Parenting a Family with Autism Spectrum Disorder (My Perfect Family: The Priestleys)

as a family trying to raise three autistic children in a society that really struggles to understand what autism is is really hard most people wouldn't understand how much time and effort that goes into creating a good life for these young people welcome because we don't want our children living a life excluded from things the more people understand autism the better our society is going to be [Music] i've got an amazing family and exceptional children they may technically sit on the autism spectrum but to me they've just got their own specialties they're all incredibly gifted sophie she's really funny and really outgoing she's on the spectrum harry this is mine does mine is constantly going he's on the spectrum liam he's my oldest son he's very high functioning autistic so he's very clever connor's exceptionally fit and sporty he loves to play soccer he's not on the spectrum maybe just need a bit of food rachel she's my loving wife she's the rock that holds us all together she's always thinking about everyone else without that we wouldn't be able to have such a tight family i guess it's just a busy six person family and i'm acutely aware that we probably don't seem a typical autistic disabled family and actually there's so much that goes on and families who are raising children who have autism but don't meet those stereotypical labels who are getting on with life most of the time who just have a few barriers to to overcome but as a family we think about autism as a strength and not to be embarrassed about for me autism is great i think i get all of the benefits of it you know i can learn really quick i can take information really well but um i guess there are some downsides too like um i get this you know that's stereotypical can't read people they're not looking into people's eyes because it's weird feeling um and i think they're missing some stuff just kind of makes a bit hard got all these children and not one of them's helping doing any cleaning something went wrong somewhere part of me why don't children do the cleaning go and get them then pick your battles yep liam is my first baby and you don't know anything other than what you get given i guess and i just thought that children at two and three could draw schematics and he could talk in these really complex sentences and had these really adult type thoughts so we had him tested to find out what his intelligence was and i think it was at that point they mentioned either some he might be on the spectrum because of the way he responds to questions about emotions and things slightly different hardest part about autism for me i don't understand people and their feelings so often i'll do something and then someone will say to me it's like why didn't you think about that and i'm like well i can't really yeah um hurting people's feelings are you sad i'm very sad they're still learning the rules of social engagement and that social awkwardness what do you say when somebody says that or how do you respond to a situation yeah like that's pretty true he's a pretty good older brother oh no how does that make you feel that i've been lied to betrayed william and connor have always been a tight wee unit connor is just your average kiwi boy and he's so empathetic and so not on the spectrum this is my trinket box it's full of everything in the world see harry is diagnosed with autism and adhd i probably use the expression to describe harry as the most impacted by his autism from papua new guinea autism is like i have superpowers but not superpowers i've got really good smell and hearing and sometimes really annoying because then i can smell the ants and i can't hear my own voice so i can't hear how loud i am or quiet i am and it's really annoying for a family i just do squiggles and then draw flowers on them i'm bad at unicorns when sophie was three or four she was doing some really typical autistic things lining up animals in a really regimented way she will mask a lot of the stuff that's going on for her she gets really confused about what's happening in social situations and then when she'll get home it's like a bottle of lemonade being shaken up and when you open it it all just explodes i noticed at school that she would react to situations which were difficult she got deeply affected by things that shouldn't really have been so important she would sort of fly off the handle a lot easier than other kids autism makes me feel different and special the worst part about autism is and it's hard to get along people as the kids were getting diagnosed the more we found out about it the more i started to realise that that was me when i was a child they didn't really understand autism very well 30 years ago i was just kind of a naughty smart kid i haven't like really been formally diagnosed so i was kind of in trouble a lot and i started to realize yeah no i'm not really very empathetic and um you know i could be very blunt what and even now it's still still the same for me i still find a struggle with it sometimes i can explain all my bad behavior but or all of my behavior um but i don't really care [Music] i don't know can you help me okay i'm a planner and an organizer and i run this house like a bit of a military operation which is a bit of a joke but it's what it needs to happen for it to run really smoothly no those are just jackets i think they haven't yeah so where is that i don't know i usually get up get things started harry's