Anonymous: Wow, it must be hard to have an autistic person on your family. I've seen how autistic kids act and gods.... it was painful to watch the parents get distressed and hopeless.

ProLifeProLiberty: It’s actually not hard. I don’t know if you’re being genuine or sarcastic, but I am by no means complaining about my brother or his autism.

All I’m saying is I’m glad his therapist was able to help him communicate with us and help us communicate with him so we could better understand what he needed and wanted.

And if you were being genuine, please know that autism isn’t the tragedy that Autism Speaks makes it look like. Autism is a spectrum, and every autistic person has a unique experience with it.

KatieMarie999: Actually it is really hard. It’s hard on the parents seeing their kid having goals and dreams he’ll never achieve because his lack of social skills prevent this. It’s hard on the other kids all getting a lot less time with their parents because they’re too tired or too busy with the autistic kid. It’s hard on the siblings, who have to deal with this every single day and have people uncomfortable around them or at their houses because of that sibling.

It’s hard. It’s painful. It absolutely sucks. I have no relationship with my brother and his effects on my childhood still affect me as a person and prevents my family from being close. We can’t even have family time because he ruins it and my parents refuse to exclude him, so none of us ever wants to spend time together because it means him talking over us the entire time and saying inappropriate things and getting offended if we try to do something he doesn’t want us to do.

It 100% depends on the situation. Some families with autistic members do really well. Some suffer. Some are ruined by it. There are way too many factors to say outright that it’s either a good or bad thing. It’s a thing. And sometimes it’s a horrible thing. Sometimes it’s the one thing that dramatically changes someone’s early life from really good to nightmarish.