Continuing The Fight For Autism Awareness
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you might've noticed the sudden decline of articles related to special needs parenting and generally about Miguel's autism journey. Don't worry, we're still continuing the fight towards autism awareness and acceptance. We're still advocating for kindness and fairness towards special needs individuals. Again, just a disclaimer that I'm not a parenting expert, more so an authority in special needs parenting. I'm just sharing our family's journey in the hopes that you will find inspiration and pick up some tidbits of knowledge from our experience.
Continuing The Fight For Autism Awareness
In terms of updates, it's already been over a year since Miguel started attending his LSEN class since we wanted to develop his social skills. He's still a work-in-progress and his development is still not as fast or quick as we wanted it to be. It's quite hard because we're playing catch up but, what can we do, it wasn't our fault that the pandemic caused the inevitable delays in Miguel's therapy. Again, we're just taking things a day at a time.
We also enrolled Miguel in a one-on-one tutorial class and we've seen some improvements when it comes to his motor skills and his hand-and-eye coordination. Miguel still requires maximal prompts and hand-over-hand assistance but at least he is showing some progress in terms of focus.
One worthy update that we'd like to share is that we were able to find a speech therapy class for Miguel a little over a month ago. I'm more excited to give an update on this area if Miguel shows great improvement in his speech.
On a further note, I feel grateful because of the understanding and words of encouragement that we received from our loved ones. We recently attended a mini-reunion and we were overwhelmed by the kind words from our relatives.
Just the same, for other people out there, what special needs parents like me want is understanding. Specifically, on the following topics, areas, or issues:
We don't want to be made to feel that our child is lacking.
We don't want to hear that we are bad parents.
We don't want to hear that we don't know how to discipline our children.
We don't want to hear comments that autism is just an invented condition because it's very real. Autism is not something that we just imagine.
We have more questions than answers. More often, we don't have the answers to your questions as well.
We may not always be at our best because we are worried for our own children at all times. Questions like "Who will take care of my child when I'm gone?" or "Will people hurt my child when I'm not around?" are always running in our heads.
We may be absent-minded on several occasions because of lack of sleep since our child was just crying the whole night.
We are happy for the achievements of other children but we sometimes can't help but feel sad about our situation.
We are always worried financially because therapies are costly. I have to work double-time just to earn extra for my son's school fees.
The list actually goes on but these are just the immediate things that pop up in my head. Special needs families go through a lot each day. Again, kindness and understanding are all we ask from other people.