next up and we just do it piece by piece by piece usually it's pretty calm and i try and keep it really relaxed because i feel like my job in the morning is to get the children to school in their best possible mindset we have a sister pretty cool system me and connor are sleeping you guys do all the work we get up eat some food annoy everybody go back to bed then you guys complain that we're not being useful enough then these guys go to school man kind of finally get up then we get our stuff ready and then we go to school i probably do a lot more in the mornings for the children but there's about that much that they can do in a day and you want that much to be stuff that's going to be in their learning environment where's your school back i sit out alone harry and sophie struggle to go to school most weeks so most people wouldn't understand how much time and effort that goes into our day oh the doors are frozen shut so we probably don't appear to be anything different to most families which is a great thing but at the same time people aren't as compassionate as understanding when things do go wrong so we probably appear as this big family with these really naughty children a lot of the time or a family who are making excuses for their child's behaviour all right love come on come on good girl you're all right climb out everyone's gone ready you look beautiful here you go safe i've got to go to work come on okay come out sophie rose no now i need to go to work come on so out you can't sit in the car all day so you got to take them to the office now okay that's your job there you go you're gonna take hunter to the office bye come back [Music] i do not like school because socializing at school it's hard because everyone there thinks i'm different because they don't want to play with me really [Music] sophie has a lot of rules to how life should be and that is a struggle sometimes because she has lots of rules around friendships and her friends have to follow her roles and little girls don't want to follow another little girl's rules all the time and also the ability to gauge a situation or know what to say isn't something that comes naturally some of these skills have to be learnt so if you can imagine if you're having a conversation with somebody and i know how to instantly react if you start to get sad but for liam harry and sophie it doesn't come naturally they're really thinking about now how should i respond so that's what dawn teaches them i'd be a bit afraid i'm a behavioral consultant and i work with children with learning needs but i specialize with children with autism sophie is more high anxiety a lot of girls present quite differently to boys and they mask their autism really well because they mimic other children they will stand on the periphery they will watch what the other children are doing and then they will copy what they're doing last year she really struggled so i worked with her to find out exactly what was wrong and one of the big things was she couldn't decide on who to choose to play with she found playing with too many girls at once was overwhelming the noise was too much the choices of games was too much following the rules was too much so what we did we spoke to the girls and asked them if they would be happy for us to put in a play chart of who she would play with each day and that really helped sophie and her friends were really understanding and now we don't have to do that she can just go out and play and she can cope with it by herself what do you need to do once he's finished if you've ever missed he says i had to finish my art because everyone else has finished my year out harry is really clever and bright child he's very passionate about animals nature he does have troubles in the classroom with particular things such as noise surprises if he's not sure what's happening then it can overwhelm him but he's got strategies that we work on to help him adapt to those things this is my calm down and this is my massage [Music] he likes using his hands if he's feeling overwhelmed or tired him being able to go to that box really helps him just to kind of get into a good space we had one incident last year where harry was really upset he couldn't go into class in the mornings and we couldn't work out what it was and it turned out that harry has got high sensory needs and his sense of smell is really really large and he can smell ants and there were ants in the classroom so we had to get rid of these ants before we could get him back in the classroom perfect harry goes to a mainstream school and i am adamant that he has the opportunity to mix with his peers and it's good for other children to learn what autism is and how do you support somebody with autism because the more people understand him and other people like him the better our society is going to be rachel in about 20 minutes come on we're going in here that's that no one is rachel paul hepa is a residential provider we provide a range of living solutions for adults with disabilities so my role is to meet new families that have expressed an interest in um getting call here to support them doing something different and how do you make that all work in this incredibly confusing system of funding and housing and rules and regulations and how to pull that all together because it needs a person to make that all kind of happen if you have a look at that about seven years ago when harry was diagnosed with autism i was just getting turned away all the time every time i tried to