Understanding

I had an interesting evening at church. One of the families that I'm friends with has two little autistic girls, and the dad is in the air force. He just left until August, then will be back for a couple of weeks and then will leave again for the Middle East until January. So the poor mom has her hands REALLY full! And the kids just started school. So I was trying to help her tonight at church. No big deal, that is what it means to be part of the church.

But what annoyed me was later. The girls went to children's church, fine, they usually do pretty well there. But today they didn't do "Treasure Chest." Pretty much every week the kids get to pick something out of the treasure chest, just some cheap little toy. For those of you who don't know much about autism, change messes them up! They just don't have the capacity to deal with change. So these poor little girls are dealing with a lot of change and the treasure chest thing just threw them over the edge. Ok, so this still isn't the problem yet. It isn't any ones fault that the kids reacted this way. And it doesn't reflect on the parents, it is just how the kids' brain works.

The problem comes in the reaction of other people around us. There were so many dirty looks around us. And people were making comments about the fit being because she didn't get a toy. You could tell that some people just thought she was spoiled and throwing a fit because she didn't get her way. And really, it wasn't the toy, it was the change.

I know people can't really tell the difference, but PLEASE don't assume that just because a kid is throwing a fit over something little, that they are just spoiled. There could be a hundred things behind that that you don't know about it. And in a church especially is not the place to judge the mom or the kids. We are the people who should be helping in whatever way we can. We should be the ones taking the kids so that she can stop and breathe for a few seconds. We are the ones that should be encouraging the mom and supporting her as she deals with all this craziness. We aren't the ones that should be giving her dirty looks and making little comments behind her back! GRRRR!!!!