Pushing Back

I'm sad, I'm annoyed, I'm irritated. Why? Because I use blogging as a means of working through and figuring out how to cope with my very challenging life -- but writing the kind of confessional posts I sometimes do on my other blog just became that much more difficult, thanks to recent comments made by my local social services to my beloved spouse. Their comments questioned my fitness to parent my profoundly autistic son.

I am a qualified special needs teacher because of my son, and even on bad days, I do a bloody good job of parenting him. I garnered a great deal of respect from my colleagues when I was studying for my autism teaching qualification at B. Uni, not because they thought I was some kind of hero, but because I was an exemplary A-grade student who demonstrated an in-depth practical understanding of the needs of my son and of autistic children in general. I don't take kindly to people calling into question my ability to parent my own son, especially people who have no training or - in my view - demonstrable expertise comparable to my own.

So when a social worker lifted comments made on this blog to suggest I was in some way unfit to parent my autistic child (and that my partner is perhaps too busy to support me), you can appreciate I got pretty fucking angry. Moreover, given the sole intent of these vile innuendos was to pressure me into removing what I considered to be fair comment about my local social services from this blog, you can appreciate the extent to which my anger was informed by utter contempt for an agency which has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of professionalism in its dealings with my family, and now -- it would seem -- utter contempt for principles of free speech and accountability.

In my son's interest, and for the comfort of the majority of staff at my son's social services respite centre who do a fine job despite the constraints of working within a collegial and largely deprofessionalized service, I have removed the offending posts from my other blog. For my son's and their sakes, I will refrain from blogging about their service on that blog, henceforth.

If "experience" was sufficient to learn how to manage children with autism, we'd all be home and dry by now. And the experience one gains with a keen mind and on the back of a rigorous education is not the same as that gained by people who couldn't even jump the exam hurdle at 16. Sorry to be ideological, but your service needs a double dose of managerialism.