Great Post for Parents New to Autism: Identifying & Avoiding Autism Cults
"Mother and child" by Dale Gillard under CC-BY-SA via Flickr
Blogger Shannon Des Roches Rosa has a terrific post on BlogHer about the ways in which parents with kids newly diagnosed with autism can get sucked into cult-like thinking by individuals and organizations promising cures.
Rosa acknowledges the void into which many parents are flung at the time of diagnosis, because pediatricians often don’t have enough useful information to provide, and she outlines her own family’s struggles when her son was first diagnosed, including her initial hopes that so-called “DAN” practitioners and therapies would offer a cure.
She writes of her ultimate disillusionment with and abandonment of these therapies: “I guess that makes us the recovered ones, not our son.”
Her eloquent phrase perfectly captures the experience many parents of children with developmental differences have as we mourn “what might have been” and learn to accept and celebrate our children as they are.
