Marital strain?

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How does having a child with ASD affect your marriage?

Mine, no, but I think it is going to depend on a number of things:

How severe the child's issues are
How prepared both parents are to handle those issues
If the parents have similar philosophies and approach with respect to the issues
What other pressures the couple is facing
etc

Any stress affects a marriage, right? OTOH, working together to manage a stress can bring a couple closer together. We've experienced both things.

It's not that different from having your first newborn (of any neurotype.) Being new parents to an infant is really, really hard - much more difficult than you would imagine. It's very difficult to be completely prepared, and you either work together to get through it, or you don't.

One thing we've learned that is important to think about: there is a strong genetic component to autism. That means there is a high likelihood that one or both parents have autistic features. Keeping a relationship going when one or both of you have a social communication disorder requires understanding and communication strategies that account for the unique needs of a person on the spectrum.

I agree with MomSparky - you have to work together or you are going to come apart. It is vital to carve out some time for each other as a couple and as individuals as well. If you don't take time to take care of your marriage it will fall apart - that is true regardless of having a special needs child. Having an autistic child can mean it is more difficult to find that time -but it is so important. Something as simple as having a 'date night' where you sit on the couch and talk, watch a movie or have dinner together can go a long way to helping keep the marriage strong.

Build a network of others such as family, other parents of autistic kids, social workers and teachers that you can lean on when you need to. I also agree that one or both parents may have aspects of autistic behavior. I know that once our child was diagnosed with aspergers I could see a lot of myself in her - she just takes the behaviors further than I do. In fact now that she is a teen she makes fun of my ADD and pokes fun at her own, "Look Mom, 'It's shiny"

Having a autistic child is hard and it is important to take time to take care of your marriage too. Good Luck

Dawn

momsparky basically already said it best.

I think that having a child on the spectrum is incredibly hard on the marriage, and we've had it relatively easy compared to many. I find that I get very frustrated at times because ultimately the responsibility for the care falls on me, as I am the stay-at-home spouse in the marriage. At certain times, this is overwhelming, and I get burned out. My husband is REALLY, REALLY good, but I still get very frustrated. I've always been bothered because I do all of the research on the internet and reading books on the subject -- my husband rarely, if ever does any of this. I'm also the patient parent. Even though my husband KNOWS that it takes many, many more repeat sessions to teach our son things, my husband loses patience and quickly gets angry. At those times I think "Hey, the kid has a hard enough time negotiating high school and social life, etc. -- and you have the audacity to get angry at him?" But, to be fair, I also lose my temper and lack patience.

We do have a regular date night, because we need to get away from the responsibilities. This helps A LOT.

Also, we tend to break up responsibilities. We've had to help our son after school INTENSIVELY with homework. He's finally doing well without us now, but before now, it was literally a 3:00 pm to 12 midnight job many nights. I would take the English/Social Studies/Language classes, and my husband was responsible for the Science/Math classes. This has worked out well.

One of the best situations is that my husband tends to see the long road vision, whereas I can only see what's immediately in front of my face. When I am saddened over my son being excluded from certain kid's circle's, my husband will point out that he didn't feel comfortable at high school until he was a senior, and that our son may not be able to really make friends until college -- where kids won't know his background. This is very helpful to me.

In My case, married for 5 years now, our only daughter diagnosed on the spectrum. I dont think it affected our marriage as such but more the plans we had for the coming years. buying a house, holidaying etc. everything put on standstill but thankfully in spite of all this there has been no issue with the marriage, in fact i feel like it has brought us closer, MAYBE we would have taken some things for granted if this did not happen to us. There are various sides of us that we have discovered that we hadn't know about each other before. More than anything else we have put our daughter's well being first and both my wife and I can see how much we care about her so it has held our marriage strong.

It is definitely difficult. For me, even more so because my husband has a lot of Aspie traits. Which therefore puts a lot of strain on me--because he is not organized or focused enough to do his own reading, research, investment into our son's needs. He can spend hours looking into his own obsessions, but can't even listen to/process my explanations of why we need to parent in a certain way with our son. I have to write it all down, and even then it is not necessarily effective.

Another area is communication with our son. Imagine a child who has trouble expressing fully his thoughts/needs . . . and then a father who can't read that son's social or non-verbal cues. Oh, my goodness! Very frustrating for my son and for me . . . and yes, for his Dad. I'll sometimes overhear and try to explain to him what our son wants, because it's obvious to me . . . but then husband will get mad at me for telling him what to do! (According to speech therapy, we need to reward our son's efforts at communication by acknowledging his communication, but my husband just 'shuts' him down because he can't read him! Very frustrating. It often results in our son having a meltdown and his father getting angry.) I sometimes fear ruining/sacrificing my son's well-being for the sake of rescuing our marriage, but perhaps that is too dramatic a perspective.

Anyway, I am trying to understand my spouse . . . but we are definitely in a very tough spot right now. What's often frustrating is getting him acknowledging that. He's kind of content to not have any social/emotional depth, so he can go for a long time without acknowledging that our relationship sucks. Or that he is not 'getting' our son. I think being a mom to someone on the spectrum and married to someone who is half there as well, is a very lonely difficult place.

We've made progress in the past . . . just have to take each hurdle at a time. And sometimes takes a whole stinking lot of patience and persistence. Definitely not what I had imagined 8 years ago . . .

I thought for a long time about posting this topic because it has been pretty stressful for me.

From birth our AS daughter was a "high need baby" and initially my wife was 110% focused on doing whatever was required to help her. But over time our daughter became more difficult and my wife became less tolerant and it got ugly. I'm surprised the police were only called to our apartment once. About two years ago our daughter abruptly decided that she had no mother. Hasn't spoken to her since then. Does her own laundry. Wont eat any groceries that her Mom bought or food that her Mom cooked. Doesn't want her Mom present at any school events like graduations and music recitals. There's zero communication between them, so I;m stuck as the intermediary, but what they want is totally irreconcilable. And they both dump their frustration with the situation on me.

So regardless of the fact that my wife and I share some interests and might enjoy doing some things together, there's always this thing in the background.

We actually find our NT 2-year-old more stressful to deal with...