How do you respond to someone when they call your child a, "problem child"? Do you shrug it off? Do you laugh? Do you correct that person? What? Now what if your child has special needs? And the person who called your child a "problem child", knows about his special needs. How do you respond then? My answer? Well, it is in two parts. What I did & what I WANTED to do. What I did was "remind" her of exactly what his issues are. And that it is something that he cannot help. And that we are going through the necessary steps to learn how to better manage it so he can have the best life possible.
Now what I really WANTED to do was throw her out of my home for being so insensitive & rude & hurtful. But given who that person was, that wasn't an option. Or maybe it was, but if I wanted to keep some sort of peace in our lives & not travel back down a road once traveled, I bit my tongue, took a deep breath & explained yet again what was going on. Is it denial on her part? Or is it a pure lack of interest? Who knows. Maybe lack of understanding... The sad part is that this seems to be a bit of an inconvenience for some people, but given a choice, I am sure that I would not choose this for my child, nor would he. But it is what it is. You almost expect to hear rude comments from strangers, after all they don't know you, but when it comes from family, it never makes any sense to me.
