Yes he has autism. But that does not excuse bad behavior or inappropriate choices. Or does it ? Our oldest son has autism. Our oldest son Avery was diagnosed with severe non verbal autism. Autism does not excuse him from knowing right from wrong. Well and if it does according to other people, I am going to make sure I teach him better. Well here I thought I was teaching him right from wrong. Maybe he doesn't understand fully. Or maybe he simply does not care. Truth is I may never fully know if our oldest son understands everything. So I am blaming my parenting because what happened this week should have never happened. We had a rough week which ended in me being so disappointed in Avery. & also frustrated that I had a parenting f%ck up moment. You know when you think you can handle everything and life has different plans. Yes, that was this week. We were in the city running errands & accomplishing all the things. And as per usual in a hurry because we had places to be. Somewhere in our journey Avery decided stealing is okay. Avery took some tiny fidgets while we were in a store & put them in his pants pocket without me knowing that is until he showed me hours later. And well Avery probably didn't decide stealing is okay but he needs to know better. Teaching our children right from wrong is so important. And yet teaching them right from wrong is so hard to navigate because we are not completely sure they are aware as say an atypical child would be. Avery is grounded currently & Walmart trips got taken away for the next 10 days. The thing is he probably does not know it is stealing but he should. As parents it is our job to attempt to teach him the best we can what he should be doing. Back to the store we went to return what Avery took. & of course we did the right thing by making Avery return the items. But the lady at the store excused the behavior & felt pity for Avery which is not what I wanted. Autism isn't an excuse to steal, that is how I see things anyways. She told Avery " you could have just kept the items ". Frustrated, that is how I felt because I am trying to teach our severe non verbal child what he did was wrong. I have no idea if Avery understands completely what happened or what he did. What I do know is that our family experiences a lot of things that are hard to navigate but we will keep trying our best. Our best has to count for something.

Posted by journeyforavery at 2022-09-26 13:36:46 UTC