Key notes: For parents,autism, friends and family support, charities, local support groups, education, SENCO, council, GPs

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When your child receives an autism diagnosis, it can be daunting, but there is plenty of support available for parents or carers. This blog aims to give an overall summary of all the support available.

Friends and family

It can be difficult to decide who to tell upon receiving a diagnosis, but friends and family are some of the best people to provide social support to you. By confiding in people close to you, they can better understand how to emotionally support the child and how to adapt everyday tasks to make them more manageable.

The key to this is providing them with the basic information they need but also what autism means for you and your child and their behaviour. By providing suggestions such as having your friends/relatives play with your child while you make dinner, you can allow connections to be formed while also allowing you to continue with your daily tasks without having to manage your child simultaneously which can be stressful.

National support

On the more national level, there are multiple charities and support groups such as the National Autistic Society which works towards providing residential assistance and training for parents/carers. Ambitious about Autism is a careers education framework that provides free resources to allow people in education to support autistic students.

Autism Central is a parent/carer- focused charity that provides advice, one-to-one chats and events for the parents/carers of children with autism to allow better understanding and to bring people together; they also have a podcast led by a neurodivergent occupational therapist to discuss sensory processing in autistic people. By engaging with any of these charities, extra support can be found for you and your child. 

Furthermore, you can ask the autism assessment team for a list of local support groups once a diagnosis has been received. Help is also available online on social media and forums - some of these are professional such as the National Autistic Society Facebook group, others are people sharing their own experiences in blogs or forums. These can provide personal experiences and insight into how other parents adapt to the diagnosis.

Support in education

If your child is struggling at school, you can contact the SENCO for specialist support, and as your child progresses through education, there should always be student support services to get in contact with. Communication between parents and teachers will reduce any anxiety regarding your child’s performance and behaviour at school.

The “local offer”

The local council can provide emotional support and sometimes financial benefits (such as the disability living allowance fund for under 16s and the supplementary security income), but this depends on the situation. Every council must have a “local offer” for people under 25 with autism. This will tell you what support is available for children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities, and their families. By accessing the local council’s website and searching for “local offer” you should be given information about education, health and care provision. Under this, carers can sometimes have a carers assessment to determine what level of support they need to receive – if you believe extra support is required, it would be advised to book a carers assessment.

Resources

National Autistic Society: https://www.autism.org.uk/

Ambitious About Autism: https://www.ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk/

Autism Central: https://www.autismcentral.org.uk/