Messages By: califlori

After reading this shows intro about the child's violent behavior, it  worries  me that many people will view others with autism as potentially violent and even fear them. Violence is unusual for a person with autism. It is not the norm but gets the most attention of course.
Since my son was diagnosed in March of 2000, I've been studying this disorder and hope that the show conveys to viewers that autism does NOT look the same on every person and each person with autism has a range of mild to severe behaviors that can arise.
Many behaviors come and go as the child explores his world around him, tries to assimilate into the environments we've created and tries to desensitize himself to what can be overwhelming environmental triggers due to heightened senses.
We need to have compassion because the population of people with autism has exploded since the 1990's and many many families have made significant progress with children who may have seemed unteachable to many.

This enormous and growing population of people WITH autism (NOT autistics - impolite term to many) will be all of our co-workers, neighbors, spouses, class mates and ultimately our greatest teachers in the next two decades and then beyond. 
Your future grandchildren and even future son-in-law may have autism.
Please honor and respect them and if you know of a relative, friend, school mate, or neighbor with autism, please do not be afraid of getting to know them better. They will develop more acceptable ways of expressing themselves by watching your example and thrive with attention. Just try to ignore the autistic behaviors and treat them like everyone else. It may take practice.
The child featured on the show can be helped a great deal if the parent has help, resources and does research. What has helped my son the most is nutrition and biomedical help such as determining trigger foods, allergens and ridding the body of toxic build ups of yeast, metals, preservatives. Also, five years completed of speech and occupational therapies. And most importantly, treating and interacting with him as we'd treat him if he was any other typical child. He is now age 10 and doing better than ever expected.

If you love somebody whose life has been touched by autism, THEY may not have enough time and energy to go on-line and research from thousands of websites to learn about all of the wonderful and varied approaches to helping their child or loved one with autism to thrive.
YOU can help by learning all you can, reading, printing info and sharing with them.
I hope this helps inform someone and I sincerely will answer any questions posed as I care very much about these kids and this topic. I will be back on-line after the holidays though.
Thank you for reading.

I don't think the mom ever said she was drunk when her son was a baby, I think she meant that she hasn't been drunk ever since becoming a responsible parent.
I agree with the theory that people do try to come to terms with past relationship problems either with their parent or their ex by subconsciously choosing mates with those qualities they found most challenging to deal with during their previous significant relationships. I wouldn't attribute that theory to Freud though as many therapists have put some version of this out there. You can see it with people choosing substance abusers over and over in hopes of being able to accomplish helping them or maybe with physical or verbal abusers, hoping they can overcome the overpowering that was done to them or even thinking they can improve enough to become acceptable to their abusers. These are just two simple examples.
Of course here we're dealing with control issues and I think it's safe to say that the new wife must be a bit older than the husband, a dynamic that many times leaves a man in a submissive role.
If it were my son, I'd be very disappointed but would just have to wait for him to mature and hopefully outgrow this bratty wife.

What I want to tell the mother-in-law is just to get involved with her own life and her own friends, sit back and wait! Without putting yourself in view to be the target or object of this girl's hatred, she will start to turn her abuse toward her husband and sooner or later, he'll be back at mom's house saying I'm sorry mom, I didn't see it sooner.
If the mother-in-law stays in the picture and keeps trying to be in these two kids lives while they are displaying such controlling immature behaviors, then SHE will continue to be the emotional punching bag for these two and find herself in a continuous cycle where sometimes they accept her and then they pull out the rug from under her in order to punish her and show they have the upper hand in the relationship. This is evident by the DIL threatening not to share any grandchildren with the MIL.
I was disappointed that Dr.Phil told these kids that they were right. Doesn't he remember on their previous visit that the DIL had posted hateful, outrageous comments to her MIL on-line?? Telling them they are right is just validating their ridiculous wrong-thinking even more.
Both the kids and the mom behaved badly and one side not more than the other side but to her credit the Mother-in-law can admit some mistakes.
Mother-in-law, please just wait until your son sees the light and you will eventually go to his NEXT wedding when he grows out of this starter marriage and finds somebody with a good heart.