Your child was just diagnosed
Everybody is looking at your child right now. This is the part that is about you.
Short answer
After a diagnosis, almost every resource points at the child: services, therapies, school plans, waitlists. Almost nothing points at you, and the parents doing this describe an exhaustion that sleep does not fix, alongside grief they feel guilty for having. That is a normal response to a genuine load, not a failure of love. This work is about you specifically: what you are carrying, what you are allowed to feel about it, and how to keep functioning without disappearing.
What I actually know about this
I did forty eight weeks of field training working directly with autistic children, and a field-work case study where I gathered real behavioural data. So I know the vocabulary, I know what the services actually do, and you will not have to explain what an IEP is or why the waitlist is eleven months.
I want to be precise about the limit of that, though: it means I understand the world you just walked into. It does not make me your child's clinician. I do not diagnose, treat or advise on your child's care. I work with you.
The things people do not say out loud
These come up in almost every conversation I have had with a mother in the first year, and almost none of them get said anywhere else.
- You are grieving something, and you feel like a monster for grieving it, because your child is right there and is not gone.
- You are relieved to have a name for it, and the relief feels disloyal.
- You are tired in a way that scares you.
- You have become an administrator of a system, and you did not want to be an administrator, you wanted to be a mother.
- Your relationship is under a weight neither of you has language for.
- Somebody said something well meaning and stupid and you have thought about it for four months.
- You looked at your own childhood differently after the assessment, and you have not told anyone that.
That last one is more common than people realise. A lot of mothers start seeing traits in themselves once their child is assessed, and it opens a door they were not expecting to find.
What this is not
It is not parent training. It is not a course on behaviour management. It is not somebody telling you what to do with your child. There are professionals for that and you probably already have a list of them.
It is an hour that is about you, with someone who knows the terrain and is not going to redirect the conversation back to your child the second you start talking about yourself. That redirection happens to these mothers constantly and it is why so many of them stop talking.
How we work on it
- You get to say the unsayable version first. Not the version you tell your mother or the school. The real one. Nothing you say in that hour goes anywhere. Here is how I handle that.
- We separate the load into parts. Some of what you are carrying is administrative, some is grief, some is fear about the future, and some is a relationship problem wearing a diagnosis costume. They feel like one thing and they are not, and they need different responses.
- We find where your baseline actually is. Most mothers in the first year have no idea what a normal day feels like anymore. Signal and Source is unusually useful here, partly because it is the same shape as the data logging you may already be doing for services, turned toward you instead.
- We build something small and real. Not self care in the bath-and-candle sense. One or two things that actually survive contact with your week.
If you are in the first three weeks
You may not need coaching yet. You may need sleep, a meal somebody else cooked, and one person who does not need anything from you. Book the free call if you want, and I might tell you exactly that.
Placeholder A resource list for newly diagnosed families, and a worked example used with permission, will go here.
Common questions
Is it normal to grieve after your child is diagnosed?
Yes, and it is extremely common. Parents describe grief for an imagined future alongside enormous love for the actual child, and the two coexist without contradiction. The guilt about the grief is usually heavier than the grief itself.
What is autism parent burnout?
The term describes exhaustion from parenting demands that chronically exceed available resources. Parents describe it as deep tiredness that sleep does not fix, emotional flatness, and a loss of joy in parenting. It is a response to sustained load, not a measure of how much you love your child.
Do you work with the child as well?
No. I work with you. I do not diagnose, treat, or direct any part of your child's care, and I will not second guess the professionals who do. What I bring is that you will not have to explain the world you are in.
Not sure if this is for you?
The first call is free, it runs about 15 to 20 minutes, and its only job is to work out whether I am the right person. If I am not, I will say so and point you somewhere better.