advocate for what they needed or what i thought they needed so i thought right i just need a bigger piece of paper than a mum then i'd always kind of had an interest in social work so i did my social work qualifications through messy by distance i'm extremely proud that she's managed doing a degree and raising these children and then raising me as well and she's working in a similar sort of area i think she finds it really rewarding and fulfilling she's doing a great job [Music] so this is lj assembly this is where we assemble the large jets so i designed the control systems which actuate it and make it move and then this is controlled by the photos on the bridge which the operator drives the boat with i've always worked with boats for 20 years i've worked in defence on the anzac frigates and the protector class ships designing electrical systems for those being on the spectrum i've got a quite a good ability to visualize things in my head so i can generally see the problems before they occur with aidan's job he has to travel a lot so i parent alone for about 10 weeks of the year so as a family we're learning really quickly it's about the right people that surround us [Music] the bumblebee for our family having a break is really tricky because there's not many people that can manage the complexity of three children with autism and then you're adding change and then you're putting in somebody that they might not know or trust it's often a recipe for failure until we met big lamb and big lamb showed that if you have the right carer in place you can actually have breaks and last year aiden and i had our first night away as a couple after 14 years or something crazy i'm going to push you real high though hold on oh bud's going to get hit now stop being a carer especially with kids of a young age i feel like you've really got to just be yourself because they can see right through here you know mum doesn't like dad putting up posters i did yeah this might have a cool spider-man poster and imagine if sam was like that you would die i i feel sometimes harry he's just a wild boy he'll just go and go and go try and take it for a walk or go for a swing or a swim or anything like that just to burn off some energy and then i mean sophie she's brutally honest you know i walked up to school today she said i don't like your haircut i liked it longer than the first thing she noticed we talk about autistic children not having a filter sophie certainly does that you know she will tell you exactly what she thinks if you want to hear it or not and sometimes it's okay [Music] she's learning when to think it in her head but not say it out loud and because we can't get rid of the connector it's going to be a big hole there oh we'll just put a little plate there what i was actually thinking is if we look under the bracket there's a hole so you could go put under the bracket and feed out through there liam's go-to guy for i.t in the house because there are benefits to being on the spectrum logical thinking nowadays is very important as everything's based around computers and visualization things like that being able to see in inside your head what's something how it will work what it looks like so he's learning how to be a plumber and an electrician and an i.t engineer and you know he's learning all of those skills and he's only 14. hey dad yeah i'm gonna give it a tug okay when i met aiden he would talk about his adolescence being the most challenging part of his life that social awkwardness having a parent in the family with autism makes this job a lot easier because he can share with me how it feels and i can learn from aiden about how he sees things ready so just hold it there jiggle it so it'll come down now the boys are sort of coming to that teenage age i can see the potential areas where they're going to struggle because it's easy to sort of put behavior down to just being rude like i've got a learned response for how i need to act it's taken a long time to kind of piece together by making mistakes you know if something goes wrong then i need to sort of show some empathy even though i don't really feel it and this is quite hard and especially and that's why you know i don't like large groups of people i don't like having to i've got to really work hard to think about oh how do i need to behave how should i be acting because i might upset people and and i can do that quite easily by being very blunt so fortunately we've got connor and rachel that um very good at seeing the other side lamb has a really nice relationship with a girl from his school they've been together as a couple for over a year now and it's been really really helpful for liam's growth to work out the rules of relationships i've been going with my girlfriend for about a year and it's best year of my life actually yeah we have said i love you to each other i'm pretty sure i understood it because it's just you know it's something that you should really understand before you say it it was because it takes a lot of thinking time for me to actually understand a big thing like that it's physically and emotionally exhausting for me to understand small emotions so i think yeah it was something that i really meant connor do you want to play space engineers kind of play space engineers no it's boiling the surface above it don't tease him about his overheating laptop [Music] connor serves up he plane no come on it's kind of neat as a family we've got this sort of common denominator between a lot of us which also it