Autistic parenting

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Do you think an Autistic person would have a hard time interacting with an infant?

Not as hard a time as the autistic person would have interacting with a 15-year-old!

According to my mother my husband and I didn't know how to interact with a toddler so it was our fault he was developmentally delayed apparently but now he is doing good and catching up. I asked her how does she know we caused his delay and she said she has seen us with him and how we took care of him and interacted.

But we have our daughter and I can see a big difference in development but then again she has my parents around and an older brother and having a little sister also helped with his development.

Yeah I always feel bad about all this.

Depends on the person and how autism effects them I suppose. I have an infant cousin who I have interacted with a lot. He always acts happy and excited when he sees me. And if he is crying, he usually stops if they put him in my arms.

I think as an autistic parent, and there are plenty of them, all the crying would be difficult to deal with. Seems like that would trigger sensory overload.

We were told something similar by my mother, but what she really meant (we now know years later) was that we weren't interacting with our baby the way *she* was taught *she* was supposed to and therefore it was "wrong".

Please don't be so hard on yourself. Unless you kept him in a Skinner box or sensory deprived to a damaging degree, if he is now catching up it is likely he just wasn't ready before. And you cannot compare the two children - each is different, with a different temperament, personality and most important, growth/development cycles & schedule. It's those families where all the kids turn out identical and within the range of "perfect" that freak me out a little - I cannot honestly see how that's done without damaging them. Yet, for our parents' generation(s) that was the ideal, and many were taught anything else was considered a failure.

Not really. Especially if said child also turns out to be autistic.

In all seriousness, both my spouse and I are on the spectrum. Neither had trouble interacting with our children, although we soon discovered that we each had to find our own way with each one.

Luckily, so much of taking care of infants is making sure that their physical needs are taken care of that the basics such as physical contact are almost assured so long as you don't mind holding and touching them. Infants are not social in the way adults are - they are pure instinct and curiosity, but their brains are not even done developing or connecting so really they don't "do" much at first at all.

And since they don't talk to you, it's easy to just babble at them about whatever comes to mind, sing them a song or whatever. And there's nothing wrong with quiet times, either!

The weirdest thing for us was that we both became good at analyzing why the baby was crying. You form mental checklists, go through the possibilities and 95% of the time you only get halfway through and they are satiated again.

We were cooped up in a 900 sq foot apartment so he had one big room to play in and crawl around it and I had the doors closed and baby gates up. So he didn't have all the space to explore and no stairs to climb and stuff or a big yard to play in. My husband and I are home buddies. I did go for walks with him and took him to the park sometimes. I did play groups also and then we enrolled him in school so he could learn social skills and develop language because he really needed that and the stimulation and be out in the real world to learn and explore and to reinforce his language skills. Plus the IEP has helped him also because he needed more help to function and has made a lot of improvement thanks to the therapists.

It might have been our apartment environment that delayed him but who knows and we live in a different environment now so of course our daughter will learn to do more things and there is more things to get into and more rooms to explore and walk around in and we have more furniture and we have stairs and we don't have up all these baby gates to keep her in one room. But we do close doors now because she explores and likes to put stuff in toilets and unroll toilet papers and stuff it all in the toilet. And we let her play with markers and pens. I didn't let my son do it because I was worried he would scribble on walls and stuff so I think that attributes to him not wanting to write and saying it's all hard. But then again we are still home buddies and our daughter is fine. And some kids are just slower than others and outgrow their developmental delay and then they are fine and normal and don't need intervention anymore or any therapists so I can understand why some doctors would do the wait and see approach before labeling them. But sometimes parents know something is wrong with their child than just being developmentally delayed so they do push for a diagnoses.

Sounds very much like us. First child was in a 845 sq ft place & we were overcautious, second was in a bigger place and we loosened up a bit. Very much homebodies, too. I tend to listen when older women talk about raising their families, what it was like when they were young, and so on and based on what they've told me, I think you did good. Don't sweat the environmental stuff too much, it is hugely overshadowed by differences in the children's personalities, innate abilities/disabilities, development stages and drives. To me anyway, the two of you seem like wonderful, caring parents that put a huge amount of effort into your family. That's what matters most!

Is your first kid on the spectrum?

Our first child amazed the delivery nurses with the way she was looking at everything, seemingly aware. Apparently now it's known that can be an indicator of someone who will later be deemed to be on the spectrum (along with just about all the other classic indicators, which she also exhibited). For the longest time she would only interact with the world using her left index finger. And so on. She's a 'tween now, clearly on the spectrum and turning out to be an amazing person. She just needs extra help learning how to work with her uniqueness in a world that expects everyone to be more or less the same.

My parents were and are great with children of all ages. And still i was delayed in speaking. Parenting in some rare cases does have to do with issues like that, but as another user said unless you kept him in a small box with no human interaction, you DID NOT CAUSE IT! !! Developmental delays are natural and cannot be blamed on a parent, or other factors.

I think it really depends on the person and the way their ASD manifests itself. I have ASD and I used to be a teacher. I certainly found teaching 7-11year olds much more natural and easy than teaching teenagers. I think 7-11year olds are quite literal and concrete in their thinking style so that fits with the way ASD works in me really well making me effective in my job. I have also worked in 11-18year old education and I found that very challenging indeed. Most of the kids were socially more advanced than me so I found it hard to engage them and I couldn't do the all important 'bantering' which a lot of teachers of this age group use to great effect.

With respect to infants, I don't know. When infants are non-verbal it's difficult to tell what they need sometimes but I think that's probably true for most people. Being structured, reliable and consistent helps infants and having ASD means that this stuff was easy for me. However, I believe, eye-contact and physical touch are also important for health and developemnt in toddlers so that could be more problematic for some folk on the spectrum.

It's also my opinion that ASD parents generally do pretty well with ASD children.

I have found it really hard to be a parent. I think I still haven't come to terms with the whole parenting thing and my daughter is 24 years old.

I find it a strain to interact with most people regardless of age but somehow I cope.

People for many generations have lived in small spaces raising families. 900 sq.ft is not especially small.

Okay so maybe my mom is just finding excuses for my son's delay like she did for mine. Mine were hearing loss, being in a self contained classroom, being naive, not enough exposure to sarcasm, etc. Even my therapist I saw in high school said that parents like to blame things on their kids behavior meaning they find excuses for why it's not autism or any other disorder. So my mom thinks autism is environmental factors and that being sick a lot can push a kid to be on the spectrum because it interferes with their brain development and learning style and it being based on their environment they're in so my mom always made sure I was always with normal kids and not be in special ed full time or be in any special school and she didn't like me being in social skills training because I would mimic behaviors I would see so she didn't want me to grow up and act that way thinking it was normal behavior. I think in some cases it is true but it might not mean it's autism such as if you neglect a child severely from when they are a toddler, they will have autistic behavior but would it mean they are autistic because they were deprived from stimulation and social development, etc.

For me it was much easier to deal with infant. Difficulty started when he was about an year old. Infants are easy to deal with since it is easy to figure out what they need. Once they start to form self-consciousness it gets very difficult.

My son turned out to be not autistic at all, but he has delayed speech. I honestly think that it is because I was taking care of him excessively for too long before he started kinder garden.