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Help! My son doesn't want to fly

sas

Hi everyone,

I'm new here, but my son's journey with autism has been a challenging one, particularly since the pandemic. Towards the end of 2020, as my son turned 13, he began adolescence, which resulted in low mood, and high anxiety about Covid. This wasn't helped by my own health issues, which required surgery in November of that year.

Since then, it has been a slow crawl back to a sense of normality. Part of this included flying. We've all flown as a family numerous times in the past, to Malaysia, where my inlaws live. The last trip was in 2019.

Since then, he's now a teenager, with a lot of anxiety and low mood. We attempted to fly to Malaysia in November last year with my inlaws, as they came over here last summer. However, he insisted on everyone going back with them. I couldn't do that, as my daughter is at secondary school, while I had no leave left.

We instead thought we could head off in August this year, so booked tickets back in January. We then booked a short break in Ireland last April, to help him prepare for the long haul flight. He managed very well, but was clearly masking his anxiety, particularly the take off and landing. We did experience meltdowns in Ireland, and after our return to the UK.

I'm writing this, having had to cancel the August tickets, as he had made it clear he had no intention of wanting to fly. It would seem the issues he experienced with the Ireland flights, have made him even more anxious about flying long-haul.

My wife and I are now depressed at the prospect of not ever flying again. Which is hard to accept, as my wife has family members who - due to their age - cannot keep flying to the UK forever. Can anyone offer advice on how best to resolve this problem? I read a few other postings on a similar subject, but wanted advice that felt more specific to our situation.

I look forward to seeing what opinions and advice will be forthcoming. Thanks in advance.

Parents

  • Flying/travel is not necessary and there is no reason why your son should do it if he doesn't want to.

    How does him not flying prevent you both from never flying again? Does he require 24/7 care from you? Even if that's the case, surely one of you could go abroad while the other stays home.

    sas said:
    It would seem the issues he experienced with the Ireland flights, have made him even more anxious about flying long-haul.

    I experience the same thing in that being pushed into doing something I don't want to do makes it much more difficult to do the same thing again. For example, being pushed to make phone calls when I was younger has meant that I now can't use a phone at all. I appreciate that most anxiety advice says the opposite, that exposure reduces anxiety, but I don't think it works that way for autistic people. Every experience of a difficult thing adds to the bad memories and associations until it becomes impossible.

  • in reply to MrSolo

    Exposure is always about making small steps a lot of times, autistic or not. It sounds like your phone call experience shows that it was approached in the wrong way, not that exposure doesn't work on us. 

    Like I've had issues with public transport, and the steps start with just going one stop or something really small. You wouldn't start with an hour long train journey (or however long flying to Ireland takes) because that's huge. 

  • in reply to T

    What worked for me with public transport was avoiding it completely for about a decade. Sometimes that works - if I don't do something for years and years I kind of forget I was scared of it and I can approach it fresh. It needs a really long period of avoiding the thing though.

Reply
  • in reply to T

    What worked for me with public transport was avoiding it completely for about a decade. Sometimes that works - if I don't do something for years and years I kind of forget I was scared of it and I can approach it fresh. It needs a really long period of avoiding the thing though.

Children
  • in reply to T

    I don't form long-term memories of experiences if they are okay. So no amount of good experiences is useful in convincing me not to be scared of something. But one bad experience will still be fresh in my mind a year later. It's only once enough time has gone by that it feels like it happened to someone else that I can face the thing again.

  • in reply to MrSolo

    That's an interesting approach! Personally, the longer I leave something, the bigger of a mountain it seems. Like I didn't use public transport for more than 2 years after the start of the covid plague and it seemed scarier and scarier as the memories of doing it and being okay became more distant.