From The Diary Of A Mother Of An Autistic Child

My Son Is The Smartest! Last week, Milan, father of eight-year-old Rohan, called me to talk about Rohan. He told me that Rohan was in the autistic spectrum, which the family has recently discovered. Though he went to a regular school, the teachers often pushed him to the corner as he was a non-performer academically and often disturbed the class by blabbering irrelevant things during the class. Rohan doesn't have a peer group as his peers don't relate to him. Milan was obviously disturbed and honestly, whatever he told me didn't come as a surprise to me. I have gone through all that with Anshul. However, what I did find disturbing was that his frustration over Rohan's shortcomings and constant complaints from school often got vented out in form of anger towards his son. "My son is scared of me, my family is under lot of stress and we have no social life as we can't go out with Rohan anywhere. We never know when he will embarrass us," Milan told me in utte...

Accepting Autism It was in mid -2006  when my son, Anshul, started going to a play-school close to home. Like any other mom I was excited as well as anxious. The first few days were a racket, Anshul wailed as though I was throwing him into dark room. The teachers consoled me that he would be fine in a few days and asked my helper, Jassi, to stay with him at school till he settled down. There were other kids who were taking time to settle down too. A month later while the other kids had settled down, Anshul showed no sign of settling down. He wailed as if it was his first day at school. The principal told me that this wasn't normal. What she was even more concerned about was that he wouldn't respond till he was called 2-3 times. I had noticed that at home too. He would play with the same toy for hours together and wouldn't respond unless he was called multiple times. I always dismissed it thinking that he was in his own world. While his peers had started verbalising, Ansh...