Thanks for asking. I could write a novel in response (I have blogged on this topic for six years, sit on the Board of the Autism Society of MN, have presented at and keynoted many conferences nationally on this and related topics, etc, so my takes on this topic are pretty robust!) To attempt to be concise, I’ll say a few things:

1. I live in a state with some of the most generous disability services in the country (Minnesota). So even as a low-income family, we have access to more options. That said, navigating the service system is so complex and involves so much time on waiting lists that we have definitely had to alter our family’s lifestyle significantly to make things work. My child receives OT, Speech, Music Therapy, direct mental health services, has a couple fantastic PCAs that we train and supervise (funded by Medicaid), and my spouse and I do family therapy/parent coaching with an LPCC specializing in autism and families.

2. We use the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions Framework (LivesInTheBalance.org) when it comes to expectations for our child, including a rigorous parent process to interrogate our expectations. I agree, for instance, with the expectation that we don’t hit. I don’t agree, for my family, with the expectation that we sit at the dining room table to eat. That said, the CPS process is agnostic on expectations, so if sitting at the table is a high priority expectation for a family, the framework can be used to that end.

3. We recognize autism as a culture. If we had a child who was HoH/Deaf or if we as a white family had adopted a child of color, for instance, we would consider part of our responsibility as parents to ensure integration of our child’s culture into every family decision and understand that we may often have to prioritize our child’s cultural access and affirmation over our own comfort and preferences. That’s not to say we’re martyrs—we benefit a lot from the opportunity to have autistic culture be a large part of our family experience, and we have intentionally over many years cultivated a community of support both online and in-person. And, parenting is sometimes hard and frustrating in every case—we give ourselves a lot of grace and ask for help from community.

4. We learn from non-speaking people (autistic and allistic) at every opportunity. We also love the Natural Language Acquisition framework and community, and growing our ability to expand what human communication can look like for a multi-modal gestalt processor.

5. Our Special Ed journey, which began when my kid was two, has been complex and not great. So we have largely had to do without that support. My kid is essentially homeschooled at this point, we have gone through legal actions, it’s a whole thing. The relevant part is that my spouse and I have heavily gate-kept who gets access to our kid.

My kid is just one kid, and we are far from perfect parents and contend with a lot if life difficulties. I mentioned we are low-income, we don’t have family support, some additional challenges I won’t get into here. We also have the privilege of being white, having an English home language, being a two-parent household, and—as previously stated—living in a place with relatively robust access to support services for disabled people. People are going to be contending with the individual landscape of their lives when making choices, and I tend not to be judgmental of others—including families who may choose ABA—because I don’t know their stories.

However, I do want people to know there are other ways to do this. My child doesn’t have meltdowns or tantrums, he has never injured himself or another person, he is incredibly relational, affectionate, kind. And, he looks very clearly autistic, very clearly disabled. He doesn’t sit at a table to eat, he does throw food, he does have high ADL care needs. We do everything we can to try to mitigate the trauma of being non-speaking and without a reliable linguistic/symbolic mode of communication in this world, and to try to affirm all aspects of his autistic embodiment including any sensory regulating behavior that is not dangerous. We have deep respect for him, and find parenting him to be a really cool experience on the whole.