty trained till three and a half.

The conversation with my friend got me thinking about how many moms are beating themselves up for issues that might be totally outside of their control. One baby raised in one town might be happy as a clam, but miserable in a more humid environment. Kids are their own people with their own struggles, preferences, and needs. All we can do is try our best, but it won’t completely erase the difficulties of life.

Or worse, abuse. I thought I must’ve been a bad parent for the first three years. I did all the right things and yet my kid did all the things people say are due to bad parenting. He didn’t listen to instruction, ever. He would do mean things and then laugh about it. He couldn’t sit still in a restaurant unless he was on a tablet. He was a picky eater. A biter. When he went through his poop smearing phase I was desperately googling what to do. Every Reddit post I read said ”Poop smearing is always caused by sexual abuse.” And I was so confused and scared because my son wasn’t being abused. So why was everything telling me abuse was the only possible cause? I was inspired to make this post the other day when I read a post in a parenting subreddit where someone was asking why their cousins 6 year old would be aggressive and defiant. (I cannot find the post now for the life of me) Everyone who commented was saying that clearly it was bad parenting, because of parents these days who just let their kids do whatever they want. I kept reading through and thinking, is anyone going to mention the possibility that the kid is neurodivergent? It just really frustrates me when people think that good parenting always looks a certain way without any room for nuance.

I’m a stay at home mom to a five month old baby and a five year old boy. My oldest has high support needs autism and adhd, so there’s no short supply of stress in our house. My husband‘s job offers three months of leave for the birth of our new baby. He took two months at the start and is currently taking the last month of leave. He‘s a really great dad and partner, but to the point where it almost feels like an ocd compulsion or something? He wakes up every morning and does every single chore. I would do more but he doesn’t leave any. I have made chore lists in the past and had discussions about who will do what chore, but as soon as I don’t get the chore done as fast as he would he just does it himself. I can’t do chores at the same time as him because I breastfeed and my baby eats at the same time we wake up. I could wake up before sunrise to contribute to the chores but my baby doesn’t sleep well so it seems stupid to wake up early just because my husband can’t leave any dish undone. He cannot even sit down and eat a meal if the house isn’t clean enough, which isn’t great when you have a kid who destroys the whole house the second you look away. We also have gotten into a habit of me caring for the baby and him watching our older son while he’s on paternity leave. Even when he’s not on leave he’s an amazing dad. He’ll spend hours playing legos or play doh with our son, or taking him out to the park or zoo. But while he will frequently offer to watch both kids so I can get time to do things for myself, he refuses to let me do the same. In fact, he barely lets me have a turn with parenting our oldest because he feels responsible for it. Our oldest requires pretty much constant supervision so it’s not that he’s being overbearing, but there have been many many instances where I’ll see that my husband is getting stressed out, and offer to give him half an hour to himself. And he’ll say “Oh don’t worry about me, I‘ve got this babe“. Only to end up flying off the handle yelling at our son ten minutes later. Or he’ll just be so incredibly stressed out that he’s shaking and basically having a panic attack. And I’m like dude, I could’ve taken over twenty minutes ago and you wouldn’t be feeling this way right now.

This just happened again last night, and afterwards I asked him to please let me give him a break when he’s stressed, a conversation we have had many many times. He always agrees but then in the moment when I offer he refuses all help because he says he’s not stressed and doing fine, even though I can tell that’s not true. I basically would have to kidnap our son and take him to a different location to get him to accept taking a break. Even then he’d probably spend the time organizing the pantry or something. And this also affects our son because he’s super in tune with how people are feeling, and if his dad is getting stressed he can tell and he starts to act out, even when another person wouldn’t pick up on it. Last night when we were discussing things my husband told me that he feels like he’s a bad parent if he has to take a break from parenting. Which doesn’t surprise me at all because he has a lot of self doubt. He could clean the house from top to bottom, give me the day to myself and a back rub and then say “Do I do enough for you? Am I a good husband?”

What‘s really crazy is this is exactly how his parents are- his dad does everything and is insanely stressed out, while his mom does nothing. Although in his parents case I think that his mom is perfectly happy to do nothing while I don’t want to be that way. I want to be an equal partner. But I don’t know how to do it without locking my husband out of the house for half the day. And I think that if things continue the way they are he’s going to end up in a psych ward from how stressed he is.

We don’t have any help. All of our family either lives scattered across the country or are too old to help us out at all. We used to have a babysitter but don’t really have the money for it anymore because our son needs all different kinds of therapy and it’s expensive. No we can’t get respite care, I’ve checked. Our only break is when he’s in school but that’s still a month away. Things are very hard but I feel like they would be easier if we could work together to give each other time to ourselves. I hate feeling like I have to force him to take a break. I just want to be able to say “hey do you need me to take over?“ and get an honest answer when he does. I can’t even be honest with him about my own stress because all he hears is that he’s not doing enough for me as a partner.

TL;DR- My husband is a great dad but won’t take a break and it’s causing him extreme burnout.

