Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello, just wondering if there is anyone here who has an autism diagnosis and is a parent?
I received my diagnosis at the age of 35, it was liberating and a relief that there was a reason to what I felt was happening to me, now it is something I'm struggling with.
I am ccurrently experiencing a period of burn out and have taken leave from work as a result. The largest stressor and trigger unfortunately are my children. They are aged between 2 and 7 and typically with young children very demanding.
If anyone is in a similar situatio how do you manage? Taking leave from motherhood is not an option.
Thank you for reading. Afer many deep dives on google I think here is my best chance of finding some help.
Emma
I am autistic and the parent of two, now adult, children the elder has ADHD, the younger is autistic. I would say that both were always relatively well-behaved in public, but we had problems with tantrums (pre-school age) with the elder, and food pickiness, anxiety/attachment issues and poor sleeping (did not sleep through the night until 4 years old) with the younger. Both are bright academically.
My wife is neurotypical. When we married, my wife earned a bigger wage than me and continued working while our eldest was young. I would take them to the nursery attached to the university I worked at. However, when our younger child was born her lack of sleeping and over-attachment to my wife persuaded her to stop work. When our youngest started school my wife retrained as a teacher which helped with looking after the kids after school and in the holidays. Luckily, I had a job that was very autism-friendly, biomedical researcher, so I never had a problem with burn-out. Having children changed my wife's priorities away from a career towards bringing them up. I became the sole breadwinner for a number of years and the major breadwinner thereafter. We solved our problems by reverting to the old stereotype, I'm afraid.