inattentiveness to danger carrying over into parenthood

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im wondering if any autistic parents or those who co-parent with an autistic adult see issues with appropriately recognizing dangerous situations in regards to the care of their children.

my SO is a good man and very loving father. he is also in the middle of getting diagnostic testing done, and we fully expect his formal diagnosis will be classic autism. throughout our time together we have had some good sized disagreements on parenting issues. the majority of these have centered around how he speaks to children (granted i now know this is usually communication issues and sensory overload), his getting absorbed in his own interests and not watching the children, and situations he finds acceptable that i dont due to dangers.

for example, on saturday we went to best buy specifically because i needed to get a new phone. our 7 yr old NT and our 5 yr old AD sons went with us. i stopped at the mobile department and he and the kids went to the video games halfway across the store. multiple times my SO came over to the mobile dept and was watching what was going on with my phone. when i was almost done, he was back again for several minutes. i told him multiple times i was uncomfortable with the boys being unattended in the store and asked him to return to the kids, and he kept refusing. he insisted that they were safe and that he had told the 7 yr old to stay with his little brother. when i was done at the mobile dept, we went to get the children, and they were gone from the video games. we split up to find them, and did find them in another area of the store.

things like this have happened several times. K just turned 5 last week, and he is a wanderer. my SO has "lost" him in walmart, mcdonalds (he left playland and the building), target, at home.... i work full time at the apt complex we live at, and multiple times K has come to my office from our apt without his dad knowing he had left. some of these issues are strictly inattentiveness to the childs whereabouts or because my SO was lost in his own interests, but other times they have to do with permissive parenting that goes into what i consider dangerous territory. things such as letting K play outside by himself or with other kids, sometimes right outside the patio door but other times 100 yards away at the other end of the building while my SO is in the kitchen, not in the line of sight and busy with other things.

i dont claim to be a perfect parent by any means, and in fact K has wandered away from both of us on 2 separate occasions before we knew he was asd, for less than a minute each time but those instances terrified me. i tend to watch him like a hawk these days.

after best buy on saturday, SO and i had a calm discussion about it, during which he agreed not to leave K without an adult again. unfortunately hes agreed to similar things in the past, and its sometimes an escape where he will say whatever i want to hear just to get out of a conversation he doesnt want to have. he has severe trouble with personal or intimate conversations, so basically he will lie to me to get me to shut up and go away.

so i am curious if any other parents have dealt with issues like this, and ways they found to work with it. due to my employment, my SO provides the bulk of the childcare during school holidays and summer vacation, as well as after school before i get home. this creates a lot of anxiety for me and stress in our relationship. we have done some things to prevent K from wandering off, like a high inside lock on our front door, but it doesnt solve the issue of poor decision making or inattentiveness. i want to feel my kids, specifically K, are safe when i am not around, but i often dont, or cant, feel that way.

I relate to that but not in an aspie/NT way, more in a male/female way. I have the same exact problem with my husband, i'm always asking him where he left the children, pay attention she's going to fall, don't give her a knife, (barely exaggerating ) and all i get in return is a shrug. I don't feel that it has anything to do with AS, as i personally have a tendency to visualize what might happen in very graphic details, and i only get the horror version ... son running in the stairs: i see his neck snapping as he falls head first. Things like that. So i'm always on the watch.

I have been exactly the opposite. My son is now 2 years old and for the entire two years of his life I have had to check on him a couple of times a night to make sure he is still breathing. I still have a hard time leaving him alone in a room while I am doing something in another. I stress over what he is eating and drive my wife nuts as I constantly worry over the possibility that he is going to choke on something, so I dice everything I give him into little pieces. My NT wife is the one trying to introduce a small level of danger into his life so I don't force him to grow up sheltered.

You should show him cases where children have gone missing or were abducted when their parents let them wander off alone or even with other children.

If that didn't work, honestly, I would not let him watch the children.

some may be gender related, but there are a lot of things that are from distinctly autistic traits. things like getting so involved in one of your special interests (a video game or an online chat forum) that you literally do not hear the 4 yr old asd child open the door and leave the house, or because you took your laptop to mcd's to read the forums and didnt notice that same child walk right by you and out of the play area. part of it is due to his special interest in books on tape, he has an mp3 player on and in his ear about 12 hours a day, nearly every moment he is not at his computer, even while we eat dinner (unless i ask him to turn it off, and a lot of times i get flack for that), and he wears it to bed to go to sleep to. you cant hear the children around you when some man is droning on in your ear reading a book. he also uses it as a defensive coping mechanism when out in public (children at the park, shopping, etc).

so part is strictly from inattentiveness. i get that, and i understand how it happens, even tho i wish he could control it better. but the things that worry me most are the just plain poor decisions, and ive started wondering if they are related to the issue of being oblivious to dangers that our son has and that is not uncommon in autistic children. who lets a 4 yr old autistic child with a history of wandering off play outside without an adult or older child in sight (and no, 7 isnt "older")? who leaves them in a busy retail store and goes to the other side of the store?

