Autism and Safety

As I talked about in my last post, autism can be a health hazard.  I don't want to dwell on such a morbid subject but this is a very important subject and ignoring it could be hazardous to your children's health.

Whether it is a young child with autism running back into a fire, wandering away from home and dying of the elements, or a parent snapping under the stress of a having a children with autism, autism has contributed to or caused the death of many people.

Of course, since we are talking about autism, there are a variety of opinions about whether autism "itself" (whatever that means) is what causes the health hazards or whether it is other factor that do.  And, as is normal in the autism world, you have the majority of parents on one side and the "autistics" and the neurodiverse parents on the other.  I can understand where the former are coming from, but the parents, those I just don't get.

But regardless of whether you think that autism is a health hazard, it is important to remember that autism causes safety issues for children and young adults.

I think that the basic safety issues might be hard for some people to fully understand if you do not have a young child with autism or have not experienced the problems first hand.  Many of these children simply do not understand and cannot navigate the dangers that "typical" children can.  They will run out the door, walk out in front of cars, jump in pools when they can't swim, and charge into any and every situation without any understanding or ability to understand the dangers.

They will continue to do this long after every "typical" child has learned to navigate these dangers.  If a parent isn't careful these behaviors, behaviors caused by autism, can be the death of their child.

With three children on the spectrum, we have had to do some remodeling of our house to deal with the danger.  We added bedrooms and moved doorways so that we have a set of bedrooms that can be gated off from the rest of the house.  So, every night, there are multiple child gates stopping the children from getting out of that area of the house and the exterior doors have locks, deadbolts, extra locks up high, and alarms to prevent our children from being able to leave the house undetected.  These measures are there for their protection and to keep them safe.

During the day, there is always someone watching the children to make sure that they don't get into a situation that would pose a threat to them and to make sure that they don't wander away.  Because if they wandered away, they would not be able to tell anyone who they are, where they live, or anything else about themselves.  In other words, they would be completely defenseless.

Going out into public posses other safety challenges as well.

The funny thing is that my children aren't actively trying to escape or wander and aren't little daredevils.  For the most part they are actually very well behaved little girls.  But there have been a few incidents where they have almost wandered away or gotten themselves into situations that would have been hazardous.  These incidents and situations were directly caused by a lack of understand of the environment and this lack of understanding is directly because of autism.

The risks are simply too great to ignore.