Home is where your kids can be happy…

About 3 years ago, my wife and I were called into school for a special meeting during which my daughter’s teacher first said the word autism to us. We grappled with it. Our girl? She’s eccentric, sure, but does it require a formal label, we thought?

The next year of school, real school, when kids start reading and doing math, and all those important things, is when she began to crash and burn. Our daughter simply couldn’t keep up with what was expected of her in a classroom of 30 kids, and it began to take its toll. Rather than acknowledging and addressing possible sensory overload, or differences in processing information, the school we had enrolled her in chose to view her obstacles as disciplinary problems and quickly initiated a color-coded scale which was meant to dictate her behavior for the day, green being compliant, and red being disagreeable, needing to be sent home. Low and behold, our daughter spent a lot of time at home that year. Shortly thereafter, she was formally diagnosed with Autism.

My wife and I spent more nights than we wish we’d had cursing the teachers, the institution, the society which was surrounding us. It felt like we were completely alone in the struggle to give our amazing, beautiful, smart, talented daughter the educational experience she deserved. Even worse, it seemed like she was making associations with the concept of school in general as being something blanketly bad and impossible. How would we ever break this?

For about a year, my wife and I had been discussing moving out of The Hague, Netherlands, where all this had transpired, which is odd because The Hague touts itself as one of the most inclusive and forward minded cities in the country where we live, but in action it seemed to be the exact opposite. My wife comes from the south of the country, down between Belgium and Germany in an area called Limburg, largely considered to be the opposite of The Hague’s open minded mentality, but full of open space, and most importantly full of my wife’s family, whom we were sorely missing.

We knew it would be a more sensory friendly place for our daughter, but we didn’t know which would come first, a school or a house. This chicken and egg situation went on for months until we chose a specialized school for her in the city of Maastricht which had been highly recommended to us by the parents of another child with autism.

We enrolled her, we packed up our lives, and this past summer, we moved 3 hours south to give our girl a new start. It wasn’t an easy transition. It took a long time to undo the trauma instilled in her by her previous school experience, but a few weeks ago, she walked out of school, got into our car, and calmly told us that in honor of all her merits that week, she had been appointed the “Hero Of The Week.” It was no big deal to her, but to us it was such a triumph. Since then, she’s been empowered and excited to go to school and talks about her teachers as her friends and confidants, as opposed to her teachers in The Hague, one of whom she was absolutely afraid of, and the other who insisted she stayed home on the days she taught because she couldn’t deal with her.

I’m certain there will be times where my daughter’s autism will overwhelm her as she deals with new situations, but for now we’re so incredibly grateful to have made this choice which impacts her so profoundly, which gives her the gift of success and confidence, and the ability to have space in her head to be the amazing person she is, without being sensorily overloaded or exhausted by day-to-day tasks.

Being the parent of an Autistic kid is a journey, but I truly believe we’ll all be better off for giving them the lives they deserve. The world will become a better place because of their perspectives, ideas, and actions.

Thank you, Rich, for creating a place where I finally feel comfortable sharing all of this.

1 comment

My Ausome Kid

skool.com/myausomekid

A place for parents who have a child on the autism spectrum. A safe place to share our challenges, share our wins, and grow together as parents.

Leaderboard (30-day)