really worries me it kind of excludes connor a little bit we have to be very careful because we find ourselves putting a lot of effort into supporting the other three kids so i'm very aware that he feels like he gets left out it is really hard and i'm so mindful that he doesn't get lost in that busyness of three children with quite strong needs he just wants to be a typical young man and do typical young men things [Music] auntie anne she is incredible to this family she gives honor one-to-one time it's really focused all about him so once a week he goes out on a sad day for the entire day go and play soccer and then they'd go off and do the market and fixing cars and then come home so it was a really nice break for him [Music] now this woman here is amazing because her and her husband they've come early they put up the tent today they're running a barbecue last time i think they paid for the sausages and the bread yeah um they bring connor to all his games she is an amazing lady [Music] i was thinking you guys have both been so good today that i was thinking about doing a no-rules night [Music] what's no rules for you sir well the rules are for us one night i was just so tired of no rules and as long as you guys are doing the right thing i'm not going to see any rules all of a sudden we had these really well-behaved children that weren't fighting with each other and having a whole lot of fun and i'm getting a break and it just worked [Music] yep see these loops we can use these we'll just look them up and then we just need to get this loop we have nature play school one day a week i was aware that in the new zealand legislation children can attend a different school one day a week we've also learned that harry and sophie clearly don't enjoy going to school five days a week so i started to look for what would be the right fit for them to have a break and do what they love to do which is to have no rules and to be free and for harry in particular he loves bugs and birds this yeah no guys stop we need this to be like super tight are you really heavy don't go on i need you to pull this again can you pull this piece for this okay so with our nature-based play programs all our curriculum is looked at from both a sensory child development point of view as well as an education and fun point of view so it's a bit more holistic um with what we have children doing throughout the day with a really nice balance of some intentional teaching and a lot of child-led play hey two people on this side three people on this side three people on this side nato school is really cool because there's kim she brings in tools and hammers and sores and stuff like that and we cut down the dead trees there was a borer we saw two borah there was heaps of hoo-hoo holes as well and if you touch the tree it just fell into dust because some of the tree fell into dust look how much i got hardly sophie has really hooked him with another girl that's here and they are on their own mission a lot of the time they have been quite creative and expressive and they both have a passion for mud they just go is fun maria is really cool and she's my best friend definitely and incredible there's been benefits that i didn't anticipate finding our village we had this amazing community of very similar-minded parents who were open and accepting of a little bit different a little bit quirky and these are all things that are really critical to their success as being an adult but it takes a huge amount of time and effort to find those resources and you also have to spend a lot of time talking to people because there's no resource in the community that says here are all the options that you could choose no so every friday auntie and uncle come and have dinner and every now and then we have other people over and just to say thanks so thank you for all the hard work around putin helps us out so tonight we've got a big lem and cya and sarah here as well they're also carers without rachel's never-ending efforts to keep the family working smoothly we wouldn't be in the situation she pulls off his amazing achievement of raising all of us and helping us the family grow autism has taught me that everybody has their own view on their own life i think having a lived experience of disability makes me a richer person and i'm super proud of all my children i'm really excited about their future because i think for all of the kids it's going to be something pretty incredible i couldn't be more proud of my children i think they're all incredibly gifted it would be a boring life without having some autistic kids [Music] bye

Channel: Attitude

Views: 851,343

Keywords: AttitudeLive, Disability, my perfect family attitude, autism children, autism spectrum disorder, autism spectrum kids, autism family vlogs, parenting a child with a disability, intellectual disability, autism awareness, parenting autism, autism family, autism spectrum disorder documentary, autism children behaviour, intellectual disability children, intellectual disability documentary, autism family journey, my perfect family, autism spectrum disorder explained

Id: uBWCY0yF_5g

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020

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[u/Quandarylad]

I do not like this video. Very sweet kids. Reminds me way too much of my own family dynamic... where my mother exploited us and forced us to behave like the perfect family because she was a narcissist. This woman has exactly the same body language as my narc mother.