Autism and the Family (2)

A mother discusses the problems encountered by her autistic son when he first started school.

If you’d asked me, what would have been different had we known earlier, one of the main differences would have been for our daughter because she is only eighteen months older than Laurie. When he went into school without a diagnosis, she was the one having to look after him. She was in the same school, she was trying to intervene on his behalf and explain that you don’t have to shout at him and you have to tell him things by name. She tried to intervene and a dinner lady told him off because the loos [bathrooms] that his class used were locked at lunchtime. He doesn’t like the other loos because they had a urinal that flushed randomly, so he wouldn’t use it. And he would take himself off into the field to urinate, which I thought was really good, he had done really well, and then the dinner lady stormed after him, and grabbed him by the shoulder, and said “You’re dirty! How dare you do this.” And Claire, at six was trying desperately to intervene and become terribly distressed by the whole thing. So one of the reasons we took Laurie out of school was to save Claire, because I don’t think a six year old should be telling people about how to treat a child with autism.