“autism grievance parents”: These are parents who brand themselves as autism experts, yet promote reactionary ideas about autism and resentment towards autistic advocates—while encouraging followers to become too upset about having autistic children to question autism misinformation. Knowing how to identify and avoid grievance parents matters, because their efforts limit autistic people’s already challenging lives, instead of enriching or improving them.
Grievance Parents Are Autism’s MAGA Movement — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
These parents are notable for their toxic combination of resentment over having disabled children and fury at anyone who dares to question the vile ways they publicly speak about those disabled children (especially if those critics are themselves autistic or disabled).
Who are these grievance parents? They are generally—like me—parents of autistic children with significant disabilities. Except instead of targeting “the libs,” grievance parents and the forums they run target autistic, disability, and neurodiversity activists. Meaning, the people who fight to protect autistic kids’ rights, and improve their and their families’ lives. It is painful to watch parents who should be my and my son’s allies instead publicly declare war against the autistic adults their children will grow up to be (or in some cases already are) and dismiss the valuable advice autistic advocates provide. Or to see how grievance parents deflect queries about such behaviors by enlisting and spotlighting outlier autistic adults who agree with them.
Grievance Parents Are Autism’s MAGA Movement — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
You can identify grievance parents by how they reject insights and advocacy from autistic and disability communities—insisting autistic adults “despise parents of autistic children,” while invoking Trumpian egocentrism, and maintaining that it’s parents like them who “have been at the forefront of reforms aimed at improving the lives of those disabled by autism.” They also often claim that they need to “be their children’s voices.” These stances are troublingly out of sync with rights- and services-focused developmental disability organizations, as well as a worrying denial of their children’s communication capabilities. As autistic advocate Julia Bascom reminds us, “There are no voiceless people. There are plenty of people who are spoken over, ignored, or not given an accessible way to communicate.”
Grievance Parents Are Autism’s MAGA Movement — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Grievance parent leaders, Like MAGA figureheads, are masters of aggressive hypocrisy and spin. They are generally wealthy, connected parents who sit on multiple boards and head foundations, yet claim to be bullied by neurodiversity and autism advocates (i.e., by systematically marginalized and largely impoverished disabled people). Grievance parents are in positions of privilege and influence—are some of the most thumb-on-the-scale influencers in autism policy and research—yet take advantage of entrenched negative social attitudes about disability and their status as parents of high-support autistic children to appear like typical Davids, and avoid being outed as elite Goliaths.
Grievance Parents Are Autism’s MAGA Movement — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Grievance parents also ape MAGA’s strategy of claiming to represent a wider underserved (autism) community, while in actuality working against the interests of autistic people and families who lack grievance parents’ class advantages, or who have trouble accessing public benefits. This disconnected entitlement is—I suppose—why, while autistic people themselves beg for increased quality of life and participatory autism research and policy, grievance parents endorse cure-based or self-funded autism causation research, advocate for institutionalizations and against best-practices community housing policy, and even—in a climate of Extreme Right-manufactured paranoia over voting fraud—blithely argue for the right to co-opt their adult autistic children’s votes.
Grievance Parents Are Autism’s MAGA Movement — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
