I need to tell you something and I need you to stay with me even if your first instinct is to get defensive.
Because I’m not coming at you. I’m not coming at anyone. I’m coming from the middle of something that I think is breaking the autism community apart in ways that are actively hurting the kids everyone claims to be fighting for.
Here’s my particular position in this conversation: I am autistic. I am also the parent of an autistic child. I am, simultaneously, the adult that some parents dismiss as “not like my child” and the parent navigating the exact daily realities that some autistic advocates wave away as drama.
Most importantly, I exist at the intersection of a war I didn’t start and cannot entirely leave. And from here, from the middle of it, I can see things that people on both edges can’t.
So let’s talk about it. Really talk about it. Because the version of this conversation that’s been happening on social media for the last decade is not working, and the kids — the actual children at the center of all of this — are the ones paying for it.
What the War Actually Looks Like
If you’re new to autism spaces online, let me orient you, because this conflict has a texture that outsiders don’t always see clearly.
On one side: parents of autistic children, many of whom are exhausted and frightened and genuinely trying to do right by their kids, looking for community and information and someone who understands the specific weight of what they’re carrying. Many isolated parents of autistic children turn to social media for community and help. That’s real. That’s human. Nobody should have to navigate this alone.
On the other side: autistic adults — many of whom are also parents, also exhausted, also trying to do right by their communities — who watch these same parents share things about their children online that range from well-meaning but harmful to genuinely dehumanizing, and who try to say something about it.
Those posts can anger and offend autistic teens and adults. Also real. Also human. When you see someone talking about a community you belong to as though you’re not in the room — or worse, as though you’re the enemy — the response is not always calm.
And then it escalates. Someone says something sharp. Someone else says something sharper. Parents report feeling attacked. Autistic adults report feeling dismissed and talked over. Everyone retreats to their corners more convinced than ever that the other side doesn’t get it.
Meanwhile, the kid at the center of the whole thing keeps growing up.
The Thing That’s Being Said That Nobody Is Confronting
Here’s the statement I want to go directly at, because it’s the one that does the most damage and the one people are the least willing to examine.
“But my child isn’t like those autistic adults.”
This is the reason parents give — sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a quiet assumption underneath their choices — for not listening to autistic adult self-advocates. “My child is more severely affected, my child is nonspeaking, my child has high support needs.” Those adults can hold jobs and write articles and go on the internet, so they can’t possibly understand what my child experiences.
This is the number one reason parents use to explain why they won’t listen to autistic adults.
And I understand where it comes from. When your child is struggling in ways that feel invisible to people who seem to be functioning in the world, you want support from people who actually get it. You don’t want to be told that your child’s challenges aren’t real, or that everything is fine, or that the problem is society and not the thing you’re watching your kid go through every single day.
That frustration is legitimate.
But the assumption underneath it? The one that says autistic adults who can articulate their experiences can’t possibly have experienced what your child is experiencing? That one doesn’t hold up.
Who your child is when they’re diagnosed does not tell you who they’ll be when they’re adults. No one knows your autistic child’s future. The nonspeaking child who gets ABA therapy to make them more compliant — that child grows up. And the adult they become will have things to say about what was done to them and what it cost them, and you won’t be able to go back and make different choices.
Many nonspeaking autistics are incredible self-advocates. Don’t assume that autistic advocates online haven’t gone through the same things your child has gone through and will go through.
The autistic adults in these spaces are not your child’s competition. They are your child’s future. And some of them — many of them — had childhoods that looked exactly like what you’re describing. They just survived to adulthood and found the words.
What Autistic Adults Are Actually Trying to Say
Here’s what gets lost in the heat of the conflict: the autistic adults in these spaces are not, by and large, trying to make parents feel terrible for loving their children. They are trying — sometimes badly, sometimes with accumulated frustration that comes out sharper than ideal — to say something important.
They are saying: we were those children. We know what certain things felt like from the inside, and some of what felt terrible from the inside looked fine from the outside. And some of what was done to us in the name of helping us caused damage that took decades to understand and name.
They are saying: “Don’t underestimate self-advocates’ level of not only empathy, but also information that they hold to support you on your journey. Yes, sometimes they come off as abrasive — but what you’re seeing is someone who is begging you to do better.
Begging you to do better. That’s what the sharpness usually is, underneath it. Not cruelty, not elitism and certainly not an argument that your child’s struggles aren’t real. It’s people who have the lived experience that you cannot have — the experience of being the autistic child — trying to get you to hear something that you won’t be able to learn any other way.
Because here’s the thing about being the parent of an autistic child: you love them completely. You observe them constantly. You know things about them that nobody else knows. And you will never, not ever, know what it feels like to be them. That’s not a failing. That’s just the limit of being a different person.
Autistic adults can give you something you cannot get anywhere else. They can tell you what it felt like from the inside.
That is not nothing. That is everything.
The Part About ABA That Everyone Is Too Afraid to Say Plainly
I’m going to say it plainly.
Applied Behavior Analysis — ABA therapy — is the most common intervention for autistic children. It’s hailed by ABA therapists and many families as the most effective, most scientifically proven way to support autistic people. It is also the intervention that autistic adults most consistently and most intensely object to.
And the conversation between those two facts is not happening, not really, because the parents who swear by ABA and the autistic adults who describe it as traumatic are mostly screaming past each other on social media rather than sitting with the actual tension between those two realities.
