Thanks for validating my concern.
I definitely concur. I’m not advocating "tough love " as much as asking about how to navigate that line between helping and hindering.
Perhaps the answer lies more in addressing the older child. As they become an adolescent, they can be tasked with more responsibility.
But it makes sense that young kids benefit most from a surplus of support. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
This is a good question, and it’s actually come up in this thread before as well as in other threads, and my short answer is that I don’t think @Spice_Weasel needs to worry about that – but I think it’s a valid concern, and it’s something I have worried about with my kids, especially my older one, who is also on the spectrum.
One thought: My kid had an amazing therapist who basically advocated that my kiddo should be challenged out of her comfort zone, but not so far that she would just shut down. I’ve erred in both directions (and I think it’s OK to err occasionally, as long as it doesn’t become the rule), but I had tended (and still do, when I am not thinking about it) to err more on the “yes, you can keep in your comfort zone” side because it’s much easier… so having the therapist advocate for this was very useful for me. When a kid has to deal with things outside that zone, and is encouraged to constantly do so, then I think it’s harder to maintain a victim-type mentality, even if that comfort zone is significantly smaller for some people than for others. (And in @Spice_Weasel 's specific case, I believe that a large part of the accommodations she’s making for her son are of the sort that allow him to be in the range where he can be challenged but not so far that it’s too much.)
Going along with that is giving the child as much responsibility as they can handle. I’ll admit that my kid’s (private, probably over-supportive) middle school did NOT do that. It was a bit of a wake-up call when kiddo went to public high school with thousands of kids and suddenly she was expected to do a LOT more on her own. I do have a kid with a lot of executive function – if not, I would have had to do things differently – but I could generally trust her to either get the things done or ask for help (even if asking for help often took the form of a meltdown). We’ve been working on how to ask other people (e.g., teachers) for help, and that’s something that yeah, I think I need to start stressing more, as it starts intersecting with her overpowering need for other people not to think she’s stupid (“your teacher is not going to think you’re stupid if you ask about this Spanish thing that your terrible Spanish 1 teacher never taught you!” “But what if he does??”)
We have also always stressed in our family that different people have different strengths. My child has some amazing strengths, but also some decided weaknesses. That doesn’t mean that she can ignore the weaknesses. Kiddo still has to live in this society and take responsibility for doing so.
And as others have said, it’s definitely a different sort of calculation in early childhood than in late childhood/adolescence, though obviously one feeds into the other. In early childhood, my kid did need a lot more explicit scaffolding/support for skills development than practice pushing that comfort zone, and as she got older and gained more emotional/social skills and could do without so much support, exercising those skills and pushing the comfort zone became more important.
But yeah – I’ve definitely seen people who try to claim the victimhood identity, people who don’t take any responsibility for themselves, and it’s a mess.
I do think it’s a valid concern, and something I wrestle with a lot. I have two family members who are dead in part because of enabling parenting behavior. I have to contrast that with my own childhood, which pushed me to independence to the point of neglect. In some ways I’m glad I was raised to be independent. In other ways I just felt abandoned to figure a lot out myself.
What I will say is that the point of this is not to make him comfortable, but to help him build up the skills he needs to cope with a world that is not very accommodating. This school we have chosen heavily emphasizes personal responsibility and independent behaviors (and emotion regulation, self-management, self-awareness, etc.) It starts with highly structured scaffolding but it expects the child to develop independence over time. As he ages up, that scaffolding is slowly pulled away and responsibilities are increased. Our ultimate goal is to transfer him to public school (he will be in a very good public school district after the move) or to a local GATE school. But if the new private school works out, he loves it, we love it, we might keep him there. Hard to say. My husband’s cousin, who I’m 99% sure is autistic, went to this same school because he was floundering in public school. He is now a decorated Marine veteran. This isn’t a place that lets kids phone it in.
The reality is that it’s hard to say at this point what he will be fully capable of in the future. I honestly don’t know if he is going to be able to live independently. I would like for that. I will give him his best shot at that. But I know that, at least right now, he is not at the same level developmentally as his peers. He cannot perform independent behaviors at their level. He does not have the safety awareness, emotion regulation, or social skills of most kids his age. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for his behavior, or that we try to solve all his problems for him. But this is the kind of issue for which intensive early intervention is most recommended.
But of course I ask myself all the time. Am I expecting too much? Am I not expecting enough? I question it daily. I have days where I’m angry at the school for not understanding the issues better and days where I’m angry at my son for apparently deciding he just gets to do whatever he wants all the time. His experience of school is already so radically different from my own, and school is so different than it was when I was a student, that I often feel like I don’t even understand what’s happening at school. Sometimes I want to go full bore authoritative Mom and other days I feel so bad for him, I just want him to have one part of his day without constant stress and expectations.
He asked me today about punishment and what’s the worst punishment he ever got? I said probably two weeks ago when your Dad picked you up for licking everything and you weren’t allowed to have screens that weekend. He said, “What? I don’t remember any of that.” And I believe him. One of the reasons his neuropsych ordered additional testing was his difficulty retaining information. How can you learn from an experience you don’t even remember?
Then he asked me “What’s the worst punishment you ever got?” How do I explain child abuse to a child? My mother’s response to my ADHD symptoms was to go on rampages, slap the shit out of me, and scream insults at me for hours. Naturally I’m going to want to do the opposite of that. I’m always going to have a bias toward being accommodating so that I don’t end up anywhere in the neighborhood of parenting like my mother.
But I want my kid to be independent and follow the freakin’ rules!
Is it worse to expect too little or too much? I don’t know. It’s like walking a tightrope.
There’s a Sanskrit proverb in the medieval compilation Chanakya-niti attributed to an ancient sage and leader that says:
I don’t think that the entitled, irresponsible mindset that @Moriarty is describing is developed in the first several years of life. I think that children/young adults build that attitude over many, many years of poorly supported development.
My guess is (and I’m no child psychologist so my opinion is worth exactly what you’re paying for it, but it’s based on what I’ve read from more knowledgeable people) that it arises not from being “excessively” helped and supported in confronting their challenges, but from being conditioned to believe that they can’t actually accomplish anything, so eventually they build their persona around inability rather than competence.
The conditioning seems to happen either through chronic neglect (the kid gets no guidance or help with how to cope with challenges, so just keeps failing at them until eventually getting permanently discouraged and averse to trying) or chronic undermining of autonomy (the parents never let the kid go through the trying-and-failing-and-learning-and-succeeding process, because “it’s quicker for us just to do shoe-tying/homework/transportation/application forms/etc. ourselves”, so the kid learns to think of these tasks as intrinsically beyond their capabilities).
Neither of those situations sounds at all like @Spice_Weasel’s parenting. Supporting kids is not spoiling them.
I’ll also point out that all of us (more or less) neurotypical people who feel that some degree of “struggling” and “figuring things out for ourselves” and “taking responsibility for our own development” was beneficial to us are kind of in the position of unvaccinated chickenpox survivors, or whatever, who take it for granted that a routine childhood illness is no big deal. Yeah, it seems that way to us because we were among those who happened to make it.
If we hadn’t been lucky enough to be landed with challenges of a size that our juvenile bodies and brains were capable of handling, no amount of “toughing it out” or "soldiering on" would have brought us through them. And we probably wouldn’t be in a position to be having this conversation in this forum in the first place.