By Charissa Bates 
“I’m trying to figure your kiddo out. Just when I think I do, the same approach doesn’t work the next time. He’s like a puzzle.” We heard this at a conference. Our best parenting hacks and attempts didn’t always have the anticipated results.
“He’s not trying to be defiant,” I said, tears in my eyes, to a group of educators helping my child. Sometimes it seemed that way, but I knew his behaviors weren’t rooted in defiance. His stress often came off as disobedience. His inability to focus for long periods led to multiple unfinished assignments. Papers went missing. Jackets were left all over the school. Hyperfocusing on space and black holes became part of our everyday conversations.
We had known for a long time that our child had ADHD. Living in the Midwest, winter was often costly for us. You need a good pair of waterproof gloves—but a kid with ADHD simply cannot keep track of two gloves. The ADHD hacks mostly worked at home, but ADHD alone didn’t account for all the challenges we faced.
“I’m not his therapist. I’m his mother,” I told several professionals. Being a mother removes your professional lenses. We asked educators about autism but were told his academic giftedness, being young for his grade, and his social skills left that diagnosis off the table. Or so we were told. My son had an amazing way of finding kids to play with. Friendships with younger kids came easily; making friends with kids his age was typically more difficult. He’d get excited about a topic and talk and talk and talk—hardly noticing whether the other child was interested or not.
“We’re going to the pool today,” I told my kids one day. An unplanned activity. My son broke down crying saying he didn’t want to go but he also didn’t want to stay home. He loved the pool, by the way. He didn’t love not being prepared for the outing. It didn’t make sense to me. The pool is fun. The pool is a privilege. The pool is somewhere you enjoy. But unexpected plans weren’t comforting to him. The pool outing wasn’t exciting—it was anxiety-producing.
Then one day, we had a big assessment of my child’s needs. He was struggling, and we needed answers on how to help him be successful. The ADHD diagnosis, the anxiety diagnosis, the learning disability in writing—none of those shocked us. The autism diagnosis? That didn’t shock us either. We had always known in our hearts that he was amazingly different. This diagnosis didn’t change how we saw him. But we hoped it would change how others treated him when he got stuck. We hoped it would help them see him through a new lens, one that showed how his brain was simply overwhelmed by the typical day-to-day expectations.
We worried about how our son would take the diagnosis. Would he be upset? Would he think everyone was wrong? Would he be embarrassed? He wasn’t any of those things. He accepted it. I almost wonder if he found comfort in understanding why some tasks were difficult for him.
We told him the doctor said she thought he would be successful in life, and he responded in the best way possible. He said he thought he’d be successful in life too. With the knowledge of professionals, we as parents are learning how to raise a child with autism, and with the love we have for our son, he will be successful in life. Success may look different, but it’s in the eye of the beholder. As parents, we can show him we see success every day as he works through hard things.
