My wife and I have been together since meeting at art school and are both employed in professional roles. We have an eleven-year-old daughter, and she is our only child. We are a creative and caring family who like to travel and spend time in the garden together.
I am an autistic person who has always had to be careful when it comes to mental health challenges, specifically anxiety. I can get very overwhelmed when fatigued and have high self-expectations that exacerbate this, which peaked during my transition into parenthood.
Preparing for parenthood
I was very excited about being a dad and understood myself to be one from the moment we knew we were pregnant. Yet, I was worried about how my new responsibilities would interact with my idiosyncrasies. Overthinking has always been my default survival strategy, which is why I spent a lot of the perinatal period ruminating about hypothetical parenting scenarios.
Our best option was for me to work one day per week and care for my daughter at home when my wife returned to fulltime work. I could not have guessed how amazing it would be to witness a baby seeing a fly for the first time, to hear her first laugh, her first words, to see her squealing with joy in a baby swing secured to a Hills Hoist clothesline.
My partner and I are a good team, which helped greatly during the perinatal period. She has a much greater tolerance for uncertainty than I do and has always been a trusted source of reassurance and level-headedness.
Parenthood as a neurodivergent dad
In some ways, my strict adherence to routine tasks helped me be a consistent and reliable parent from the outset. I was meticulous with my daughter’s feeding schedule while my partner was at work and always kept her clean. I dealt with the vomit and excrement cleanups by focusing on the measurable steps of each task.
For me, the biggest challenge was getting used to having my routines and my self-expectations reshaped by a little person. I tend to over-focus on minor details and lose sight of the big picture, and so it was important to keep reminding myself that being a good parent wouldn’t require me to be a perfect parent.
“It was more important that my daughter stay safe, loved, and fed, and not whether her blanket was tucked in on both sides.”
The vertical transition into parenthood led me to become more aware of my own idiosyncrasies and how different my needs were to my daughter’s needs. I knew it was important to make eye contact with my daughter even though I tend to avoid eye contact with others. I became more conscious of, and sometimes worried about, my tendency to engage in self-talk when I knew my daughter was in earshot.
Seeking help
My primary source of support was my wife because her perspective was most relevant to my own situation, and I trusted her the most.
I did not reach out for help when I was tired, anxious, and overwhelmed, even though that could have helped a lot. With all that I heard about mother’s groups, on reflection, I might have benefitted from being connected to other parents if I knew that they were autistic dads. In any case, I preferred to avoid support options that conflicted with my social interaction challenges; the idea of sharing personal stories with dad-strangers in an unfamiliar physical environment seemed more like multi-layered torture than informal peer support.
Self-care
My ability to hyper-focus on tasks means that I usually forget to stand up from the desk and stretch my legs. So, self-care is something I need to set an alarm for. I take a short break every 60-70 minutes for 5-10 minutes to go outside and look at the garden or give my dog a pat.
“I feel much better when I’ve gone for a walk while listening to music or podcasts through my noise-cancelling headphones.”
A message to other neurodivergent parents
Parenting is an ever-evolving learning experience because your child is constantly growing. It can be reassuring to know that many of the challenges we face today will not exist forever.
Although parenting requires a level of flexibility that some autistic people find challenging, learning to be a good parent does not mean having to mask autistic traits, especially at home around your child or children. Children that engage with authentic adults will have a better chance of growing up to be authentic adults.
It is common for autistic people to liken their experience of the world to that of an alien without a social script. As with other neurodivergent people, autistic people have firsthand insight into, and appreciation for, non-standard ways of sensing and interpreting the world. I think that autistic lived experience can be a wonderful foundation on which to raise open-minded and empathetic individuals.