This is kind of a long ramble but I just wanted to get all this off my chest I guess. My son recently started horse therapy (idk what the right term is for it). They do group sessions and it was my first time ever being around other special needs families. And it was kind of a bizarre experience because with literally everyone I know I have had to explain almost everything about autism to them. Anything they know about how my kid operates came from me. I follow a few different groups like this online so I know that there are people out there experiencing the same things as me, but I walked into this group and for the first time everyone was speaking the same language as me. I talked to another mom who got there at the same time as me and she was like “yeah I’m glad we were able to make it, my son’s been super disregulated today and he was beating the crap out of me”. And I’m like yup, I get it. 100%. But if I said that type of thing to someone else they’d look at me like I was insane. Then at the end of the session (which my son absolutely loved btw) he had a meltdown because he didn’t want to leave. But the people running the place immediately knew what to do and were able to calm him down really well using all the same techniques that we’ve had to learn through a lot of reading and trial and error. I didn’t have to apologize or explain anything. In a way it felt like before the autism community was separate from the real world, and I was living alone in a different reality from other parents. But after talking to other people who get it I feel a lot less alone. It also made me realize that I want to fully commit to the way I know is best to parent my son, but since it’s so different than the parenting advice I’ve received from people around me I always feel like I’m second guessing myself.

If I were to create such a response it would be -Is your baby meeting the milestones typical for their age? If yes, come back in a year, there’s no way of knowing.

I get it if your baby has developmental delays. But there’s so many people describing a completely normal infant and terrified they might have autism. And there’s always people who answer “oh yeah my baby flapped his hands at 8 months too and he has autism” like thats an obvious sign and not just part of being a baby. If you look for “signs of autism” that early you will probably find some autism parent who’s kid was similar. But that’s because it’s a wide spectrum, not because you can diagnose autism in an infant. My advice to these parents who are so worried about autism is to consider whether you have postpartum anxiety. I had horrible medical anxiety as a first time parent and I was googling literally everything of note about my baby to see if he might have cancer or something awful. It didn’t save my kid from being autistic it just made me a nervous wreck. Rant over.

With my five year old it’s our neighbor Gary. Gary has been polite to him, he’ll say hi how are you, and maybe stop and chat with us for a bit if we’re both outside. But my son always wants to see him and has had many a meltdown when we go out and Gary isn’t there. It’s kind of awkward because he’s a nice guy but I don’t think he wants to spend all of his outdoor time talking to our son, while our son would talk to him for the whole day if he could. Sometimes when we go out and Gary’s not out there he’ll just stand at our fence looking towards his house saying “Garrry Garrry“. He sounds like a ghost haunting him or something. He also likes to use his binoculars to try and look in Gary’s house to see him. I only allow this because you can’t actually see in from our windows. I try to time our outdoor playtime so we go out right before Gary leaves for work, so that we don’t have a “I didn’t get to see Gary today” meltdown. Sorry Gary. I do my best to let you water your lawn in peace.

My husband always makes breakfast, and occasionally he has to leave for work earlier than anyone else gets up. So on those days he’ll make breakfast for me and my five year old and put it in the fridge with a little note for each of us saying “I love you”. Today he did that, and this time he also left a note for our four month old on his breakfast, aka my milk.

The baby didn’t appreciate it but I thought it was funny.

I know this is a rather niche topic but we’re trying to find a good school district for my five year old who has autism and adhd. He currently gets PT and OT so he’ll need an IEP. If anyone could share their good or bad experiences that would be great. I’m wondering how long it typically takes to get an IEP in place as well.

My son is 5, level 2/3 audhd and life has been very hard lately. I feel like today went pretty well compared other recent days but it ended with my son accidentally ripping out a large chunk of my hair, which caused me to say ow, which triggered a mega meltdown, which caused my husband and I to argue because we have no idea what to do. I’ve found when posting on here that I get a lot of “omg my kid‘s the exact same way”. And it’s good to know I’m not alone, but I could use a little hope for the future. Tell me it can get better.

My son was invited to a birthday party by a girl who invited their whole class. It’s at a Chuck e Cheese type place. This is his first time being invited to a birthday party so I’m not really sure what’s considered the norm when it comes to gifts. Additionally, my son isn’t really friends with this girl so I know literally nothing about what she likes. I was thinking since I don’t know what she likes that maybe I could just get a pack of stickers so she has something to open, plus a $20 gift card so she can pick something out herself. Is four too young for a gift card? Is $20 too cheap? Help me, I have no idea.

Growing up in church I was always a real “prayer warrior”. I spent so much time writing in my journal about all the people I knew who needed prayer. I had a list of every person I knew so I could think of them and make sure I didn’t forget anyone in my prayers. I felt constantly guilty that I wasn’t praying enough. When I realized I no longer believed one of the biggest things I struggled with at first was not having anyone that I could go to with my prayers. Then I quickly realized how pointless prayer had always been. Like maybe it was helpful as a meditative practice, but nothing I prayed for ever was changed because of me. I have a lot of social anxiety, so I barely even spoke with most of the people I was praying for.

This change in mindset changed me for the better in a major way. I think in a way losing prayer made it that much more important to me because I’d always thought my prayer was making a difference, so realizing it hadn’t made me want to actually work to make change. Instead of thinking “oh I‘d better pray about that and maybe God will fix it” I’d think “what can I do about this?” Now if I know someone is sick, I try to bring a meal. When I struggled with not really having any friends I started trying to connect with people and invite them to hang out or get lunch, rather than just inviting them to church(god I was such a dweeb). When I became a mom and there wasn’t stuff for little kids to do in my area, I started a mom group with activities for kids. And probably part of this change is just due to me getting older, but I feel like I’ve become less indecisive as well. Before I was constantly waiting on God to give me a sign that something was the right choice. Now I make the right choice with my own brain. I’m not perfect but I have a fairly good track record with decision making, so its nice just relying on myself and not assuming Satan‘s trying to lead me astray with my pride or something.