Fame or Famine

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Man oh man I’m betting the online autism community is abuzz tonight. I just got through watching an hour of Supernanny which I actually usually enjoy. But, boy, did they make a mistake this week.

As usual, Jo Frost went into the house to observe the family and the kids were neglected and the parents did not have control and were disillusioned and overwhelmed. Jo was there theoretically to fix the “family”, but it all comes down to crappy parenting and how to recognize and fix it.

Only this week, one of the children in the family was autistic.

Now, you know that this can’t be the first family that has contacted the show begging for help juggling non-autistic kids and autistic kids together. You know that this isn’t the first time the Network has had the opportunity to broach this subject, however they chose this family. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

Having a child diagnosed with autism is scary and worrying and depressing and brings up guilt and shame and all kinds of helplessness. What people often don’t realize is that Autism is often called ASD or Autism Spectrum Disorder. This means that if you have a child who is diagnosed “autistic”, they can fall anywhere on an entire spectrum of behaviors and abilities. They can be highly responsive to therapy, or not very responsive at all. They can be gregarious or entirely withdrawn. They can be high-functioning or low-functioning.

So the network obviously chose this family with an autistic child because this little boy was very high-functioning. He didn’t have any outward abnormalities. He could have been the poster boy for the Aryan Nation. Blonde hair, blue eyes.

To their credit they brought in a woman who really does work with autistic children, so Jo herself didn’t try and do “therapy” with the little boy, and they portrayed the kid accurately, in that he really does have ASD and they really worked with him, but within an hour or two of withholding what he wanted they took this kid from non-verbal to having three or four words.

It broke my heart to watch, not because I wasn’t happy for the family, but because, hell, there are parents out there who’ve invested twelve hours every day trying to convince their child to say one word, and on this television program they had it done in minutes.

It’s not that the high-functioning boy was on TV, it was that they never qualified the show by stating that he was high functioning. So everyone who has an autistic child, many if not most of whom are going to fall at a much more severe place on the spectrum, are going to have to deal with all the asshats out there who’ve seen this program and have independently decided that autism isn’t so bad. After all, an hour or two and this kid was talking!

As if there wasn’t enough stigma already, now parents of autistic children who aren’t so lucky are going to have to deal with well-meaning family, friends and the strangers in the grocery store who urge them to play tickle games with their kids and everything will be fine.

It must be so discouraging to have an autistic child and to see that on television.

I’m glad the family made progress. I’m glad they have a little boy who is now flourishing under the parental attention and is growing like a weed in abilities through simple family games. My heart breaks for those who aren’t so lucky and I wish the program had done a better job of explaining the difference between this kid and the ones who rock or who have overt and embarassing behaviors.

They really dropped the ball.

Want to read a blog about a real family dealing with an autistic son? Go to the adventures of leelo and his potty-mouthed mom.

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