A day before her 42nd birthday, this Singaporean mother had a row with her husband in their Tampines apartment. For a while now their marriage had been on the rocks, but on this particular day, their argument was particularly bad.
As the rain began to pour down, her husband shouted at her to take the laundry in, throwing the laundry poles on the floor before leaving the apartment with their older son.
She brought the laundry inside, and when she got back discovered that her younger son, who was seven-years-old and had an autism spectrum disorder, had soiled his pants.
READ: Does my child have autism?
After a while she took a breather.
An idea came to her, then: the reason for her many problems and chronic exhaustion was her autistic son—so she thought to kill him.
She lured her son to the kitchen, asked him to look down the kitchen window and find grandmother below. When he followed, she pushed him out the window, sending her son plummeting down from the 9th floor.
The boy died of several injuries due to the fall.
READ: Does my child have a mild form of Autism called Asperger’s Syndrome?
“The High Court heard that the woman, who has a history with the Institute of Mental Health since 2008, had suffered a relapse of her major depressive disorder,” a Strait Times report said.
But the most surprising thing about the tragic incident was that the woman’s son and husband asked for leniency in her sentence, and that they longed for her to return with them at home.
Justice Tay Yong Kwang sentenced the woman to five years in jail.
“I hope you recover well and that you can return home much stronger emotionally to rebuild your family and personal life,” he said Justice Tay.
Parenting autistic children
Parenting is hard enough; parenting autistic children is an altogether different ball game. Children with autism spectrum disorder require more attention, more care, more patience from those in charge of looking after them.
Unlike normal children, children with autism need to be looked after beyond their teenage years. It is a life-long challenge that parents take on, and its understandable that certain parents are overwhelmed with this responsibility.
Here are some tips to help parents cope with these challenges, as offered by WedMD:
- Learn All You Can About Autism: Autism is usually detected during a child’s formative years; early diagnosis, intervention, and treatment are the keys to helping young children with autism develop to their full potential.
- Get a Strong Social Network. Gathering your support network involves knowing ahead of time whom you can call for different types of support, even for emergencies.
- Teach Your Family About Autism. Training family members about autism and how to effectively manage the symptoms has been shown to reduce family stress and improve the functioning of the child with autism.
- Assess Your Child’s Need for Medication. While there is no medication for autism, there are drugs for specific symptoms that kids with autism might display.
- Learn More About Behavioral Training Behavioral training teaches people of all ages with autism how to communicate appropriately. This type of training can reduce behavior problems and improve adaptation skills.
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