Autism and Parentification

Children are not supposed to know how much their parents do for them or how hard being a parent is until they become parents themselves. It's a pay-it-forward kind of system. You love your children and that's why you don't let them know. Developmentally, children who are allowed to be children without taking on adult responsibility until an appropriate age are more likely to become calm, successful adults. Yet, a number of "autism parents" seem to make it their life's mission to draw attention to how difficult their child is, how severely "disordered" their child is, and seem to even want validation from their own child for how hard they are working. That is not how it works. If you would die for them, then you should also be willing to do the harder thing of self-overcoming for them. Unfortunately, ABA and Autism Speaks have become traps where parents get stuck continuously seeking the validation of others for how difficult it is to have an autistic child, and such organizations are too weak to tell the parents to snap out of it, which is what would actually help both the parent and the child.

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Yes it is challenging when someone won't eat your cooking, breaks down crying when you were just trying to have a nice time, and makes a rule out of every exception you give them. There are infinitely many challenging things about being a parent that people who have never been parents have no idea about, but that doesn't matter. The captain of the ship doesn't need his sailors or others to praise him, he just leads. If your need for your child or others to like you is greater than your ability to handle these situations such that you are routinely getting frustrated with them and making that known, then something needs to change. In the long run, letting your frustration leak out will result in rifts in your relationship with your child, and many autistic adults find it so upsetting to have had a parent treat them this way that they are no longer in contact with their parents. This is a sad situation that is very preventable.
 

Autistic people treat power as a huge responsibility because it means making decisions on behalf of someone else, which is not something to take lightly or do without skill or consideration for the feelings of the people you have power over. Neurotypical people, through their overreliance on herd mentality, tend to be more able to eke by under an insecure boss or parent. One of the reasons autistic adults tend to do better in places like academic institutions or military environments is because people there are more likely to treat power as a responsibility instead of something deserved, though this is obviously highly variable.  
 

Many parents of autistic children inadvertently give their children a distressing amount of power. This happens when the parent gets upset when the child gets upset, when the parent doesn't have interests or skills of their own so they adopt those of the child, when their happiness is dependent on the child doing something, when they become embarrassed by their child, when everything needs to be done exactly the way the parent wants it lest they get annoyed, and when the parent’s insecurity makes them reactive if the child triggers them. The child is the one expected to remain calm while the parent is upset with them, or feels the parent is learning how to interact with the world from them, which are both a reversal of healthy power dynamics in a parent-child relationship. All the things that look like the parent being overly domineering towards the child are actually signs of severe emotional weakness of the parent, as are validation-seeking behaviors of the parent and an overreliance on the child by the parent.

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Many times, what looks like rigidity or aggression is simply the child doing their best to hold the authority that you are giving them over yourself. You have communicated to them that they are in charge of your emotions, so they try to take on the responsibility of making decisions for you, which they obviously lack the skills to do since they are children. The adult should be aiming to bear the responsibility better than the child and should be aiming to remain calm, make a reasonable judgement call, and avoid taking out frustration on the child. While it is not possible to do so perfectly 100% of the time, mistakes only really spiral out of control when the parent slips into a mindset that they have been victimized by their child, for example if they are constantly trying to convince others of how difficult the child is, if they feel they need to "stand up to" their child, or if they feel the need to "put the child in his or her place," at which point professional counseling would be recommended, with a specific focus on reducing feelings of powerlessness.