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First, Happy Mother’s Day to every mother reading this and many more (my own included, of course)!
An essay by Robert Hughes in today’s Chicago Tribune is entitled What Autism Means to a Father and much of what he says strikes home with me as a parent. Hughes captures how a parent feels as he or […]
Last fall, I wrote about our difficulties getting swimtime in for Charlie at our YMCA pool in the later afternoon/early evenings, the time when he’s most ready to go. Our YMCA has three pools, two of which seem to be perpetually in use for the swim teams’ practices, adult lap swimming, or lessons. The third […]
It was about three years ago as Charlie was turning eight that I stopped carrying him. He was always big for his age and I developed a bit of a muscle in my left arm from holding him, balanced on my hip—-he weighs as much or more than me now and the babe-in-arms days are […]
The risk of having an autistic child is doubled if a parent has schizophrenia or if a mother has psychiatric problems (depression, personality disorders), according to a study published in Pediatrics. From Reuters via WNED.org:
The study of families in Sweden with children born between 1977 and 2003 involved 1,227 children diagnosed with autism. They were […]
Thinking about long-term housing and job needs for my son and also the matter of a special needs trust and a will and one has those moments of thinking (yes, ridiculously), pity one can’t live forever……..
Maybe you’d rather not know this, but you can take a Vitality Compass quiz over at Blue Zones to find […]
What gets “disclosed” and what does not was the issue at the center of the recently released document concerning Hannah Poling. I have “disclosure” and “transparency” of a slightly different sort on my mind right now. Charlie’s IEP meeting is today and, amid reading over documents and evaluations and forms, reading up on IDEA at […]
Nuala Gardner’s son Dale was born in 1988 and diagnosed with autism. In an essay in yesterday’s Guardian entitled The day I could no longer cope with my autistic son, she writes about how she contemplated suicide when her son was three years old but did not:
At the time I felt incredibly guilty about how […]
I was interviewed in the May issue of Working Mother magazine in an article by Jennifer Owens entitled The Quiet Struggle: From heartbreak to hope: moms of kids with special needs. The mothers in the article have special needs kids of varying diagnoses (some with autism) and ages (3 years old; adults). One mother […]
“And then the guilt starts again because I have brain-eating blood that attacked Hayden.”
So says Dee Cogdill of Benton, Ohio in the April 21st Cleveland Banner; Hayden is 11 years old and autistic. Cogdill and her husband, Ed, took Hayden to Johns Hopkins University to participate in a research study about maternal antibodies (more about […]
Laurie Duddy’s 8 year old twins, Tommy and Alex, both have severe autism. She—and a number of other parents of autistic children—are now studying for a master’s degree in Applied Behavior Analysis at Caldwell College in northern New Jersey. Today’s New York Times profiles the program and some of the parents who are studying […]
Autism mother gets on her soapbox.
Written by Kristina Chew, PhD [email] for b5media.
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