03/16/2026
Trust your gut, Mom and Dad …
A few years ago, a friend came over to talk about her toddler. Not yet two, she had been identified as autistic a few months before and had been receiving early intervention services ever since. Every day, for hours a day, therapists were coming to their house to work with her.
It hadn’t been feeling right, my friend said. Something felt .. off. She’d been wanting to call it off — or at least cut it back, but she’d worried that she’d be doing her daughter a grave disservice if she did.
I told her to listen to her gut. And then I came here to say this:
To my fellow parents of autistic and otherwise disabled kids, I need you to hear this …
When we are told that our child’s neurology diverges from the norm, we are often also told that whatever guidebook to parenthood we may have thought we had is now useless. We’re told that the rules no longer apply. That our children have totally different needs than typically developing ones. We’re told that our instincts will pretty much always be wrong. And above all, we are told that there is no time to waste.
We are told that our kids need therapy. LOTS of it. And NOW. We’re told that if we fail to use every second productively, we will miss some mystical window of opportunity that can never be re-opened.
Most of us defer to these so-called experts and their house-on-fire recommendations because of course we do. This is what they do so they must know more than we do, right?
They tell us that 26-40 hours of therapy a week is best practice. So we frantically sign on. And then, even when our gut screams that something doesn’t feel right, we carry on. We remind ourselves that our instincts no longer count. That while it may not feel right to us, it must be necessary for kids with disabilities, right?
Please, if you hear nothing else I ever say, hear this:
If your gut says something doesn’t feel right, DO NOT IGNORE IT. It’s a mechanism designed to protect your child. Listen to it. Examine it. Respect it.
Because there is one thing that never changes, no matter what challenges our kids may face: their right to be children.
To explore, to play, to get out of the house and try all manner of new things. To get dirty and messy and fall down and get back up. To splash in puddles and play in snow and feel sunshine on their face. To bang on drums and strum guitars and run around a gym. To play with parachutes and swing on swings and slide down slides and be around other kids.
To try music and movement classes and see what appeals. To learn to swim. To be out and about with us. To watch us interact with store clerks and postal workers and toll takers. To see how we navigate the world around us. To BE KIDS.
My friend said that they had no time to do anything with their daughter. That after hours of therapy, her kid was exhausted. I told her that of course she was. She was a toddler with a full time job.
Years ago, I wrote, “I’d argue, as I have before, that the end goal is creating an environment which enables our children to grow into adults who have the tools to live a happy and fulfilled life, in whatever form that may take for them. But that cannot happen at the expense of their childhoods.
Our children deserve to have childhoods. Happy ones. Comfortable ones. Playful and play-filled ones. Stimmy, squealy joyous ones. Ones in which they learn and grow and discover the world in their own ways.
That doesn’t — it can’t — happen when we’re always, always fighting against the clock.
We have got to break free of this bu****it paradigm of artificial deadlines — of the need to rush, rush, rush to teach, teach, teach to drill, drill, drill — to make every single waking moment a *productive opportunity.*
Because when we release ourselves from that pressure, we allow our autistic children to BE CHILDREN.”
Please don’t get me wrong. There are some wonderful, helpful therapists out there who are doing fabulous work with our kids. I’m not telling you to fire them. Rather, I’m pleading with you to listen to your gut about what feels okay and what doesn’t. And what’s simply too much.
Because no toddler should ever have a full time job.
{image is a photo of Brooke and me at a family brunch in 2005, when she was two.}
