No Boundries?

I was just watching a BBC programme concerning autism and how it affects development as well as the child and their family. The vast majority of the points raised were true and excellent, but there was one mother who was entirely ignorant of the way she should treat he sons' mild autism.

Being a mother of two autistic boys must be tough, no doubt about it, but there were a couple of things that this lady thought that cannot be excused by stress. Firstly, she seemed to feel that her son "feels no emotion" after he asked her a question. He asked what would happen to him if she died. She cleverly replied with "we have a wonderful family..." he said (in typical autistic tendency) "OK". She told this tale in an interview within the programme.

So far, so good, but it all went south from there. She went on to say that he felt no emotion about the plausible death of his mother. This, I know, is not true. She appears to think that autism is linked to feeling no emotion. She appears blind to the fact that autistic people feel emotions as well as the rest of the population, but they find it near impossible to express or portray emotion. Her son knew that all people die at one time or another, and he wasn't really asking who would take care of him, but rather, would they be able to do the job as well as a mother? I can give you this as a point of absolute truth: autistic people feel emotion, often more than 'neurologically typical' people (I shall discuss my reason for the quote marks in some other post). We often have outbursts of emotion. If something is wrong in our lives, we tend to get very angry, then break down and cry a lot. Only once these powerful and damaging emotions have been dealt with can we look at the problem with an eye to solve it as opposed to dealing with the effects it had emotionally. People who feel no emotion or compassion are not autistic, they're psychopathic.

The programme then showed the mother trying to deal with such an outburst. The child in question nearly ran from her grasp onto a road while a car was coming. She did not even tell him off. It may seem wrong for me to criticise her on not telling an autistic child off, but it is really quite daft that the boy nearly killed himself and was allowed to think that he was entitled to do so again if he felt the same as he did the first time. If an autistic child does wrong, you have to shout at them. One of the main things people notice about us is that we cannot pick up subtle hints about others' emotions. Therefore saying "don't do that again" in a voice near a whisper meant that "I'd really prefer it that you didn't" as opposed to "never do that again or the consequences will be massive". In this situation at least, the child needed - for their own safety - to be shouted at, to associate the road with bad behaviour. The child needed boundaries.

I could have forgiven the incident as a one-off, perhaps caused by the presence of the camera had a similar incident not happened again, and again. One of the boys had a meltdown after school, (stresses of the day) and kicked hit and pinched his mother. There is no warrant for this kind of behaviour in a child who is to be exposed to mainstream education. The mother did nothing save from quietly asking him to stop (while he screamed so loud you only heard her when he drew breath) and waving her arms to ward off his blows. That is ridiculous. She was well within her rights to yell over him and gently restrain him and stop him from attacking her. Even a slap on the bum to show that hitting others just because you are having a bad day is completely wrong and hitting your mother is inexcusable. The child would have cried, but then apologised and been better off because of the incident - they would understand that hitting was painful and would not do so again.

I understand as well as anyone that when you are autistic and you have a bad day, you have a really bad day. However, no matter how bad things have got over the last two years, I have never hit anybody in anger. I could even argue that it was longer than that as I was defending myself on the last occasion, but was doing so with hatred. In short, I was taught at a young age that violence towards others due to my anger was inexcusable and that helped shape me into a better person.
Let me know what you think of that lady and her methods of controlling her child's autism in the comments box. Other questions are more than welcome!

P.S: It is really worth noting that there was another mother of a more challenging autistic who was way better than the one I discussed here.