![]() ![]() The implications in the discourses are clear: if you don’t try X, Y, or Z new therapy, then you are negligent, a parent who has abandoned your child (and thus the future) to the disorder that is their anomalous neurology. ![]() This particular cruel optimism is born of medical, psychiatric and educational narratives and practices provided by professionals to parents and their children, and imposed by parents on themselves, each other, and their children. The melancholia of autism parenting rests in the figure of the changeling, the stolen child, the lost child of neuro-normative fantasy. The pursuit of this vision – the usual metaphor is of combat, of laying siege to the fortress that has locked the “real child” inside – all but banishes the actually existing child who lives among us. The pursuit of these hopes typically involves what Berlant calls “conventional good life fantasies,” which, in this case, might include the everyday dreams that one’s child might someday be gainfully employed (or somehow provided for), integrated into their community, and satisfied in their intimate relationships. Īnd in these quests for “cures” or “recovery” – in the search for a transformation from the “before” of the supposedly (and sometimes palpably) debilitated autistic child into the “after” of the supposedly “normal” child – parents are transformed into consumers and purveyors of all sorts of untested, unproven treatments as they cede the child before them for the imaginary child of their hopes and dreams. Because there is little uniformity in the ways that autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed (or, even, for that matter, in the ways these “disorders” present themselves), and because of occasional stories of children who have “recovered” from ASD, or lost their diagnoses, the quest for interventions can become all-consuming, imbued with that particular desperation that comes of fighting for the future itself. Paradoxically, what can be most difficult for parents of autistic children is the possibility that particular bio-medical, nutritional, behavioral, or psychopharmacological interventions will help their child (or children) conform or adapt to the demands of the neurotypical world. Indeed, research on parents of children on the autism spectrum has long suggested that one of the greatest stressors for this group comes from the ambiguity of the prognosis that comes with such a diagnosis (Wolf et al 1989). Cruel optimism hits particularly hard in the world that is euphemistically known as special needs parenting. ![]()
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