One mom’s journey.
You know, it seems like everywhere I look, I’m hearing about autism in children. There’s a mention nearly every time I pick up a magazine, whether it’s a parenting magazine or not. It’s all over the internet too, of course, and I was just checking out this ebook called Getting Adam Back, which chronicles one woman’s battle to get her son the treatment he needed for autism and childhood epilepsy.
It looks like one of the book’s main focuses is on drug free and alternative treatments, and how they changed her son’s life. The cover image shows her son smiling, happy, and looking pretty darned “normal” at his high school graduation. I love seeing stuff like that. It gives me hope for Pablo’s future. Because autism is a spectrum disorder, there are kids who are basically normal, and then there are kids who are severely disabled. That’s one of the scariest, most frustrating things to me, as a mother of an autistic toddler – the not KNOWING. Not knowing whether Pablo will be one of those kids to go on and lead a normal life or if he’ll struggle every day.
I’m on the fence when it comes to people who are practically evangelical about how they “cured” their children of autism. I hate reading about the controversy over mercury in immunizations, and how they’re the cause of autism. Maybe it’s true in some cases, but not in our case. The dreaded MMR shot, which supposedly is the culprit for “making” kids autistic, isn’t given until 12 months, and we knew long before then that there was something wrong with Pablo. Our experience with diet changes has also been pretty unimpressive. We tried doing the gluten (wheat) and casein (dairy) free diet for about a month and a half, and really didn’t see any remarkable changes in our boy. Certainly not enough to warrant continuing to push nasty, overpriced food to an already picky eater. I almost think it’s possible that Pablo just is who he is, and we need to figure out how to work with what we’ve got. I DO believe that the earlier you can start treating these kids, through occupational and speech therapy, the better, and that’s why I’m a HUGE advocate of early childhood intervention. And of course, I’m open minded – I’ll try anything and see if it works. I just don’t believe there’s any one method of helping these kids that’s going to be a guaranteed, across-the-board cure for all kids. That’s why it’s important to me, as a parent of an autistic child, to explore every avenue.
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Laura, also known as LaLaGirl, is the mother of a teenager and two young sets of twins. She's happily married, loves living in Colorado, and writes almost daily about married life, raising multiples, and parenting a child with autism.
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October 11th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
((hug) Pablo is one lucky child to have you as a mama!!!