Stop, and Think About How Your Autistic Child Feels

Recently I wrote a piece stating that we need to have more compassion for the parents of autistic kids, and I stand by that, but that doesn’t mean that parents don’t need to do some inner work and learn how to change some of their behaviors. When we act poorly as parents we need to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. Today I am weary because of the many meltdown videos on TikTok that I witness that carry variations on the tagline “No one talks about the true face of autism”. Firstly, that’s such a damaging gross thing to say about autistic people and secondly, it seems like the parents who post these videos never stop talking about meltdowns and how they affect them. In every one of these videos the autistic child or dependent, high support needs adult is in a meltdown, and instead of helping them, the parent picks up a camera and decides to, perhaps unintentionally — but not always — humiliate their children instead. I am not here to roast these parents. I am writing this to implore them to look at their own behavior in these scenarios and to question what they are doing and their motives for doing it. I am asking them to consider how their child feels. <a href="https://medium.com/@smcnett/stop-and-think-about-how-your-autistic-child-feels-e8d2a6d8acdd">Learn More</a>