How Our Son Responded When We Told Him About His Autism Diagnosis

Our son is fully aware of his autism diagnosis and has been for years. As we’ve learned and he’s learned, we’ve made a habit of sharing our knowledge together as much as possible (and as appropriate).

After we received his diagnosis, we considered how to tell him, and while we were still digesting the news, one of my colleagues arranged a lunch date with me, herself and her adult son on the spectrum.

When talking about how to tell our son about the diagnosis, his advice was: Don’t wait.

We found ourselves stumbling into the conversation only six weeks after we received the diagnosis.

My husband and I were not yet ready to have the discussion, but it became clear that our son needed to know after he announced he “was stupid” because he “kept getting sent out of the classroom” because he “couldn’t do the work.”

I hated his coming to that heartbreaking conclusion. The conversation had to take place right away because our child was in pain and we needed to do something about it.

I think we did pretty well at not using too many technical terms, and we emphasized all the good things that came with the way his brain is put together.

We were specific, as much as we could be in the early stages of our understanding, about the gifts and challenges he experienced.

We also talked about how we would work as a team on his challenges, giving him tools and strategies to eventually manage them on his own.We talked about his strengths, about people on television or famous people who also have autism and the successes they have experienced. He liked the idea that Einstein may have had autism.

Most importantly, he seemed relieved to know his struggles at school weren’t because he lacked something and instead stemmed from coming at things from a different direction.

It has been four years almost to the day since that talk, and when I prepared to write this article I asked him what he remembered of the conversation.

“Nothing,” he answered. “It is like I have always known that I had autism.” I like to think that means we did our job well.

And for us the conversation doesn’t really end. Like all important parent-child conversations, it isn’t a sit-down-one-weekend-and-you’re-done kind of thing.

As he grows and his developmental understanding becomes more sophisticated, with every challenge and every success, we try to weave it all into a cohesive tapestry that makes sense to him.

Our goal is 360-degree knowledge of himself that is based in self-love and constantly-reinforced total acceptance.

Follow this journey on Autism Mom.

The Mighty is asking the following: How would you describe your disability, disease or mental illness to a child? If you’ve done this before, tell us about that moment and the child’s reaction. If you’d like to participate, please send a blog post to community@themighty.com. Please include a photo for the piece, a photo of yourself and 1-2 sentence bio. Check out our Submit a Story page for more about our submission guidelines.