Developmental Changes in Families with Autistic Children

Abstract

Trite as that beginning may be, I chose it because it has an emphasis we need. Note that it does not say, “Every family with an autistic child is unhappy in its own way,” just “every unhappy family.” In thinking about this topic—developmental changes in families with an autistic child—I kept running into dead ends: Of every example of change that our son Ed wrought in our lives, I could say, “It would have happened anyway—or something very like it.” So what we are going to be looking at here doesn’t have as much to do with autism as it does with stress and different ways of reacting to it.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Tolstoi, Anna Karenina