A friend whose daughter is autistic recently told me that her therapist encouraged her to mourn the daughter she didn’t get (i.e., the neurotypical one). My friend struggles to parent her daughter, who is not quite the companion she had envisioned when she was pregnant. The imagined child was going to be different, and the task at hand was to grieve.

There is no doubt that raising a disabled child makes parenting more challenging. Things we were counting on, like an easier lifestyle, a supportive community, or clear school choices, are no longer guaranteed. But it’s vital to point out that even though many of these experiences may not happen, it’s not the child we are mourning. We are grieving our own expectations, the systems around us, and the stigma, uncertainty, and stress of raising a neurodivergent child in a neurotypical world.

This misplaced grief narrative, advocated by my friend’s therapist, stems from a deficit-based framework that views autism as a loss. The grief narrative becomes a therapy trope and a developmental mandate for the parent to mourn. When clinicians insist that parents must grieve who their child is, that narrative becomes profoundly damaging. The problem shifts to the child rather than focusing on the environment, and autistic children are highly sensitive to the emotional tone around them. They pick up the message that “There is something about me that is bad and must be gotten over.”

Parents of autistic........

© Psychology Today