Random child hit my baby

[bluehatbaby]

Name changed. Don't usually post this kind of thing. Really angry. I was waiting in the queue at shopping centre toilets. My 8 month old son was crying and I was (still am) super stressed out as was bursting for a wee and had hysterical child to contend with. Woman stood next to me with child I would say was about 5. She kept saying 'naughty baby naughty baby' - I ignored. Thought she was quite cute. She then turned and smacked my son on the top of his head, hard, at which point he screamed the fucking place down. The woman grabbed her daughter's arm and said nothing to her. I in all fairness went a bit nuts and told her to control her child. She snapped at me 'she's fucking autistic you stupid cow' and dragged her daughter by her hood out of the toilets.

I literally don't know how to feel about it. Pissed off. Ds has now cried himself to sleep and has a red mark on his head.

AIBU to ask mn for some words of wisdom as I'm not very calm and just want to cry.

Having lived with literally hundreds of autistic children, I remain of the opinion that one needs to accept the child but reject the behaviour.
Autistic children can and do learn to behave differently with the right support - which is not necessarily the same as accepting violent behaviours.
Autism isn’t a single condition but a spectrum (it’s in the name). It does include conditions where there are traits of autism. It is a label but that doesn’t make it less real any more than obesity is a label and deaf is a label. It simply describes the condition.

There is no such thing as a diagnosis of "asd traits".
There is no point in using a sanction that a child doesn't understand.
There is no point in using a sanction that isn't effective.
In order for a child go grow up to be as independent and behaving in socially acceptable ways as possible, the child needs appropriate behavioural strategies that work for that child.
If someone doesn't understand that they shouldn't be working with children with autism.

MauisHouseOnMaui my youngest used to repeat phrases from kids movies over and over again, particularly phrases from monsters Inc, Shrek, Chitty Chitty bang bang, and he would mimic the voice perfectly. He doesn't use echolalia now but he still uses phrases from movies in general conversation at appropriate points.His current favourite one is phrases from the LOTR movies, we were recently discussing what to do with the potatoes that we were going to have for dinner when suddenly he said in his best Sam voice "po-ta-toes, boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew" quickly followed by "Gollum, Gollum" and "my precious" Inthe most realistic Gollum impersonation I've heard.

His humourous side is really coming along.

I think it's interesting how some jumped on the "I'll bet the child isn't even autistic" bandwagon. (Not you OP, by the way - I recognise that you never said this) This need for some people to dismiss the autism and recategorize the child as a "naughty child" also allows them to think of the mother as a "bad parent." People will practically turn themselves inside out to place blame on the child and/or the parent. Think about some of the comments people make - "He doesn't look like he has autism" or "He would never behave that way in my house" or my personal favourite to hear "A week with me and he'd be behaving differently." (No, not being familiar with autism or him, you'd likely be sitting in a corner, clutching a gin bottle, wondering where the fuck you'd gone wrong.) You cannot discipline the autism out of a child, and just because you may not see the autism, that doesn't mean it's not there. Being dismissive or disbelieving so you can settle into a more comfortable stance of being judgemental helps nobody.

It's the same with the splitting hairs about whether autism is an excuse or an explanation. A person telling you that their child has autism is explaining that their child is struggling, so that you can put the situation in perspective and understand why that parent is talking calmly to their child and leading them away, rather than telling them off and demanding they apologise to you.

I have 2 autistic dcs. I am not going to discipline them in front of other people just to satisfy their need to see their behaviour disciplined. Shaming them is not helpful. Making a public spectacle to "prove" that I'm disciplining them is not helpful. Depending on the situation, I will either take them somewhere quiet to calm down and discuss it there, or I will calm them down and wait until we are home to discuss it. That is what works best for them and allows them to process the information properly. My priority initially is to calm them down. I suppose that some may think that I'm not disciplining them or holding them responsible for their behaviour, but I guess that's their problem, not mine. I'm not required to provide "proof of discipline."

Autistic children cannot be disciplined the same way that NT children can

Is it doing them a disservice not to discipline them?

Saying that autistic children cannot be disciplined in the same way as a NT child doesn't mean not disciplining them at all, it just means you have to take a different approach because what works for a NT child won't necessarily work for an autistic child.