Here’s what I think is true, holding both sides honestly:
Some parents have watched ABA help their children develop communication skills and navigate environments that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. That experience is real.
Many autistic adults report that ABA trained them, from very early ages, to suppress their natural behaviors, to perform compliance regardless of their internal state, to prioritize making neurotypical people comfortable over their own wellbeing. That experience is also real. And the research on the mental health outcomes of intensive ABA — the correlation with PTSD symptoms, the impact of suppressed stimming on emotional regulation — is not nothing.
Both things can be true. A therapy can produce short-term functional gains and long-term psychological costs simultaneously, depending on how it’s implemented and what goals it prioritizes. That’s not a paradox. That’s a complicated reality that requires a more complicated conversation than either side is currently willing to have.
What autistic adults are asking, when they push back on ABA, is this: what is the goal? If the goal is making the child easier to manage, more palatable to neurotypical observers, better at suppressing the behaviors that mark them as different — that’s a goal worth examining. If the goal is genuinely helping the child develop skills they want and need and that serve their own flourishing — that’s different, and it looks different in practice, and it’s worth asking whether what your child is receiving is the first kind or the second.
That question doesn’t make you a bad parent for asking it. It makes you the parent who actually wants to get this right.
What the Parents Are Getting Right That Autistic Adults Sometimes Miss
This goes both ways. And I mean that.
Some corners of autistic adult advocacy online have a problem with how they talk about parents — particularly parents of children with high support needs. The framing that parents are simply ableist, that their grief is invalid, that their search for support is inherently harmful — that framing does real damage too.
Parenting an autistic child with high support needs is genuinely, legitimately hard in ways that deserve to be named without immediately being redirected to a lecture about ableism. The systems that are supposed to support these families are chronically underfunded, inaccessible, and designed without any input from the people using them. Parents are often navigating medical crises, IEP battles, insurance denials, and a society that provides almost no meaningful support, while also being told that any expression of struggle is evidence that they don’t love their child enough.
That’s not okay either.
“It is painful to watch parents who should be my and my son’s allies instead publicly declare war against the autistic adults their children will grow up to be.” Yes. And it is also painful to watch autistic advocates treat every struggling parent as an enemy rather than someone who is drowning and reaching for anything that might help.
We need each other. That’s the thing neither side seems to want to admit.
Parents need autistic adults because autistic adults have the lived experience that parents cannot have. Autistic adults need parents — particularly parents of children with high support needs — in the political fights for funding, services, and rights that affect the entire autistic lifespan, not just childhood.
The fight for rights and supports for all autistic people is one fight. Dividing it is exactly what the people who want to cut Medicaid and gut disability services are counting on.
What Actually Happens When Parents Listen
I want to tell you what I’ve watched happen when parents actually do the thing — when they put down the defensiveness and genuinely listen to autistic adults.
“It’s given me confidence and far better insight into my son’s competence. I feel far less panicked about this idea of a window of opportunity closing.” That’s a parent who listened. Who heard something that shifted their relationship to their child’s future. Who stopped seeing their autistic child through the lens of a developmental race against time and started seeing them as a person with a future that is unknown but not doomed.
The traditional model — parents and professionals deciding what’s best for autistic people without their input — is being replaced by a participatory model where autistic individuals shape their own support. This is happening. Slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of conflict along the way, but it’s happening. And the families who lean into it are finding something better. Not easier. Better.
Listening to autistic adults doesn’t mean agreeing with everything. It doesn’t mean abandoning your own observations about your own child. Doesn’t mean that every autistic adult online has all the answers or that lived experience automatically trumps all other knowledge.
It means treating autistic adults as a source of irreplaceable information about something you cannot know any other way. It means giving their experiences the weight they deserve instead of dismissing them because they look different from your child today.
Your child is going to grow up. They are going to become an autistic adult. The question is what kind of world that adult inhabits, and what relationship they have with themselves, and whether they were given the tools to understand their own brain rather than just to perform neurotypicality well enough that the adults around them felt better.
Autistic adults are trying to help you get that right. When they’re sharp about it, it’s usually because they’ve been trying to get someone to listen for a very long time.
The Part I Say as an Autistic Parent of an Autistic Child
I want to end here because this is where I live.
I am autistic, I understand my child in ways that I genuinely would not if I weren’t, I recognize things in them that I recognize from the inside, I know what certain overwhelm looks like because I’ve felt it, and I also know what a meltdown is not because I was told but because I have had them. Most importantly, I know what it costs to mask because I’ve been paying that cost my whole life.
And I am still learning from other autistic adults. Still encountering perspectives on autism that shift how I understand my own child and myself. Still finding pieces of the picture that I couldn’t have gotten from parenting alone, even autistic parenting.
If I — who have every possible insider advantage — still need that community, still benefit from listening to autistic adults who see and name things I haven’t found words for yet — then parents who are not autistic need it even more.
This is not about who loves their child more. Every parent in this conversation loves their child. That part is not in question.
It’s about who has information that you can’t get anywhere else. And that information is sitting in the minds and the memories and the hard-won understanding of autistic adults who were once autistic children, who made it here, and who are trying very hard to reach back.
Let them.
It might be the most important thing you do for your kid.
— Tessa (they/them) Autistic adult. Autistic parent. Both, simultaneously, always.
