I’m trying not to sound provocative or alarmist.
As a SEN parent, I see a lot of posts from frazzled parents of children with additional needs, which may or may not be formally diagnosed. Posts I see daily:
My child will not walk (any distance)
my child will not eat (anything but two safe foods)
my child regularly hits to get their needs met
my child hits me if I take their iPad away after 8 hours (‘but it’s their way of decompressing’)
my child refuses to go to school or leave the house.
This is becoming a pandemic of unhappiness. But part of me thinks, have we lost our way with parenting?
The feedback from other parents is nearly always ‘go with what the child wants’ but it’s become a sort of echo chamber of ‘enablement’ for lack of a better word.
Don’t get me wrong, no one is happy in these situations, but aren’t we becoming less optimistic and strengths focused, by changing the rhetoric from ‘my child can’ to ‘my child can’t’?
This is NOT to say that we need to be strict or invalidate our child’s emotions, or that we don’t believe our children, but that we need to support them to do things which may feel initially uncomfortable. Otherwise would any of us survive our first days at work, uni, first dates or even get on a plane?
Instead, the current trend is to demand change, but not necessarily in a way that will benefit their child long term. So your child won’t walk into school from the car and you demand to use the school car park, how do you and your child move on from that? Especially with autistic children who get used to things being a certain way?
Resilience is frowned upon but honestly it needs to be seen as a common stage of development. We all become resilient. What are we doing if we don’t encourage our children to work through things they find difficult, within reason.