Making Her Feel Safe and Happy
My daughter, Kya is twelve and on the autism spectrum.
Like most parents I wanted my daughter to get an education because that was what I thought was important and let me be very clear, reading and writing and an education are very important, but when you take a step back and live a different kind of life than the average typical person things shift on what is important.
Self- care, self awareness and independence is most important for my daughter.
My daughter has to know life skills. She has to be able to get her own cup of water. She has to learn what money is, how to pay for things. How to exist in a world that is not designed for her.
In three short months my 12-year-old becomes a teenager and I’m not sure I’m ready for it but here we come!
Over the past year my daughter has made enormous strides towards all of the things I’ve talked about. Her biggest strides have been in her self confidence, her language and her overall awareness of this crazy world.
We have taken a step back from school and entered into the homeschooling world. It has given my daughter a relief she desperately needed.
I’ve always said in this autism life things work until they don’t and my main goal for Kya is making her feel safe and happy. And I won’t sacrifice that for anyone or anything.
She’s been asking to go to the bank so yesterday I took her and we opened up her very own bank account. She was pretty excited in the bank, happily stimming, and repeating bank.
She skipped in, happy as a little clam, and it was a pretty big moment for me as well. We have a lot of work to do on money and understanding but this is a great first step.
I cannot wait to see what this 13th year has in store for my incredible daughter because she is just scratching the surface on what she can do.
As a boy with an autism spectrum disorder [not to mention high sensitivity and resultant also-high ACE score], my Grade 2 teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped.
I cannot recall her abuse in its entirety, but I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall.
Luckily, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me. … But rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’.
Thus, I feel that school teachers should receive mandatory ASD training. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated).
It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. And how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase.