Your Role
Your role in your child's life is changing, and it's not easy to adjust to this idea after eighteen years of caring for your child, especially in the case of children on the autism spectrum. Your role is now to get your child independent and ready to face the world without you - but there are likely a great many people who disagree on this point. During this time, many people will likely attempt to influence you and tell you what is right for your child. Some of them you may wish to listen to - others, less so. My mother had to go through this and it was very difficult for her, being torn between so many different opinions (I'm afraid I was one of the guilty parties here), and made her feel like she would be a bad mother if she didn't listen to them.
To help prevent other parents from feeling this way and sort out this tangle of opinions, here's a hierarchy for you to follow. It essentially goes like this - the opinions of those with relevant professional experience or who know your child more should be given more weight than that of those who have neither. Hopefully this will help give you the support and encouragement to follow the path that's right for your family.
Less weight: Extended Family/Family Friends > Coworkers.
While coworkers may try to weigh in on the situation, as people who don't know your child and have no relevant training, feel free to ignore their advice if you don't think it's relevant. As to extended family and family friends, while they likely know your child better, they still don't have any training or enough experience with your child to really contribute to the decision.
More weight: Psychologist > Close family > Your child's teachers.
Your child's teachers, having interacted with your child in an academic setting, likely have useful advice to give as to whether your child can go on. However, having only known your child a year, close family members' advice should be given more weight. Even more weight, naturally, goes to a psychologist, whose assessment comes from a position of training and understanding of autism.
That said, all opinions, even those of the psychologist, should be taken with a grain of salt. In my sister's case, the psychologist said that she should live at home and go to a community college (and thought her prospects for independence were dim, at best). Due to my advocacy (as close family, I got more weight) and home circumstances, my sister ended up going away to university despite this. Now she's the happiest I've ever seen her, doing well in her classes and quite independent, which has made my mother ecstatic, to say the least. (Read A Mother's Story for more on that front.) Why did that discrepancy exist? I think what happened was that the psychologist didn't see who my sister really was - he saw the autism profile he expected to see. After all, there's only so much that you can uncover about a person in a short hour. So please remember this story if your psychologist says something similar to you; their word is not your child's destiny.
Most weight: Your child
Your child's opinion is the one that has the most weight here. They're adults by now, and if college is even a consideration that means they're at the level of functioning where they have the right to choose their own destinies. College is not right for everyone; that said, college is not out of the question for people with ASD either.
Ultimately, this is up to your child. Your role is to help them make the decision, give them data to factor into it, but when it comes down to it, this is their decision and you should try and emotionally support it either way, whether they go to community college, a university, or choose to get a job. Is it easy? Not at all. In my own family, my sister's opinion hardly even got asked until about halfway through the process, at which point it was made by default when the other decisions were taken out of play by external factors. But it is what is right and what is easy rarely overlap, and this is another one of those cases.
Good luck!
To help prevent other parents from feeling this way and sort out this tangle of opinions, here's a hierarchy for you to follow. It essentially goes like this - the opinions of those with relevant professional experience or who know your child more should be given more weight than that of those who have neither. Hopefully this will help give you the support and encouragement to follow the path that's right for your family.
Less weight: Extended Family/Family Friends > Coworkers.
While coworkers may try to weigh in on the situation, as people who don't know your child and have no relevant training, feel free to ignore their advice if you don't think it's relevant. As to extended family and family friends, while they likely know your child better, they still don't have any training or enough experience with your child to really contribute to the decision.
More weight: Psychologist > Close family > Your child's teachers.
Your child's teachers, having interacted with your child in an academic setting, likely have useful advice to give as to whether your child can go on. However, having only known your child a year, close family members' advice should be given more weight. Even more weight, naturally, goes to a psychologist, whose assessment comes from a position of training and understanding of autism.
That said, all opinions, even those of the psychologist, should be taken with a grain of salt. In my sister's case, the psychologist said that she should live at home and go to a community college (and thought her prospects for independence were dim, at best). Due to my advocacy (as close family, I got more weight) and home circumstances, my sister ended up going away to university despite this. Now she's the happiest I've ever seen her, doing well in her classes and quite independent, which has made my mother ecstatic, to say the least. (Read A Mother's Story for more on that front.) Why did that discrepancy exist? I think what happened was that the psychologist didn't see who my sister really was - he saw the autism profile he expected to see. After all, there's only so much that you can uncover about a person in a short hour. So please remember this story if your psychologist says something similar to you; their word is not your child's destiny.
Most weight: Your child
Your child's opinion is the one that has the most weight here. They're adults by now, and if college is even a consideration that means they're at the level of functioning where they have the right to choose their own destinies. College is not right for everyone; that said, college is not out of the question for people with ASD either.
Ultimately, this is up to your child. Your role is to help them make the decision, give them data to factor into it, but when it comes down to it, this is their decision and you should try and emotionally support it either way, whether they go to community college, a university, or choose to get a job. Is it easy? Not at all. In my own family, my sister's opinion hardly even got asked until about halfway through the process, at which point it was made by default when the other decisions were taken out of play by external factors. But it is what is right and what is easy rarely overlap, and this is another one of those cases.
Good luck!
