World Autism Awareness Day: How to parent an autistic child?

Representational image. (Photo: Nathan Anderson via Unsplash)

Debashis Paul is a professional management and marketing strategy consultant who has led several public service campaigns but, before everything else, he’s a father. He’s tuned his parenting strategies with that of his child’s growth indicators. Ensured his firstborn, Noel, grows and realises his true potential in an educational environment which doesn’t consider neurodiversity as a “disorder”. Patience, compassion, respect, and trust have been key in this journey. And that he carefully jots down in his deeply personal, articulate, and moving book, I Have Autism and I Like to Play Good Bad Tennis: Vignettes and Insights from My Son’s Life (Westland Non-Fiction, an imprint of Westland Books, 2023), that is as much about Noel as it is about parenting, replete with recommendations for raising a non-neurotypical child in a resource-strapped and discriminatory society.

April 2 is a good time to pick up the book, it is observed as World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD), instituted by the UN in 2007. And the theme this year is “Transformation: Toward a Neuro-Inclusive World for All”.

“The general awareness and understanding most people have for [a congenitally disabled person] is pitiably low and unfortunately marked by a noticeable lack of empathy,” writes Paul in the introduction to his book.

Often the world around you, if you have a special child, extend shallow sympathies, seeing such children as a curse and a burden. In my family, too, there are two children who are on the neurodivergent spectrum. Insensitivity makes people wish them death, too. Education helps though. At times, you come across people like Paul and his family, albeit they are few and far between, who’d let their child experience life, learn and grow at their own pace and liking. The world at large, however, is anything but rosy. The ableist society others the differently-abled, seen as an outcast, an anomaly.

There are such parents too, thanks to social conditioning, who are embarrassed to get their autistic child to interact with the world — though sometimes that could be out of the sheer need to protect them from harm’s way. But shame and discrimination are the wheels an ableist society runs on. And that’s exactly why it’s necessary to take a leaf from Paul’s book, to begin a journey of understanding and compassion.

Paul asks his son “Which is the one activity that you like most?”, Noel’s ready response was “Coming back home”. More than associating that place with warmth and safety, for a neurodivergent child, it is a familiar space — a structure that’s deeply embedded in their minds. And structure plays a crucial role in parenting an autistic child, Paul notes. He shares several incidents that help laypersons learn how even a degree of separation in an instruction, setting, or discussion from what it was intended to be can unsettle an autistic person. For example, for Noel, any advanced music system wouldn’t have gotten him excited as he still remembered beautiful melodies emanating from a car’s CD player. It has to be that and nothing else.

And how “transitioning” from one environment to the other isn’t as swift as it’s with a neurotypical person. These are crucial lessons for everybody, not just parents. Parenting isn’t easy, all of us need to play a part in building a safe and inclusive society for parents to give wings to their children. For that, all of us need to learn the art of “proactive handling of distress and all kinds of behavioural issues associated with disappointments” while interacting with an autistic person.

After reading Paul’s book and the super resourceful appendices towards the end, I couldn’t help wonder, aren’t these things basic? Everyone should treat a child with empathy, respect, and love. Everyone should provide a chance to a person willing to do something. To cross the barricade of social class and allow our children to learn from one and all, like Noel does in a bakery. However, as they say, common sense is far less common. How do countries and societies, that don’t meet the basic, meet the human at the basic, minimal level, hope to grow, develop and become world-class examples and superpowers? Time we looked within and rewired our ways of being. The book not only reinforces several recommendations for good parenting — which builds good citizens and societies — but also provides a language to communicate better with autistic children and people.