Are your mom, dad and In Laws in the loop on your child's special needs? Mine lives 2500 miles away, and while I have let my parents in on it a little, they basically don't understand, nor do they try to. My sister has a child with similar symptoms, but I don't think she's really looked into it - she doesn't understand her son.

My In Laws? DH's brother and his wife live locally, and I let them know, but his parents are so ignorant of anything like this and so negative we've decided to simply leave them out; we never see them anyway.

How involved do you let the extended family be?

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I would be an extended family and have offered support but my neice is just starting to accept. My sister(the Grandma) is very active, almost too much.
The rest of the family,aunts and uncles, have been urging neice to seek answers for years. she is just not the type of person to stick up for herself much less her dd. My sister is so anti-medication for ADHD that she hindered her own dd from seeker answers to her dd's behavior. I learned to step back and when niece asks for help I'm there.

allgirls

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My entire family lives 600 miles away, including inlaws. I am fortunate enough that my mother works in a daycare center and my mil for the health dept. They are always just a phone call away. Matthew is ADHD, and it runs in the family, so he is "normal" around them. (Imagine family dinner with my son, DH, my mil, both of her sisters and brother, and DH grandfather--all diagnosed with ADHD and all on meds except my son and DH and that is only for insurance reasons)

Tommy's special needs are a different story. They acknowlege him, but there isn't much they can do except listen. I find more support online for his needs than I do with my family.

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I definately wouldn't have made it through everything without my mom and dad. From the moment I called and said "something is wrong with Luke", I don't think they left our side for atleast two weeks. I have to say the only thing they do that annoys me is they just spoil Luke something awful! He can do no wrong with them, and never gets told "no". But thats typical I've noticed, my best friend treats him the same way.

My MIL treats him great too. Its even better because my husband is his step-father, but my MIL always welcomed him with open arms. It makes me laugh though, cause she doesn't let him "charm" her into getting his way.

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What great timing! We are about to go visit my in-laws in two weeks who will not acknowledge that my 4 year old has any issued (sid, possibly spectrum child). They are convinced that more discipline is all he needs.

Of course, they see him about 10 days total a year and he is usually more well behaved because he is getting tons of attention from them. Too, most of his problems are social which they can't see.

It drives me bonkers!!! He has ot once a week and speech 2x a week. They think I didn't talk to him enough and that is why he has speech issues. It doens't matter to them that he couldn't use his tongue at all and he has hypotonia so his cheek muscles are weak.
But, we can't push it too hard because then they will treat him weird and would never watch him in the future (not that they have ever watched him without us around).

My mom is local and very supportive because she sees him more and understands. My brother had some similar issues so it is nice because at least she understands.

Our family acknowledges it, but they tend to have widely skewed reactions to it. I'd say 1/2 fall into the unrealistic "Someday he'll run a marathon, he can be fixed, etc" category, and the other 1/2 is the overdramatic "He'll never be quite normal, live alone, do things independently" category. I try to avoid getting into it too much with anyone because i find my self so easily annoyed with people (my fault - not theirs.)LOL

Both sets of grandparents live less then 10 miles away and so do half of our sibllings. My DM acknowledges SID now that my DS twins (who are 2) have the same issues. But everyone else thinks my DDs need more discipline and that I shouldn't baby them so much. You would think that after 16 years that some of them woud realize that things are a little off with my DDs but as far as they are concerned I'm just a bad mother discipline wise. I have learned over the years not to ask for help from family because it causes less heart ache for everyone involved.

Just yesterday I stopped by my DA house to pickup a few things and we got to talking about my oldest DD who is 16. I was telling her how OT and speech therapy is finally starting to make a difference in DD's behavior and in school work. She was upset because I would allow DD to go to speech therapy to do a program called Brain Train for ADHD. She figured if I just medicate her and discipline her more things would be better.
I just bit my tongue and left.

My parents know, understand, work with us on it, and are so glad we have a grasp on what is going on. Dh's parents don't even know we have gone through the testing. They think parents of children "like that" need to take classes for parenting skills. They also think that our son made a huge maturity growth about 2 1/2 years ago....the same month we got him tested and put him on medication! Grrr......

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