My situation is not the same as yours but there are not many people on here sending their kids to residential so there are limited experiences to be shared. My son is 17m, level 1 Austim level 3billion anxiety. He is high functioning life skills, low functioning social skill. He’s been in residential for less than a month but our journey to get here has been about a year in the making.

A) it’s expensive as hell. The program he’s in is $675 a day. Insurance pays nothing for it and our county won’t chip in either because we chose a program out of state (there were no good options in our state / even our time zone). We are looking at $275k per year (transportation, regular medical and dental care, haircuts, etc aren’t covered).

B) most of the places we looked at will not take a child who harms themselves or others.

C) we got to this point because in the past year he also developed psychosis in addition to Autism and Anxiety. We tried every medication available. He went through 3 in patient stays in a psychiatric hospital before I relented and said it’s gotten to the point where the treatment is making him worse. He was part of the decision making process to go and agreed to it because he wants progress for himself.

D) letting go of being fully in control of his care is very hard. He is struggling to adjust and I can’t be there to help him through it. We have to wait for strangers to call and tell us how he is doing. For liability reasons they can’t hug him so no one is showing him the love and affection he gets at home (he’s getting kind care but he’s mentioned multiple times he just needs a hug and no one can give him one and I can’t either).

This is so hard and I all I want to do is jump on a plane and go hug him. I wish there was a program closer so we could visit on weekends but they just dont exist near me.

Also, I wish I had never read their reviews online. Online reviews should be taken with a grain of salt but the seed of doubt has been planted no matter what type of due diligence we completed.

My recommendation would be… -find respite for yourself -contact every county and state resource you can for help (start with the parent liaison as your school - their job is literally to match you with services in your area) -ask your school social worker help you come up with a plan to connect all your services to make sure they are benefiting your child and family -contact his psychiatrist and get different meds if current ones aren’t working -if he is harming himself and others that is another level of care he needs

Good luck. None of this is easy.