Parenting Autism
Shannon Schillings
COM/156

Parenting Autism
Children are a blessing and should always be seen as such regardless of how they are born. However rearing children always comes with a degree of difficulty, they are not born with a handbook telling us how and what to do. Could you see yourself having and loving a child with a disability such as autism? Raising an autistic child is a challenge for families, since the child cannot show emotion or express themselves, however with help and patients it is achievable. Having children is a struggle all on its own, however having a child with a disability, such as autism, makes it an even more challenging endeavor. Mothers, who carry the child for nine months, tend to be the one who take on the majority of the responsibility in terms of raising the children and who also have a tendency to blame themselves for how a child is born. When a child is diagnosed with autism it can cause a mother to feel a variety of emotions, anger and grief happening to be the strongest among them (Lutz, Patterson, & Klein, 2012). As one mother, named Suzanna states “I was lost, blaming myself or figuring out who to blame, I was angry” (Lutz, Patterson, & Klein, 2012, p.209). These among an array of other emotions also plague the entire family, where the mom is usually the rock and gets affected the most. Fathers also suffer in many ways when dealt this type of diagnosis. They have a tendency to undergo extreme stress because of the many financial burdens that surface for medical and behavioral treatment, in which the father of the family is usually responsible for. The emotional stress that is now put on the family also has a huge impact (Cowan, 2010). On the other hand the mothers and fathers are not the only ones in the family who have a hard time coping with a child who has autism; siblings are a whole different