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Diagnosed with Autism, Now What?

As far as I can tell, every parent who has just heard the diagnoses of their child goes through the following stages:

1. Disbelief
2. Shock (usually involves a lot of crying)
3. The “What is Autism?” stage
4. and then finally.. “What can we do to help our child?”

I was totally blindsided by the diagnoses, and I honestly knew nothing about the Autism Spectrum, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, or any of the similar disorders. So what did we do first? We went to Books a Million and bought every book we could find on the subject (I still haven’t read some of them). My wife and I sat at home that evening reading everything that we could find. The scariest of all of the sources… were on the Net.

We found soo many websites on the Internet, but a lot of the “resources” that we found were written by parents who believed in some of the more extreme alternative treatments (chelation for example). The treatments sounded very scary and dangerous, and it made me regret going to the net for information so soon.

The more that we read, the more we realized that something was definitely wrong. We were shocked by how many of the stories sounded like they could have been written by us. We learned a lot that night, but truthfully, the more that we learned, the more questions we came up with. Here are a few of our favorite books that we purchased during the “What is Autism” stage:

• Overcoming Autism by Koegal and LaZebnik
  
• Facing Autism by Lynn M. Hamilton

As I said in the beginning, after finding out what the Autism Spectrum is, parents go into the “What can we do to help our Child” stage. This is unfortunately where we all hit a wall. We’ve been given the diagnoses, and then sent home with little information. Alone and confused, we feel lost and we really don’t know what to do next.

We ended that night by making a pact:

We’re never going to put ourselves in the situation where we look back and think, “We could have done more.” We are going to get him as much help as we can, no matter what it costs our family (time, resources, stress, or money).

If any parents out there are at this stage right now, and would like someone to talk to, please contact us! We aren’t experts, but you wouldn’t believe how helpful it is to talk to someone who’s “been there.”

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