If there is one thing we can agree on in this polarized world, it is that we live in difficult times. Economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, technological absurdity, and cultural anarchy are taking their toll on our bodies and minds. Many of us wish we could bid farewell to 2025 right now.
My own struggles this year have often come in the realm of parenting. Our five-year-old son is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which makes for a complicated existence. As the name suggests, people with A.S.D. (hereafter usually “autism”) are not monolithic but exist across a varied spectrum, with differing abilities and needs. Autism typically involves difficulties in language and sensory processing, as well as struggles with social engagement. However, the degree to which it can be considered a disability depends very much on the individual person.
For our son, it has meant significant developmental delays in language and social skills. Though he is now in kindergarten, his progress in those areas is similar to a two- or three-year-old. What follows are the unique experiences of one set of parents and one autistic boy. Yet, I believe they reflect the experiences of a wide range of parents of children with special needs.
This is my meditation on what it is like to raise an autistic child in the year of our Lord 2025: the difficulties, the hope, and the ultimate dignity of human life.
Both the Christian and general book markets feature a plethora of volumes targeting parents. How can you get a baby to stop crying? Help a toddler maintain a diverse and nutritious diet? Discipline a willful teenager? These questions and more have been answered thousands of times by authors with varying credentials.
In the first two years of my son’s life, I perused some of these volumes—which is not to say that I purchased them, but they were gifted to me, so I attempted to read them. One author suggested the French had the best parenting method, another the Dutch, and another Sub-Saharan Africans. Children with genuine developmental difficulties rarely feature in this literature.
Much of the standard parenting advice, whether Christian or not, has proved inapplicable to our son. I well remember a book on potty training (recommended by our son’s pediatrician, no less!) in which the author identified a six-month window around age two in which parents must get their child toilet trained. Delay past this point, she warned, could be fatal. My son is five and a half years old and still wears diapers, along with many of his autistic peers. Every battle-tested strategy has failed. Where is the manual for us?
One thing you learn quickly when raising an autistic child is that the condition is still so mysterious and its subjects so varied that there is no one-size-fits-all advice. In fact, there is sometimes no advice of any kind, and certainly no prognostications. One medical professional after another has steadfastly refused to forecast our son’s developmental trajectory. “But what have you seen in the past…” No, they cannot possibly answer. “But surely you’ve seen similar five-year-olds…” No, it would be wrong of them to make predictions.
At a recent meeting with a behavioral psychologist, in which she witnessed my son become trapped in a verbal loop that defied all efforts to calm him, she admitted, “We don’t really have any research in this area.” This is a common refrain. After all, some people with autism require little or no intervention, while others need full-time, intensive assistance. How can you write treatment guidelines across such a wide spectrum? How can you standardize research criteria when your participants hold little in common?
I have often felt like a sailor using one of those old timey maps, the features near the edge less clear than those in the center. As I hold my son close, trying and failing to allay his fears, I think, “We are off the edge of the map.” This is a place of strange and fantastic creatures, unknown and thus not understood.
Here there be dragons.
Comparing two families’ difficulties is a devilish game. I am fond of saying there is “no Olympics of suffering,” which is not to deny that some pains are worse than others, but to acknowledge that by ranking experiences of suffering on any kind of scale, we risk trivializing genuine hardships.
Having said that, there is no doubt that raising children with developmental delays can be uniquely difficult. A family with ten children might have fewer medical appointments in any given year than my son. There is something inherently easier about parenting a child who can converse, understand social cues, and endure changes to the daily schedule without dissolving in tears.
Raising children with autism can be physically, mentally, and financially draining. This is not to say that is always the case, for there are major behavioral differences between autistic children, but many such parents report feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and in desperate need of a break. Yet, precisely because of the behavioral difficulties, these parents struggle to find anyone willing to care for their children so they can get away for a few days or even a few hours.
Grandparents, often first in line to care for little ones, may struggle to deal with children who need more constant attention, including physical support while going to the toilet or doing other life activities. My own son is currently going through a phase where, if he gets too upset about something, he begins grabbing us by the hair, hitting, kicking, and pressing his head into ours with significant force.