really, my SO and K are soooo much alike, age hasnt tempered some of my SO's traits at all. he wanders off too, its very frustrating to shop with him as you will turn around and hes gone, not even a mention of where hes going, so you have to scour the store for him. last grocery shopping trip he did it 3 times. at least with him i dont worry about him being kidnapped or wandering outside into the street, but one of these days im gonna leave him at the store =P

hes a smart guy, he knows the dangers and the statistical outcomes of kidnappings, but its almost like hes lost in his own world looking at something shiny, while K wanders off lost in his own world following something shiny....

ive started looking into an autism service dog for K. they are often trained for tracking and preventing wandering off. i think this may be just one of the many ways it would be beneficial for him and our whole family.

i wish it could be as easy as reducing the amount of time D has to watch the kids. but someone has to work full time, and someone has to watch the kids. given his increasing social isolation and anxiety the past few years, that means i work full time and he works part time and watches the kids. financially theres no way we could pay someone to watch them. even if he were able to find a job he could do, the income wouldnt be enough to pay for daycare for 2 kids. not to mention the problems with putting an autistic child into daycare. thats why i am trying to find a way to make our current situation work more securely.

If he is not fit to watch the children, he is not fit to watch the children. What would you do if he physically were not there to watch them? You'd have to take on some level of life style discomfort to accommodate that, no excuses.

I'm curious, how did you meet him and why did you marry him?

That is more the way my husband does it. AS really does tend to put one at the extremes, doesn't it?

Azurecrayon, some of our friends have the issue you described and the wife tends to simply tell her friends that she worries, and to ask us to fill in for her husband's inattentiveness if we're all going to be in the same place and she has to be somewhere else. She's let's it be when she has to, because letting her husband feel trusted is important to their relationship, but when she can grab a backup, she does. A subtle, back door, way of dealing with it. I admit, I took that back up role quite seriously last time she asked me to do it, because it got obvious fast why she had asked. I just tactfully kept inviting their kids to join ours

This is me, exactly. I still have a baby monitor in my kids' room. They are 2.5 and 6 . I'm just so paranoid about not hearing them if something goes wrong. Same with the choking fear.

I used to have 2 video monitors on my son from different angles. When he turned 1 I dropped that to 1 video monitor and when he turned 20 months I switched to an audio monitor. I am slowly breaking myself of the paranoia just in time to start working on the next one

I also have a baby monitor in my son's room and he is almost 6. I know I am overprotective because he is my only child, but I can't help it. We all sleep upstairs, and I am afraid he will get up and wander down the stairs. I don't know why, because usually if he gets up in the night, he will come straight into our room.

Azure, I totally understand where you are coming from. I don't think my husband has full blown AS, but he definitely has lots of characteristics. I remember when my son was only a baby about 11 or 12 mos. and my husband was supposed to be watching him and I would walk into the room and my husband would be snoozing in the chair and my baby would be trying to pull himself up to grab a lamp or something. My husband gets caught up in watching TV or reading or surfing the internet, and I know he is not paying attention at times. There are times when I have to go out for a few hours on the weekend, but I always feel uneasy about leaving my son for any more time than that. I know I drive my husband crazy reminding him to not leave our son unattended. I try to tell him that even though our son is getting a little better at not getting into things, sometimes I will walk in and he is putting something into his mouth that he is not supposed to or climbing up on something that he is not supposed to.

Anyway, I don't really have any advice but I wanted you to know that you are not alone in your feelings. I do wonder at times too though if this could be a male/female thing to some degree. But it does sound like leaving a child unattended in a store is more of an AS thing.

Good luck with your dilemma.....

we met online actually. neither of us were trying to meet someone, we met playing an mmo as we are both gamers. we are not actually married, but we've lived together for almost 12 yrs. i imagine we are together for the usual reason couples make a life together =) trying to pay to put two children in daycare is not a life style discomfort, unless you count a roof over your head and clothes on your back a luxury.

i am not overly protective, not by any means. but i do of course check to make sure the kids are still breathing when i get up at night =P thats a common parent action. i do it especially with K, i think in part because there was a moment in his life that he did stop breathing. he had abdominal surgery at 3 weeks old for pyloric stenosis, and afterward had to learn to suck again. he hadnt nursed or taken a bottle in days at that point, and his first feeding after surgery he got the sucking part down, but couldnt coordinate the breathing at the same time. he stopped breathing and turned blue, and i had to call the nurses and they had to bag him and get him breathing again. so yeah, i still check every night that hes breathing, and my heart still races if i cant see it right away.

my SO is overall a great dad, and i cant say i dont trust him. he would never hurt the boys, but there are times i think his decision making is a little skewed. he has never shirked his duties as a father, he is always willing to do more than his fair share in taking care of them, stinky diapers and all. he has been wonderful to my oldest who is not his biological son, and has always made sure that N had anything he wanted or needed. as a stepdad, he has done 100 times more for N than N's bio dad has ever done (and N spends every summer with his bio dad so its not like the guy is physically absent from his life).

i cant fault him for his willingness to do for his kids. and i wont fault him for things that i think come from the autism, because thats simply not within his control. just like i dont punish K for a meltdown over a transition. i was just hoping there was someone out there going through the same thing who had some answers and solutions. and it sounds like there are others in similar circumstances, but not a lot of concrete solutions.

maybe they BOTH need an autism service dog