Choices

Choices are funny things. When I was young, it seemed that choices were very black and white. Will I have chocolate or vanilla ice cream? Will I watch Scooby Doo or Superfriends? Will I play with Jonathon or Travis today? Because I was a simpler person, being a little kid, I had simpler choices.Any adult, I think, will agree with me that choices are just not so simple anymore. It seems that about 100 times per day I am in a position to make a choice, and that there are not just two options to go with. To draw an analogy, choices or 'tests' in life progress from true/false, to multiple choice, to word problems, to essay questions. I sincerely hope they don't become too much more complicated than they are now, because the next logical step in my analogy is doctoral thesis, and I frankly don't want to have to deal with any of those.For parents of children with special needs of any and all kinds (in my case, I have an autistic son), the predictable set of choices you will be faced with looks different than those of parents with "typical" kids. In our case, the set of choices we dealt with, in retrospect, followed a clear chronology, though to be sure this chronology is not true for all parents in a similar situation.Though I present our choices in X vs. Y format, this is not intended to imply there are only two choices, as I explained above.

Acceptance vs. Denial
When we received Jason's Dx, we entered uncharted, for us, territory. We frankly had no idea what to do first. We knew we wanted to help Jason in any and every possible way. We did not know how to do this. Jason at that point responded to us very little and had no working communication skills other than pulling us in the general direction of things he wanted and crying when something was wrong. We had no choice but to rely on "experts" and literature. My wife and I are not "joiners", so support groups and the like were not at the top of our list.Any and all information we gleaned at that time, though, was to be viewed in the light we cast on it. We had a choice to accept the Dx, or to deny that our son had been Dx'd correctly. I do not remember a time that we flat-out denied the fact that Jason was autistic. I do, however, remember that "curing" his autism was something we viewed as a goal. For those of us in the Western world, it is difficult to accommodate a situation that does not have a cure - that some brilliant scientist, therapist, surgeon, or inventor can put a Silver Bullet into the problem and *snap* make it disappear. So, we accepted Jason's autism and set out to help him in any way, the favored way being to find a cure.

Cure vs. Treatment
I am the Thinker, and my wife is the Doer in our family. I took my role seriously, and began to research autism. Of course, I went to the internet. I spent about 6 months looking at all recommended treatments and cures for autism. I parsed and supplied the info to my wife (and my parents, who were a huge help through all of this), who initiated the plans. One month after Jason's diagnosis, he was enrolled in an behavior modification/skill acquisition program (I describe it thusly because, though the agency used some ABA principles, it is in no way Lovaasian-ABA). We began to research support/funding available from the state. We had an appointment set up with a DAN! doctor. We had instituted treatments, and were working on finding a cure. I heard about mercury, and began to grow angry. I read about chelation, and began to grow hopeful. Jason would be saved!A little later in the process, a few weeks before meeting with a DAN! doc (after a bad experience with another one we had been referred to), I typed into Google for the first time "Autism Blog". I found Left Brain/Right Brain. As I read, I felt like I was on the verge of an epiphany. Not only, according to the author of the blog and all available links, were the proposed cures being sold not effective, they were harmful in many cases! Not only did acceptance of Jason's autism mean not denying it, but it also meant that I should accept Jason for who he is and not try to "de-autism" him! And this wasn't just one guy talking - it was a whole community. And most of them were autistic adults! Wow. I had never (knowingly) talked to an autistic adult before. It turns out, I realized, there are many, many autistic adults who would not take a cure if it was offered. This resulted in a whole new paradigm of thought. I have said before that we would have arrived at this conclusion on my own, we just reached it a lot faster with the help of the Neurodiversity community online.

Overparenting vs. Underparenting
Now that we knew a cure was not going to be found (though there were certainly plenty of people trying to sell us one), we had to decide - what is best for Jason? We settled into the following group of approaches:
Behavior Modification Therapy: As I stated above, this is not really ABA. There is some record-keeping done after sessions (not during). There is no negative reinforcement. It focuses on skill acquisition, parent-training, and communication skill development. Jason loves to do it, and his therapists have become some of our closest friends.
Hippotherapy: We take Jason weekly to ride horses at a very special place called R.E.I.N.S. Horseback riding is said to improve gross and fine motor coordination, provide an opportunity to "bond" with the horse, provide self-confidence with the skill acquisition, and numerous other benefits. To my knowledge, none of these are proven to be true. We don't care, as Jason loves it, and its a very healthy hobby to have.
SLT: Jason's speech was very slow to develop, and is still very atypical at age 5.

That's it. Jason's progress over the years is very comparable to the anecdotal stories we hear from all areas of the autism community, especially those who pursue some of the more extreme biomedical treatments. When deciding what to do to help Jason, we always think to ourselves "When Jason is an adult, will he look back and believe this was something we did TO him, or did FOR him?" This feels like a good approach. This way, we are doing everything we can to help him grow and progress (avoiding underparenting) while not reacting too strongly to his autism that we put him in situations that are unhealthy for him physically or psychologically (avoiding overparenting). By carefully listening to autistic adults, this is not all that hard to do.

"Equal" vs. "Special"
Probably our most current decision-making is based on how Jason fits in with the family, our and his friends, and general society. One way to look at this is in how he is treated and what expectations of him and others that we have - is he "equal" or "special". How we deal with various situations ranging from misbehavior to achievement is dictated by this difference. There is too much to discuss on this topic to include in this post, so I will leave it with this brief statement, and discuss it further next time I write: Jason, like every human being, is Special. The fact that he is autistic is simply the most easy-to-identify aspect of his special nature. But the goal is for him to be perceived as an equal by his peers. His autistic nature does not place him above or below anyone - it simply is part of his makeup. He is both Special and Equal.

These are just a few of the choices we made (though they are some of the biggest ones) over the past 2.5 years. We hope we've gotten it right so far, and hope to be right more than wrong in the future.