For example, I have an autistic DS and a neurotypical DD. If DD misbehaves then I would correct her there and then with "no, you don't do that because xxxx" and then if it was something that needed consequences then I'd try make the punishment fit the crime. This might be confiscating her tablet or other belongings, leaving a place and going straight home, docking pocket money, grounding her, sending her to her room, etc. If DS misbehaves and he's in an agitated state (which won't necessarily look like agitation, he can be eerily calm when he's really very stressed) then correcting him there and then can trigger him off so removing him from the situation and calming him down is often the priority before any sort of correction can take place. We have to think carefully what to say and how to phrase it as he doesn't have the same level of reasoning and processing as a NT child. Certain consequences don't work on him. He is not bothered about being grounded and actually likes it, same for being sent to his room. He uses his tablet to help him regulate - noise cancelling headphones on, videos of factory machines doing repetitive actions to calming music, head down and shut out all other sensory input for a while - so removing it can be counterproductive and cause worse behaviour. We tend to have to be creative in the consequences for him. He's very clever too. If he has reached his limit then he will deliberately wind up his siblings and incite them to misbehave to try and make me say "that's it, we're going home". Sometimes he misbehaves and it is not due to being autistic, it's because he's a child and children are sometimes naughty. Docking his pocket money works rather well in those situations.

How come there weren't autistic kids in the supermarkets years ago having meltdowns like you see now?

There were there, they've always been there, but they weren't autistic they were just naughty/boisterous/a handful as diagnosis then wasn't as developed as it is now. And taking children everywhere with you is a relatively new phenomenon as is doing a week's worth of shopping/several days worth of shopping in one go. I rarely went to the supermarket with my mum as a child because she would either do the shopping when I was at school, leave us playing out for half an hour while she nipped to the shops, or left us with a neighbour or my grandma. My brother was a boisterous child so she never, ever took him even when she took the rest of us, she'd learned that he couldn't cope with the shops so spared them both the stress of it. And let's not forget that children who were diagnosed with autism back then were usually at the more extreme end of things and parents were encouraged to institutionalise them or place them in residential schools.

CherryPavlova you are deliberately winding people up by continuing to use the word label.

FFS, Autism is not a label, it is a Medically diagnosed condition

I don't know why CherryPavlova keeps talking like she is the font of all knowledge on all things autism when she so very clearly isn't.

Autism isn’t a single condition but a spectrum (it’s in the name). It does include conditions where there are traits of autism.
On the contrary. It is a condition, but it manifests with a spectrum of behaviours. It does NOT include any other conditions though other conditions may themselves have traits in common with autism.

Oh for goodness sakes, this thread just goes to show what we get when there’s no formal disability education in the whole country. People need to stop saying ‘autistic or not’ why? Because it does matter if she’s autistic because she won’t be aware of what she’s doing/why she’s doing it. It’s not an aggressive move from her. It’s an expression of frustration due to lack of understanding. Not the same as typical 5yo. & whilst the mum should have apologised, surely you can cut her some slack- her life is incredibly hard OP. I can’t stress that enough. She has likely already been victim of constant prejudice & ignorance from the public. No one expects their child to be disabled, no one envisages this when they’re planning to have kids, or when they’re pregnant. It’s an incredibly hard thing to go through. She may, also have been dying for the toilet so didn’t want to move her daughter. After she stormed off OP I can pretty much guarantee she was in tears afterwards. I have an asd ds & I take him to specialist activities with other asd children there, all varying in ages and different sides of the spectrum, I’ve been hit in the face a number of times by different kids. Before having my DS I would have been so ‘wtf there is no excuse’ about this, but that’s so far from their reality OP. I really wish people would educate themselves better on this subject.

@CherryPavlova, the more you write, the less convincing you are. I actually hope you are a troll because the thought that someone with these views apparently has a job supporting, worse living with, children with autism is terrifying.

A baby being hit should not be dismissed as ‘this is something autistic children do’ so it’s fine.

No one has said this for fucks sake

Agree @MsJaneAusten

Oh wow OP, how awful. My baby is the same age and I would be completely full of rage if a child hit my lovely DS. Autism is no excuse, the Mother should have been mortified by this and apologised profusely. I can’t believe she tried to excuse the behaviour instead of making sure your baby was ok and so forth. How awful.

They were made to conform the same as everyone else. Obviously it was bloody hard for them but they towed the line the same as everyone else.

You think?

Have you any idea how common it is for children with autism to hold it together in school and then melt down outside?

Is it doing them a disservice, as
Cherry says not to discipline them?

Yeah, it’s doing them a massive favour to deal with their outbursts when they cannot cope with the environment round them due to their disability as if they were just badly behaved. 🙄

Of course you need to teach ASD children socially acceptable behaviour. This is best done by trying to understand what causes meltdowns and teaching the child strategies to try and cope with that.

My son was disruptive in school. Every day he’d say “I’m going to try my best today and be good mummy” and he really really meant it. Who wants to be badly behaved and get into trouble every day? But every day he’d meltdown again because he couldn’t cope with the chaos in his classroom. It was not a deliberate choice to be badly behaved. Of course we’d tell him not to do it but it got us literally nowhere.

