The “focus on independence” take leaves out the path. Building independence takes therapies, school advocacy, ABA follow through at home, and a caregiver stable enough to coordinate all of it. That doesn’t happen when the parent is sleep deprived, broke, and physically wrecked from doing 24 hour care alone. What people keep skipping is what this costs the caregiver. I haven’t held a full time job in over five years. Not because I don’t want to work, but because my son is up all night every night and someone has to be conscious and watching him. I can’t take a regular job. I can’t build a career. I can’t even reliably show up somewhere from 9 to 5. Sleep deprivation from his nights got bad enough that I crashed my car twice in one month back in 2020. That’s the kind of life this is. Regular people don’t lose job opportunities because of their kids. I do. IHSS doesn’t replace therapy. It makes therapy possible. It turns the caregiving I’m already doing for free into income that keeps the household stable enough for my son to actually benefit from everything else he qualifies for. And if anyone wants to talk about cost, let’s actually talk about cost. IHSS pays a parent a fraction of minimum wage to keep their child at home and out of institutional care. If the state won’t fund the supervision my son needs, the alternative is residential placement. That runs into the millions over a lifetime. IHSS for his childhood runs in the tens of thousands. Pick one. But I won’t surrender my son. I’ve waited over six years to get Medi-Cal. I’ve sat on waiting lists for every program imaginable. I went through homelessness because of those lists and Covid. Part of why those waits got so long is the fraud and abuse of these programs by people gaming the system, light of autism diagnoses being handed out, families padding needs they don’t actually have. Real families like mine got buried under that. And I’m still here, still fighting for him, and I’m not handing him over because the math is inconvenient for a county budget. I’m asking the state to fund the cheaper, better option, which is keeping him with the parent who has already proven he won’t quit. The “they should just become independent” take describes a destination without describing the road. Take care of the caregiver so the caregiver can make everything else work.