@Beetrootisthesecretingredient I hope your little boy is doing ok today. I know from my children what a big impact incidents like this can have on them. It takes them often 24 hours or more to truly recover from sensory inputs having pushed them to the point of meltdown, and then afterwards they feel humiliated, particularly if this has happened in public. I hope he is ok, and at least it is half term so he can have lots of calm and happy family time to feel comfortable again.
The world is a cruel place and as we can see from this thread there are a great many unpleasant people in it, and it’s such a hard job as a parent - but particularly the parent of an autistic child - to teach them how to navigate this and cope with it.
You are doing all the right things. Protecting him from vile people, teaching him how to regulate, but not wrapping him in cotton wool and locking him a cellar as many posters here would have you do because his existence might occasionally cause an inconvenience of a few seconds to others and instead encouraging him to explore the world and participate in normal activities and gradually learn how to cope with that even if sometimes things go wrong.
You behaved entirely appropriately, caring for your son safely, minimising the inconvenience to others as much as was possible without creating unnecessary and unacceptable risks of harm to your son psychologically or physically, so just keep doing what you’re doing and give him lots of love and hugs and tell him this was not his fault and that the people who behaved in this deplorable manner were just bad people. Autistic children have a huge tendency to beat themselves up emotionally and blame themselves for things, particularly at this age where they start to be more aware of their differences. It’s disgusting that there are adults who would deliberately make this harder for them and abuse you and your husband for treating your son humanely and parenting him well, following all of the appropriate advice from experts about how to safely manage such a situation. Such people should be ignored entirely.
And definitely do not put a sign on him saying “I’m autistic”. Sadly you just have to learn to have a thick skin to deal with the ignorant, horrendously entitled and selfish people you encounter. It’s hard. But you seem like a really good parent giving him opportunities to push his boundaries and build his tolerances and learn the skills of how to cope and regulate when he becomes overwhelmed rather than hide away and not be able to learn how to function and contribute to society as an adult and live a fulfilling life, all for the fear of upsetting some idiotic cyclists.
Keep going and PM me if you’d like to. I can understand why you might not want to come back to this thread given some of the disgraceful, spiteful and ignorant and discriminatory comments that have been made by various posters. Sadly any post about autism on Mumsnet attracts them like a swarm of wasps to a glass of wine, but that isn’t representative of how most people think of behave in my experience. Best to just make a wasp trap and let them drown in the glorious honey of their spite and focus on your son, continue treating him with compassion and kindness, keeping him safe, and helping him to have as much access as possible to “normal” childhood experiences as you can, as you seem to be doing already.