When you have a child on the autism spectrum, but also have other children who either are not on the spectrum or are high functioning and need little assistance it is hard balancing family life. Many children on the autism spectrum require more assistance and guidance to flourish. They also many times need more structure and attention. This makes it really hard to balance things within the family and still make sure that you are spending time nurturing your other children.
My youngest, and to some extent eldest, child requires extra assistance and demands lots of attention. This frequently frustrates their brother. In order to balance this, both my husband and I try to do things one on one with our middle son. One of his favorite activities is playing video games, so every few days I make sure I ask him if he would like to play a game together. Most of the time he takes me up on the offer and I try to spend at least 1-2 hours just playing a game with him, while chatting while we play. This also helps me to find out how things are going and to show interest in things he likes to talk about.
It is also hard when one child misbehaves when you have plans to do something. We try very hard not to penalize the others when one child is acting up. We also cannot give in to the bad behavior think it’s okay to do this (which we definitely don’t want) or they may continue to misbehave and ruin the activity for everyone. So in cases like this, we usually have one parent stay at home with the child with the poor behavior and the other takes his siblings out.
The hardest thing is explaining why things aren’t “fair.” My middle son when he was younger would always complain that it wasn’t fair that his brother didn’t have as many responsibilities as he did or had different rules. Some things were easier for him to understand than others. We explained to him that while his brother was older than him in age, he thinks and acts like a child much younger than his age.
We printed out lists of chores for each of them and posted them on the refrigerator door. We made sure that they had the same number of chores and that they took around the same amount of time overall to complete. Our oldest son’s chores were things that he could handle – taking the dirty laundry to the laundry room and bringing back the clean clothes, taking out the trash, weeding, etc.
It takes careful planning, but we are able to give each child the amount of attention they need (both physically and emotionally), help them to spend time together and to spend time together as a family. We also balance the family outings to try to include things that each child likes. For instance our youngest son loves to go walking and our oldest two sons love hiking to waterfalls so many of our family vacations involve hiking to waterfalls. This way each one gets to do something they like.
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