Huntington Beach Mazda’s service writer Christian, wife Jasmine, and his family discuss autism and their family.

Being a parent is challenging and exhausting but when you are a parent to a child with autism, the challenges multiply. Chris and I became parents at a young age, he was 23 and I was 22. No one in my family ever knew what autism was, no one understood it. Coming from a Mexican household, both of our parents thought our children were just being brats and needed a good spanking. My mother intuition told me that spanking was not the solution and I am glad I listened. I did some research and learned about The Regional Center of Orange County. Both my son, Jaden, and daughter, Delilah, were diagnosed. They had completely different diagnosis and they were categorized differently on the spectrum as well.

Jaden was diagnosed with Echolalia, which means he has a habit of repeating words or phrases like an echo. He also has ADHD, it was explained to me that Echolalia was the autistic disorder while ADHD was a co-occurring condition. My son required 3 days of therapy because he was on the mild side of the spectrum. Our daughter Delilah, she is on the moderate/severe side of the spectrum. She required 5 days of therapy with 3 different therapy sessions at once, which was 15 sessions of therapy per week. My days were booked with Delilah’s therapies alone. Delilah was diagnosed with Asperger’s, which has now been renamed to High Functioning Autism; her co-occurring condition is Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). SPD is a condition that affects how your brain processes sensory information, such a sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, so loud noises hurt her ears because her hearing senses are heightened.

The regional center was the best support we ever received, they provided the doctors that diagnosed our children, they taught us how to be patient, how to speak to our children so they would not only listen but understand as well. We had our own social worker that would stay in contact with us to help us and ensure our children continued to get the proper help. Thanks to the help of the regional center, Delilah was able to speak her first words when she turned 5 years old.

I speak about Delilah more because she never spoke a word before she was 5, she only muttered noises and when she couldn’t communicate her needs, she would become violent, hurting her brother, myself and when she was beyond irritated, she would injure herself. I lost hope that she would ever speak, I would cry a lot because I could tell she was trying very hard to tell me something and if I didn’t figure out in time what it was, I would fear she would rip her hair out again from frustration. Other times she would scratch her arms until she broke her own skin and there were days she would bang the back of her head against a wall. If I wasn’t in therapy with her, I was at home hugging her tightly doing my best to keep her from hurting herself, or restraining her because she was hitting her brother or hitting me. My husband’s denial didn’t help either, he had a harder time accepting that our children had special needs and this made the situation harder on our kids and myself, I felt very alone in this parenting journey. Chris would become frustrated with our kids because they couldn’t understand him. When he would become frustrated, he would raise his voice and this caused our son to develop anxiety and due to our daughter’s SPD, it would cause her agony to hear him yelling loudly. This took a toll on our marriage and he noticed. He noticed how his parenting style was not helping with the kids either, so he began asking me for help to change. Chris’s parenting style has improved so much that I am astonished at how our children now listen to him more than they listen to me. Chris only continues to improve and has found ways to get our children to engage in conversations with him and I find myself learning from him now.

To those parents who are now just discovering your child is different, understand that autism therapy takes time; it took my daughter 5 years to see an improvement. I was in the room when she finally spoke to me, her adorable little voice took me by surprise and for the first time I cried tears of joy. Be patient, I know it’s hard but continue with the sessions. Talk to the parents that you see while in therapy, many of them are just as confused and need someone to talk to as well and other parents who have been there longer will put you at ease with their experience. I know that there are many parents out there that never find the support they need and because of that, I created a Facebook group for parents with special needs children. It’s a safe space to talk to other parents who want to vent, need advice or just want to make friends with other parents that won’t judge their child because they are different.