Raising children on the autism spectrum is a life changing event. These life changes cause you as a person and as a parent to re-evaluate your new-found identity. It changes your identity of who you are, what you are and what is important to you? How to parent children especially with high functioning autism can be made simple.
One of the most difficult aspects of being a parent to an autistic child is that you as parent may feels some sort of deficiency in raising a child with special needs. The key here is to determine how the child is understanding things. It is like being an external voice to him her where you help him or her go about understanding things in a clearer way. Some conditions cannot learn from this kind of modelling but in my experience, autistic people can learn and in fact improve every year.
After a few really difficult years of trying to make my three autistic kids fit some sort of mold, I threw out the whole idea and just began to embrace their really good qualities. Afterall, when you think about it, none of us make it on our weaknesses we only make it on our strengths. This gave the kids a sense of their own competency because they were appreciated for what they are and what they can become.
One real strength is to appreciate what really good kids they are. For example, many of these children are more consumed than most with the idea of doing the right thing and living according to some sort of code of conduct. This means that these children, eventually grow up to be very, very nice human beings. In fact, recognizing these traits early and appreciating those traits will go a very long ways to building a solid relationship with your child. It will also enable you to love them for what they are as you go about looking for strengths in their development. At least with high functioning autism these strengths could range from music with perfect time, tone and pitch to sophisticated computer
knowledge, allowing them to build computers. there are always strengths and perhaps we should raise all children with based on strengths.