Parenting with Dr Asperger

Looking at your crying child and knowing that you are powerless to help. This feeling of utter desolate helplessness. This is the root of Mother Guilt. Because instinctively a parent will give their all to avoid being here.

He is sad. And he doesn't know why. And I can't get to the bottom of it. And I can't make it go away. I feel like I'm failing him.

He desperately needs me, and this time. I don't have the answers.

As I watched him curl next to me in a tight ball sobbing silently, I resolved to do the only thing I know how to do. To work through this the best way I know how, and to document the process. I hope it will somehow hold a clue to helping him. And perhaps it will help another parent somewhere, to know they are not alone.

Our journey starts here: Parenting with Asperger, so named after the pediatrician who recognized it in himself and others, and argued for their place in society.

Hans Aperger was an Austrian pediatrician (1906-1980). He may have himself been an autistic, although the disorder named after him was not popularized until 1981.
"We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers."