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Home › Articles › Special Needs Kids › How to Survive Autism

How to Survive Autism

A Been-there, Done-that Guide
for Parents

By Barbara Fischkin

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We also have been lucky, extraordinarily so, to find helpers and teachers, at home and at school, who have lightened the load considerably. Lucky, also, to find a wonderful summer sleep away camp for disabled kids. And although there have been years when we have been broke, something always comes through: A book contract, a bonus, an inheritance, a great financial advisor, a house that's value has soared through the years. Who is my best friend? There are days that I think her name is "Home Equity Loan."

Having explained and confessed all of the above, I think that I am in a position to provide a few tips, particularly to young parents. People who are where I was that day 14 years ago when my husband and I walked out of the Yale Child Clinic crying. Since Dan's autism was so unusual and so severe, I suspect that most of the parents reading this have been given a better prognosis than we got. But we acknowledge that the prognoses, better or worse, generally seem unbearable.

And so what follows is a short but, I hope, pungent, guide to survival for parents of kids with disabilities. I have tried to modify it so that it works in some way for people of all income levels, those who have not been as lucky as us financially, or for who don't have it in their hearts or in their more practical minds to be as foolishly rash as we are with money. To the parents who are poor, eitherof funds or family support, I tip my hat with great, great admiration. To be honest, I don't know how some people do this at all. But if anything I say below can help those families, then I am humbled. They are the ones who need help from our government, from their relatives, from anyone.

So here goes my modest list of tips that make up my "survival guide." It is not foolproof and perhaps repetitive. (Well who among us does not need to be figuratively clobbered over the head a few ties?) Perhaps it is fantastical too; perhaps some of these suggestions are simply undoable in certain circumstances, Still, I believe that at any rate it has served us as a reminder that this boat the one of being a parent with a kid with autism is a very, very hard place to be. No heroes, merely survivors.

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