While these behavioral issues are usually rooted in frustrations over communication struggles or difficulty processing emotions (as opposed to actual nefarious intent), that is little comfort to the babysitter who suddenly finds herself in a physical tussle. Potential caregivers may also balk at having to change diapers for an older child, administer medications, or prepare food for the world’s pickiest eater.
This means that despite needing extra time to retreat and recharge, parents of autistic children often find themselves unable to get any. Some go years without spending a night alone with their spouse and begin to think of date nights as some kind of mythical occurrence that happens in a fantasy land.
During a recent trip to a local playground, I conversed with a father who had brought his three children there. The oldest was autistic and the youngest had already been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. While I did not know this man at all, and he could have been a ne’er-do-well, the fact that he had brought his children to the playground and was interacting well with them led me to conclude he might be a decent human being.
I therefore said to him, “Parenting is one of the hardest things anyone ever does. You’re doing a good job.”
A moment passed and he replied, “You lose your village. That’s the tough part.”
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a megacity to raise a child with special needs. Yet, the cost is often too high for even the village to help.
Sometime after my son began attending preschool, speech therapy, occupational therapy, and applied behavioral analysis, I had an odd realization: every person working with him was female. In fact, nearly every person working with any of the children was female. His school had one male staff member: the gym teacher. All but one of the two dozen employees at his ABA provider were female. Likewise, the many speech therapists at the local children’s hospital were all female.
Yet more striking was the fact that all attendees at his ABA provider were male. A selection of boys aged around three to thirteen walked in and out of the building every day, all of them autistic. Of course, I had read the statistics. I knew boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than girls, but that would suggest that twenty percent of the attendees should be female.
There may be multiple factors contributing to this phenomenon. First, many experts suspect autism is underdiagnosed in females. Second, it is likely underdiagnosed because it presents differently in the average autistic girl, resulting in less severe developmental delays that require fewer interventions. Third, this may be due to differences in the female brain.
That last paragraph is part conjecture. Twenty years from now, we will be closer to knowing if there is a true gender imbalance in autism, and if so, why. But for now, it seems boys are more prone to autism spectrum disorder, as is also the case with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sensory processing disorder. When I hear commentators lamenting the male loneliness epidemic, the underperformance of males in school compared to their female peers, the tendencies of many men to favor insular activities rather than in-person socialization, and the frustrations of men attempting to find dates, I cannot help but wonder if a greater tendency of the male brain toward neurodivergence could be as much to blame as broad societal changes. If there is truly an increased prevalence of autism in our time (and not simply a change in diagnostic criteria), then it is boys who are bearing the brunt of it.
As I watch those cute little fellows file into the ABA provider one after another, a sad voice in my head often laments, “What is happening to our boys?” I also wonder, if nearly every person they encounter in their day is female, who is modeling for them how to live not just as males, but as autistic males? What does this mean for their sense of self—their understanding of masculinity? Who could attempt to twist these boys’ insecurities for their own gain? What will that mean for society?
Merely being around females does not make a male effeminate. The masculinity God created and intended presents in diverse ways and may be nurtured by many kinds of people. Yet, our vulnerabilities make us vulnerable, and at one point or another, boys do need role models. Will autistic boys ever have them? Will men be willing to enter traditionally female professions for the sake of these boys?
I am eternally grateful for the excellent care my son has received from competent, compassionate women. I do not long for some kind of precise gender ratio, but for the occasional man to take on work that is underappreciated, underpaid, and infinitely consequential in the lives of many families. I do realize this might be asking too much.
However, this summer, I noticed a change at the ABA provider. For the first time, there were some male employees working with the children, and three young girls joined the boys as attenders. On the first day back at my son’s school, I noticed some new male staff members helping to direct the parents and children. Maybe these changes mean nothing at all, but I like to think they are positive signs.
Raising children with special needs feels like it ought to be something beyond or separate from politics. Alas, there is no area of our lives that escapes the scourge of ideological conflict. The rise in autism diagnoses has led some to deem it a national crisis. On a more personal level, parents often feel devastated when their child’s development does not proceed as expected. An autism diagnosis can lead to genuine grief for a life their children will never have (or so they believe).
Where there is grief, someone will cast blame. Numerous culprits behind the “autism epidemic” have been identified by a wide range of individuals—some with medical expertise and some without, but most with an ax to grind. Some of these people have large public platforms which they use to promote their theories, always with the implication that parents who do not heed their advice are actively harming their children.
