9:20am July 19, 2014

On the Topic of Autistic Parents

Just because it seems to be banging around the ActuallyAutistic tag.

My dad is autistic and he is awesome. He is literally the best dad anyone could ever wish for. My NT sister also completely agrees with this, as does my mother. Nobody ever doubts that my dad is a great dad.

My gran is also, most likely, autistic and she raised my dad as a single mother in the 70’s and 80’s. She is also awesome.

Terrible parents are universal, as are good parents. The problem with people with disability is that, if they’re not a good parent, it’s easy to blame the disability. I mean, what else could it be right? It’s not as if non-disabled people are ever bad parents, right? /sarcasm

Having kids has always been something I’ve wanted in the future. Having an autism diagnosis should not make me feel as if that want is now somewhere between difficult and impossible, because I’ve seen it done.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100302131343/http://cap.autistics.org/

I created that website, that unfortunately didn’t go much of anywhere, because the only information on autistic parents out there was run by this self-selecting little group of people who wouldn’t let autistic people into their group, and had self-diagnosed their abusive parents with autism in order to say that autistic people made terrible parents. And they wanted to influence policy and custody decisions, yet claimed to be “just a support group where people vent, so you can’t expect us to be positive”. Can’t have it both ways.

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