Life with Aspergers

We've reached the end of yet another year and before I jump into 2020, I wanted to take a look back at my posts and activities for 2019.  Life Changes I started blogging back in October 2007, over 12 years ago now. My two boys were aged 4 and 7 and I was still young, still struggling to be a father and husband and I had only just started to come to terms with my own position on the spectrum. In 2019 I turned 50, so there's no denying that I'm old. My boys are now 16 and 19, with my eldest finished school, working and studying. Those old restrictions that his teachers tried to impose "your son will never......", seem so far away now.  We've given him a lot of good support but he's done most of the heavy lifting by himself and I couldn't be more proud of him. The problems facing us now are so different from those we faced when the kids were younger. My kids now have to enter the world of dating while I have to deal with the issues of ageing pare...

One of the frustrating things about the fathers, particularly fathers of kids on the spectrum is that for various reasons, they're not always "engaged" in the family. Fathers are often used as the "bad cop" in parenting but many fathers go completely in the other direction, permitting anything and ultimately disengaging from their child's development.  In this post, I want to look at the reasons why fathers don't engage, how you, the dad, can parent on your own terms and how to become an important part of your child's life.  Why aren't fathers engaged? Fatherhood today is very different to what it was like in the previous generation. As GenX, our parents were likely baby boomers or traditionalists. Fathers in our day didn't spend a lot of time on things like child-rearing. They were always too busy with work and chores. More importantly, fathers in previous generations were encouraged to bury their feelings and to toughen up. This ha...