In the summer of 2024, it became clear that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would end his campaign to become president of the United States in exchange for being appointed as Health and Human Services Secretary in the second Trump administration. This news was met with trepidation on the part of many in the autism community given Kennedy’s previous comments linking childhood vaccine administrations with the onset of A.S.D., a claim denied by major autism advocacy organizations like the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center, the Autism Self-Advocacy Network, and the Autism Society.
There are many things parents of autistic children cannot control, Cabinet appointments among them. So, we simply waited and hoped for the best.
Then on April 16, 2025, Secretary Kennedy said the following about autism at a press conference.
Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who—many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children and we need to put an end to it.
I am connected with many fellow parents of autistic children in-person and online. They reacted to this speech with unanimous horror and disgust. In line with much of his previous rhetoric, Kennedy seemed to treat autism not as one part of a spectrum of human behavior, but an epidemic disease sweeping the land. He devalued autistic persons by suggesting they cannot support fellow Americans (“will never pay taxes”), increase economic productivity (“never hold a job”), participate in social life (“never play baseball”), be creative (“never write a poem”), or procreate (“never go out on a date”). He then expressed his dismay that they might need help using the bathroom.
There was no sense of the imago Dei in Kennedy’s lamentation: no acknowledgment that human existence might be good in and of itself. He portrayed caring for a child with autism not as one of many difficulties a family might face in the normal course of life, but a unique destroyer of families.
The day after Kennedy’s remarks, I called the local office of my U.S. representative. Forced to leave a voice message, I explained that I was troubled by the Secretary’s words, which showed a fundamental disregard for persons with disabilities. I explained that my husband spent fifteen years serving his country in the Air Force, and I expected the representative to act on his constituents’ behalf and advocate for a more qualified person in this key position. A couple months later, I finally received a form email telling me about a bill the representative had sponsored in the past that somehow helps families of autistic children. My actual concern went unacknowledged.
There was, however, a silver lining in all this, for the Secretary’s comments set off a social media firestorm. My entire feed was filled with autistic adults and their parents assuring the world that they pay taxes, play baseball, write poetry, and go on dates. They told stories of difficult childhoods in which hope was hard to find, followed by increasing capabilities and flourishing adulthoods. What began with demeaning rhetoric turned into a tidal wave of hope.
Unlike politicians, medical researchers have longed believed autism spectrum disorder has multifactorial causation. It is not solely caused by genetics, nor solely by environmental exposures. Rather, it is likely that persons with particular genetic makeups have more difficulty responding to certain environmental stimuli than others, leading to the development of symptoms. If true, this would mean that treating, curing, or preventing autism might require a two-pronged approach addressing both the genetic and environmental factors.
This has led me to fear that as genetic links to autism are identified, embryos will be pre-screened for those conditions as children in utero are for Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities. Testing for Down syndrome has led most parents in countries like the United Kingdom to terminate these pregnancies, to the point that people with the condition are virtually disappearing in some territories. The Canadian Down Syndrome Society has even provocatively spoken of an “Endangered Syndrome” via an ad campaign in which people with the condition compare themselves to endangered animal species.
Prior to 2025, parents could not screen for more than a few genetic conditions during the earliest weeks of pregnancy. However, this year has brought stories from The New York Times heralding the arrival of something previously confined to the realm of science fiction: genetically screened embryos.
Orchid Health has begun offering whole genome analysis to parents as part of the in vitro fertilization process. In a lab setting, embryos are tested for their genetic content. Scientists estimate the likelihood that a given embryo will produce a human with a wide range of disorders, including neurodevelopmental ones. The high price tag means this service might be inaccessible for many parents, but for those who have the means, they can give their children a better chance of a healthy life…by weeding out any embryos that might not be healthy.
In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Russ Douthat for his podcast Interesting Times, Noor Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Orchid, said the following about the benefits of this process.
