The McGuire Family
  Bang! The screen door slammed. Thump, thump, thump! Small feet ran hard up the hallway stairs to the second floor. Thud! The bedroom door slammed shut. Shortly the sounds of loud music erased all traces of silence in the McGuire household. Sally McGuire sighed deeply and shook her head. Something was bothering ten-year-old Kevin. But it was harder and harder to know what the boy was thinking or feeling. He was getting increasingly moody. Sometimes he was still a little boy who liked to cuddle with her, but more often now he held his distance. Her little adolescent!

  Sally had little time to be lost in reverie. Her younger son, Mitch, was tugging at her leg. ‘Want juice. “Her face brightened. “Great talking, Mitch,” said Sally as she moved to the refrigerator and found his favorite drink.

  Mitch was five this month, and a couple of years ago Sally had despaired that he would ever speak. She and her husband, Tom, had gone from one specialist to another seeking an answer to the puzzle of their son’s behavior. Finally, when Mitch was nearly three, they had found a psychologist who understood him. She had told the McGuires as gently as she could that Mitch had a developmental condition called Autistic Disorder. He would require years of intensive education to reach his potential and would probably require some special services all of his life.

  Sally and Tom, although dismayed about Mitch’s diagnosis, were relieved to finally know what was happening to him, and grateful to know how to help him. Soon they enrolled Mitch in a good preschool class and were immersed in home programming that required them to become very skillful teachers for Mitch. Their hard, time-consuming work was paying off in important changes in his behavior. He spoke now and had pretty much stopped his tantrums. He also seemed happier than they had ever known him.

  The front doorbell rang. It was the McGuires’ next-door neighbor Rosemary Vandenbeck, who had known the McGuires for nearly ten years and had been a wonderful source of support with Mitch. Rosemary looked concerned. “Is Kevin around?” she asked. Sally said he was in his room. Rosemary went on to share with Sally what she had overheard in her backyard just a few minutes before Kevin had gone pounding up the stairs.

  Kevin had been sitting on the back steps talking with Rosemary’s boy, Jon. Their words drifted through the open window to where Rosemary was seated at her computer. The word “autism” caught her ear and she paused for a minute to listen. Kevin was telling Jon that he had a secret thought about his brother, Mitch. Sometimes he wished Mitch wasn’t his brother, but that Jon was. His parents thought every little thing Mitch did was great, but they never paid any attention to what Kevin did. Sometimes he wondered if they really loved him as much as they loved Mitch. He knew Mitch had autism, but that didn’t mean he should be able to get away with anything he wanted. Kevin felt like he had to be extra good at everything to make up for what Mitch could not do. None of it was fair!

  As she heard this story from Rosemary, Sally felt an ache for Kevin, who had been bearing all his pain without saying a word. And then she felt alarm because she had not understood Kevin well enough to see how bothered he was. Something had to be done, but how could she reach a son who seemed so remote?

 
Introduction
  Kevin McGuire’s feelings about his brother, Mitch, are not unusual. Many children in his situation have had times when they felt that their parents loved them less than they did their sibling with autism. Neither is his difficulty sharing his feelings with his parents unusual. It is not easy for many children to tell their parents their concerns about their brother or sister with autism.

  Several things may be contributing to Kevin’s silence. These include his sense of shame about his jealousy, his frustration that his parents are often busy with Mitch and do not seem to have much time for him, and his own beginning entry to adolescence, with a normal, gradual withdrawal from the world of the family to the world of peers. Each of these factors can, and probably do, contribute to Kevin’s silence.

  Do problems like those faced by the McGuire family mean that the barriers between parents and children are too high for good communication about a brother or sister with autism? Thankfully, they do not. Although the quality of family communication varies across time and across the developmental stages of a child’s life, parents and children need not lose touch with one another about the important things in their lives. But good communication does not always come easily, and sometimes requires extra effort from everyone in the family.

  This chapter summarizes some of what social scientists about the relationships between typically developing siblings. It then examines the effect on these normal patterns of behavior when one of the children in the family has autism or a similar disorder. This chapter will help you understand the many different healthy ways children can learn to get along with each other. Chapter 2 reports the findings from a research project that looked

closely at how children’s understanding of autism changes as they grow up. Chapter 3 describes how you can take developmental changes into account in deciding what kind of information you might share with your child about autism. Chapter 4 takes a look at what you can do to increase family communication. Chapter 5 examines some of the specific things you can do to help your children cope with the special needs of their brother or sister with autism. We will consider how the entire family can strike a healthy balance between inclusion and separateness, so that the needs of each family member are met as well as possible. Chapter 6 focuses on helping children become playmates for a sibling with autism. This chapter includes suggestions for teaching play skills to your children. The final chapter, Chapter 7, considers what enduring impact the experience of growing up with a brother or sister with autism has on an adult.