I don’t judge people for being ignorant about autism. Most of us don’t know much about a subject until it affects us. I do judge them for making no fucking attempt to even try and understand (not you OP)

whilst the mum should have apologised, surely you can cut her some slack- her life is incredibly hard

Boo hoo. Ffs. My sympathies for this scrote of a mother ran out when she shouted at the baby's mother and called her a stupid cow. What kind of human being behaves like that without a care in the world that a baby has been hurt??

That’s horrible. I don’t know if this child is autistic or not, but the mother should have apologised.
I had a similar incident at a church playgroup where a three year old little boy in boots, kicked my (then 6 month old) son so hard in the stomach he vomited. Luckily he was fine and I got the doctor involved to check. But the mother who had sat there and watched as her son booted mine in the stomach, said absolutely nothing and when I said that her son had kicked my baby, she just shrugged. Some people are charming

🤷🏻‍♀️pinkgin22

. Before having my DS I would have been so ‘wtf there is no excuse’ about this, but that’s so far from their reality OP. I really wish people would educate themselves better on this subject

That’s a bit fucking hypocritical isn’t it? YOU didn’t ‘educate yourself’ before you had YOUR DS but now it’s something affecting YOU other people should do what you did not do. FFS catch yourself on

obviously the general public needs to have more awareness but your attitude is shite

Can you really not see that if she didn’t have a ‘care in the world’ she’d not have needed to run out?

What kind of human being has absolutely no empathy towards other human beings who are clearly going through something difficult?

(Again, not the OP, who clearly has tonnes of empathy and has read and learnt from the thread )

God there are some utter twats on this thread. And you are not actually supporting the OP by telling her how absolutely raging, fuming, furious you would be if a little kid hit your baby, and then going on about autism not being an excuse, awful mother etc. OP has said that she is upset by many of these ignorant comments and wishes she hadn't even started the thread.

Incidentally my kids have been hit, bitten, scratched at various ages and it different settings by kids of various ages/ abilities, and it's not nice. But some of the hyperbole displayed on here by posters rushing to be the most angry/ full of rage etc. Really? Is that how you react in real life?

Look on the bright side your child will go on to have a healthy normal life totally unaffected by a smack to the head, other woman has a lifetime of incidents like this to deal with , you should have calmly said “ she’s just hit my baby” would have sufficed

Autism isn’t a single condition but a spectrum (it’s in the name). It does include conditions where there are traits of autism.

No, you are really really wrong. Autism is a single condition, and only people who have impairments in the triad are classified as autistic. The spectrum does not include people who only have traits. It used to be possible for a child to be diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which meant a child had some impairments but not the full triad. But that was removed from the DSM and rightly so. Because again only autistic people are on the autistic spectrum. If a person has social communication problems but have no other autistic traits they can be diagnosed with social communication disorder. That is not counted as part of the autism spectrum.
The term spectrum is meant to illustrate that every person is affected differently, like I said before the spectrum is not a line that runs from NT, traits of autism, mildly autistic all the way to severely autistic at the other end.

How many times do you have to say this before people get it? Having traits of autism does not place a person on the spectrum. If they don't meet the diagnostic criteria for autism how can they be on the autism spectrum?

Autistic children can and do learn to behave differently with the right support - which is not necessarily the same as accepting violent behaviours.

Some can, some can't and never will be able to learn such things.
Like other posters have said I really hope you have nothing to do with autistic children in real life.

My Autistic children have been bitten, kicked, punched, slapped, pushed over, tripped up, been run over by kids on bikes, pushed down stairs, been chased and beaten, been spat at, been illegally excluded from school, discriminated against and victimised, just because they have Autism.

In many of these situations the adults/parents attitude was that my kids must have provoked them and refused to accept any responsibility for the children's behaviour or indeed apologise for the behaviour.

I don't know much about ASD so haven't been able to chip in too much but am going to do my research now. It's clearly important.

I'm confused, in your post at 1:04 you said your sister has Aspergers, that you think you have traits and that your mum thinks you could be somewhere on the spectrum.
And now you're saying you don't know much about ASD. How can you have an autistic sibling and not know much about ASD? More to the point how can you think you have traits when you admit you "don't know much about it?"

Look on the bright side your child will go on to have a healthy normal life

Not sure about that yet. He was poorly when he was born. Has a serious bowel condition. You're right that he won't be affected by a bump on the head but he may not go on to have a healthy normal life. Not that that's relevant but felt the need to say!