What Orchid can do is it gives parents the power to protect their children before pregnancy begins. What happens today in I.V.F. centers is that they’re operating essentially almost blind. This really, really critical decision about which embryo to transfer happens with extremely limited information. What happens is that the embryo that looks best under the microscope kind of wins this morphology beauty contest and is often the one that’s selected. Other times there’s a very limited genetic test that’s offered that looks at a tiny fraction of genetic diseases that could affect a future baby. Orchid completely changes that. We’re the first company in the world that allows parents to actually sequence the entire genome of an embryo, sequencing 99 percent of the bases in an embryo’s genome, which allows parents to detect risks for some of the most serious conditions — heart defects, birth defects, pediatric cancers, developmental disorders — things that massively change the trajectory of a child’s life. And the vast majority of these diseases don’t have cures. What’s really exciting about this possibility is that now parents have this ability to protect their children from an entire category of disease that previously we had to just hope for the best and wish that our children wouldn’t be affected by them.
The language here is stunning. Siddiqui frames this as a simple matter of protecting one’s children. After all, what parent wouldn’t want to keep their children safe? Orchid can identify “things that massively change the trajectory of a child’s life” and remove those fears, ensuring a stable and healthy existence. Well, not really, but that is the impression one can easily get from her comments.
This pitch may not be targeted at the average mom and dad as much as those ambitious parents who have charted their kid’s path to the Ivy League prior to conception. Every aspect of life must be optimized. Everything must be controlled and contained. No suffering can be allowed to enter this child’s golden story, or their (economic) future will be at risk. A child must be protected. A parent must be able to sleep at night. If that means disposing of human embryos, so be it. Better not to exist than to be diseased. Better not to exist than to be a burden.
“They don’t want people like my son to exist,” I think. “They don’t believe his life has value.” For while these decisions are always presented as personal choices, they are also inherently declarative. Like it or not, a parent who chooses to snuff out the life of a child with disabilities makes a statement to society about the value of disabled life. The same can be said of traditional pregnancy termination and medically assisted suicide. None of us exist merely for ourselves. What we declare with our words and actions impacts our neighbors.
Siddiqui and Kennedy show that distaste for people with developmental delays reaches across the width and breadth of the political spectrum. Left and Right are united in their denial that we are all made in the image of God: maybe not on paper, but in their expressed beliefs and actions.
How do I prepare my son for a world that thinks about him this way? Is there anyone else who will speak for him, or are we on our own?
Unlike many in our society, I do not see my son’s autism as a curse on our family. Raising him is the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. Some days feel hopeless, while others are filled with joy. There are moments that take my breath away with their ferocity, as if I were truly being crucified, and there are moments of sweetness so deep, so life affirming that I can almost glimpse the beatific vision. No genetic test can quantify the sound of my son’s laughter, the brightness of his smile.
I survive in my vocation as his mother by the grace of God and in the belief that this is indeed what I signed up for: not a change in the plan, but an integral part of what was eternally decreed for us. I survive because I believe in resurrection—that the meek will inherit the earth and the weak things of this world will shame the strong. I recently said to my husband, “We should worry less about what he isn’t and spend more time celebrating what he is.” And what is he? A gift from God, goodness in the land of the living, life and existence and divine intent. Being his mother is a sacred vocation.
Just before I became pregnant with my son, I wrote a poem of “maybes” where I discussed my fears for our future lives: a wide variety of things that could possibly go wrong. When I look back on it now, it seems incredibly prescient with lines like, “Maybe I’ll be overwhelmed,” “Maybe they’ll have special needs,” and “Maybe I’ll get little help.” I accepted beforehand that this might be our road, and I chose to have a child anyway, because I believe in the resurrection of the dead. Here is how that poem ended.
Maybe any or all of these things will go wrong.
For this is life, and life sucks.
But perhaps they will live
And in living perhaps it is worth it
Just to live even for a moment
As a human being on earth
And to be loved by parents
And to bear the image of God.
Maybe they’re worth it.
In addition to his legal first name, our son has an Indian name: Jaideep, “victory of the light.” We chose it not only because it is related to my husband’s name, but also because it is reminiscent of the opening verses of the Gospel of John: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5 ESV)
Despite the difficulties, I believe this verse will be realized in my son’s life. We will see victory in Christ. Whether he overcomes his developmental difficulties or not, God will be glorified, and our family will not be destroyed. We will flourish together, for we are kept by the Redeemer who alone is true protection. Our only hope in life, death, and autism is our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
As it is written, “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.