Hi, and Merry Christmas to all!

I got a question “Should I put my son in a group home?”

That is a big dilemma for a lot of parents. You want to do the right thing. I know when we were contemplating that idea ourselves we thought deep and hard.  Group homes are expensive if you pay for it. The county would not voluntarily do such a thing.  Like I said before, Matt has all the other Autistic traits plus an added rage problem. The Autistic rage is very common in Autistic children. On the other hand lots of Autistic kids don’t have rage. I would suppose that has something to do with what parts of the brain were damaged by what ever caused the Autism.  With Matt he has the rage thing and that is the unbearable part. We couldn’t afford the expense of paying cash for a private group home. We looked into it. Plus the older he got the worse his rage got and it was starting to get scary.  It got to the point that he just couldn’t be trusted. So we finally decided to do something about it. We had to have the county take care of him. The tool we used was to have him taken to the hospital by police car which is something we regularly did. Then as they usually did at the hospital, call me down to fill out the paperwork. This time I refused to agree to take him home afterwards.  That way he became a ward of the county. There was a little bit of work to do in Probate Court with a lawyer. After that he has been in county run homes ever since.  That is how we did it.

Now to answer to should we do it? I know many instances we were advised by Matt’s doctors and our doctors that yes we should do it and we were advised by his therapists that we should do it because we had a sick relationship going. Matt was controlling our life to such a degree and it was aimed in the wrong direction and going down hill.  I would say 10 years went by while we were thinking about all that. It takes a lot of courage to abandon a sick kid like that.  We wanted Matt to expand his life in a more healthy way. Then one day the decision just snapped into place.

I would say that the decision is yours to make. We know you love your kid whether he has problems or not. Actually you are the wrong person to make the decision anyway. You are just like us, all tied up emotionally. Ask his doctors, all of them what to do. Ask your doctors what to do and ask his therapists what to do and write it all down and read it over and over. That is all I can say.  Good luck.  - Bob

This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Group Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.