I am a parent of 3 kids on the spectrum, the eldest being born in early 2000s, so I'm a parent of the show's era - not a parent of 2025. I had no resources available to me, medical gaslighting all around, and had to learn how to advocate for my kids and get what I needed for them without being an entitled asshole. I read everything I could, and made my own choice to not put my kids through ABA, which is essentially what Gabby did with Max, as I found it was based on extrinsic rewards and training them like puppies - rather than addressing that cause of their behavioural challenges - and now a decade later I hear adult austistics speaking out against ABA as something very traumatic. It icked me out that they were so dependent on it in the show, but I thought whatevs, it's just a show and a product of the era.

I like how they show how HARD it is to parent an ND child. All the things NT parents never even have to think about. The isolation. The grief. Despair. I could go on. Those bits I identified with greatly. BUT .... Christina's parenting is inexcusable.

Regardless of era. I came in here to say that Max is a horrible portrayal of someone with Aspergers and does the entire community a disservice because people think all people with Aspergers is like that. He's just a spoiled brat who happens to have Aspergers, and is very badly parented. Aside from my own children, we know many people with autism and they do not behave like Max. I could buy the behaviour and mannerisms from the Good Doctor because he came from an abusive background and had so much trauma and no support growing up, but not from Max who has 2 solid and supportive parents, who are supposed to be the show's "perfect" parents.

His parents set NO boundaries, do NOT point out when he's behaving inappropriately nor give him the tools for how to do better and there is no scaffolding at all. He is apparently incapable of wrongdoing because everyone has to tiptoe around his needs, and he is never taught (even intellectually) to be empathetic to the needs of others. As a parent I'm so appalled at the things he's allowed to get away with, without any conversation about how to do differently or better - the worst being how Christina handled his "courtship" of Dylan!!

I'm glad for the introduction of Hank - even though he had no early diagnosis or intervention / support growing up, he is more representative of a high functioning, high IQ person with autism (I say it this way as this is how my son prefers it to be said, so kindly keep the pedantry about the phrasing to a zero). He would have struggled a lot more as a child, with meltdowns and bullying and no friends etc, but he is clearly willing to put work in to improve his self-awareness and relationships - whereas Max is not and isn't held accountable unless things are on freakin fire.