3 yr old autistic boy banned from public transport. VENT!

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Hello Solvejg

I also live in Australia and I agree the public transport is bad at times, if not all the time especially the train system (aka cityrail). I don't know about you but sometimes crowds scare me, they get overwhelming and I understand where you are coming from. Poor handling from the bus company, it should of been dealt with more professionally btw

while I agree the professionalism of both the driver and the company are highly at question, the simple message of what they are trying to get across is not. it is not anyone else job to treat you specially because of your children's situation in life, you must still constrain them when they need constrain and discipline them when they need discipline. Having your child run around flapping his arms and jump up and down yelling at a bus stop isn't proper behavior (NT or other wise) nor is allowing them to bum rush the back door of a bus so they can grab what they assume and you let them be entitled too as "their seats". They are young children and you need to accompany them at all times in public until they are old enough mentally and physically to act in a safe, socially acceptable manner. If you want to let them run around, yelling and flapping their arms in a playground, at your house, in your office, in their rooms etc that's fine and I more then agree with the decision as I believe such things promote creativity and openness that seems to be lacking in general society today. But allowing said behavior on a public road, at a bus stop which is near a curb where cars are traveling at 30+mph is NOT okay, nor is it okay on a public transit system such as a bus. Allowing your kid to run amock just to prevent a meltdown isn't a good reason either at some point in his life he is going to have to understand that not everything is going to go his way, if he learns that melting down seems to solve the problem and gets him what he wants then you are doing him a disservice when he starts schooling and is surely going to run into problems of not always getting his way.

They did not ban your son from all public transport, they simply stated that your son is too young to be allowed on the bus on his own for any period of time, which I totally agree with, at 3yrs old i highly doubt ANY child no matter how gifted should be left for even a second on their own on any type of public transit.

I see that you're in Australia. My advice to you is never take autistic children on a Metro Bus. Those are like are smaller redder version of The Knight Bus. I took it once and it felt like it was trying to enter hyperspace and it was jumpy and crowded. They actually have less seats than regular buses. It was meltdown central for me. I had to get off early to keep my sanity.

Yeah the services here do suck. I hate catching buses and avoid it when I can. Sorry you had to go through it and I'm not a parent but I think it's best to keep your kids close to you so nothing happens to them. There's many accidents around buses. It was horrible how the bus driver yelled at you and that your son was banned if not restrained properly. There's still a lot of ignorance out there and people think most uncontrollable kids are just bad kids or that they have lazy parents. But I know that isn't always true. I was once the autistic child that wandered off.

Do you know of Autism Rainbow Services? You should tell them about this.

Well, if someone steps in front of me suddenly and I can't stop in time, we collide and fall down I might yell at them for being inconsiderate jerks. But if it turned out they were blind or had severe vision problems I'd be the jerk if I then kept piling on after finding out why the incident happened. Sometimes we make allowances for people's limitations, like not screaming at old people to hurry up. I'm with her, yelling at people after they explain is a d**k thing to do.

Im with you. I am a mother and I can see the situation in my head clearly, I dont understand why anyone is NOT seeing what happened unless they are not a parent. Parents of NTs and AS children do this ALL. THE. TIME. It is NOT unusual to let your kids go ahead of you a short distance while you take care of something. A bus is only so big, her kids were not going a mile from her, nor could they go far, its a bus. You can see everyone while standing at the front. And who cares if they sit in the same seats every day? When we go to church we sit in the same pew. We call it our pew. When a visitor sits there and we have to move my kids say "Someone sat in our pew?" They are NT so there is no melt downs. But I can imagine this would be difficult for a child with AS.

I think everyone is reading far to much into what she could have done wrong instead of what the bus driver and company blatently did wrong.