May Check In And Gratitude

It's a journey made with hard highpod I'm dad. Hi Pod, it's James Gutman, the host of HiPod I'm Dad, the dad behind HiblogImDad.com. Thank you for finding me on another Friday. We are SmackDab right in the middle of May. So it is uh getting nicer outside. The allergies are flaring, so you have my deepest sympathy. If you're one of the people battling it right now, red eyes and all that stuff. And yeah, man, it has been a crazy few weeks for me. Uh this past week was really good. I gotta tell you, it's been wonderful kind of reading the responses. And I'm talking about on Monday, I did a new blog, right? On High Blog I'm Dad. This one was called Once My Nonverbal Son Trusted Me, everything changed. And it has done crazy numbers. It's done really well. Facebook just kind of blew up. And I love when that happens because I get to read some of the responses that people have, which are always positive. Even people who don't agree, it's positive. And I want to thank you guys if you're listening, if you're one of the people who reads and replies and puts comments on things for me. I came from the world of pro wrestling. I wrote about pro wrestling for 15 years. And that fan base, even if they agree with you, they're mean. So you guys are cool. It's the opposite. And I think we're all kind of in the same boat. We all have people in our lives that we love who have autism. Um, in my case, it's my son, Lucas. He's 15, he's nonverbal, has profound autism, severe autism. And all we want to do is understand these people in our lives better. So we turn to each other for advice, for stories, for things like that. And that's what I did, and that's what this particular blog was about. It was about once Lucas learned that I understood him and that I could anticipate his issues and I could be understanding of his issues. There's very few times where I just grab him like, come on, Lucas, cut it out. We have to go. I don't do that. Did I do it when he was little? Yeah. Do I look back on it and feel kind of bad about it? Yeah. Um, did it cause more issues than it should have? Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why I didn't do it anymore. There were definitely times where I realized if I get upset and if I lecture him, hey, Lucas, we're gonna be a big boy, you're not being a big boy, he would not respond well. It's not like a neurotypical kid where you could be like, hey, cut it out, or you're not gonna get any ice cream. And the kid stands up and they go with you and they shut up. Now Lucas would cry more and more and more. And the more upset you get, the more upset he gets. And now you still have to deal with what you're dealing with. He's more upset. Um, he's also oppositional in certain times. If he doesn't want to do something and you give him a hard time, he will still not do it, but he'll do it through tears and anger. And it didn't make anyone happy. It didn't make me happy, it didn't make him happy. And in this blog, I talked about uh some of my favorite stories, and there's one that I've gone over before. And it was the day that we had gone out. Uh, my daughter, uh Lucas and I, we had gone, it was actually, I'll tell you exactly when it was. It was when we took him to see Sesame Street, which is another story altogether. It was Sesame Street Live. I bought him for his birthday, he hated it. That's when I learned he doesn't really like Sesame Street, he likes his particular Sesame Street, but he doesn't really care for the storylines, I guess. So we left and he was hungry, we're all hungry, and we went to Long Island shout out, Bluebird Kitchen on Long Island. It is, you know, just a kind of a diner-ish type of brunchy place. Uh, well, not exactly, and it also is insanely expensive. So he put those two together. Uh so we went there, we were like, all right, we're hungry, there's nowhere around, let's go. And as we walked in, they were cleaning up from breakfast or brunch and they were getting ready for lunch, and they weren't serving food, and we had to turn around and leave. And I know my kid. And he didn't get it at the time. He thought we were leaving and started to kind of melt down on the way out. I told my daughter, I said, go in the car, go in the car. And he sat down in the parking lot and I sat next to him. I rubbed his back and I did the whole, you know, hey, buddy, you're gonna get food. Don't worry. And you talk about pro wrestling. I always use this example. I guess I should sometimes explain it more. Um, I use pantomime like Hulk Hogan, right? A thing in wrestling, they tell you, is that the people in the last row of the arena need to know what you're doing. So you have to pantomime. And Hulk Hogan, if you go back and watch old Hulk Hogan matches from the 80s and 90s, Hulk Hogan is like the most animated dude you'll ever see in your life. He does it amazing, he doesn't understand something. He holds his head, he shakes it, he looks at the crowd, he's banging his hands around. It's the kind of thing you don't appreciate until you know what he's doing and you understand it. So for Lucas, I do the same thing. I want him to understand what I'm saying. So I try to, at least I, you know, especially when he was younger, merge words and and movements so that if he's not understanding the word I'm saying yet, he can understand the movement. So if we did all that, I say, Hey, buddy, you want to eat, right? I'm a hand to the mouth. We're gonna eat after, after it's like a rainbow note, like, hey, after we're gonna get food. And if you wait and two hands up, wait like that. And he got it and he dealt with it, and then we went to eat, and he was fantastic. Nowadays, I don't have to do that. Nowadays, he doesn't he doesn't really melt down with me. And I say that, and people are like, Well, I'm I mean it. Like he really doesn't. I hear about it at school, they'll come back, but he was good today. He did drop to the ground when he didn't want to go inside. Um, I hear from other people about him running up to to grab food off a table that's not supposed to be for him, but he doesn't do those things with me. Um and it's I say it's about trust. I don't know, it's just like we've been around for so long, and he's known from now, like if he's not getting fed at this moment with me, I will feed him eventually. I do the hand motions with him too. I'm like, hey, buddy, wait after we're gonna, you know, all that stuff. And I get it out. Um so he gets it. And it took a while. It took a while of him seeing this, of me repeating this, of me showing him that now it's it's almost like a fundamental understanding that we have, and it's great. But one of the things I wanted to point out, and one of the things I talked about at the start of the show, we're all looking for answers for our own situation. This is one of the times where I'm supposed to tell you I'm an expert in autism, and I'm not gonna say that. I am an expert in my son's autism. I know what works for Lucas, and I know the things that we've done to bridge this gap of understanding between verbal and nonverbal. I can tell you our stories, I can share with you techniques, but I can't tell you a hundred percent what is gonna work in your home. Only you know that. So I ask people to listen to our stories. I ask people to read what I write, and if you like it, great. Use it. Use whatever you think can work. Try it, get a different perspective, get a different point of view. Um if you can't use any of it, read the stories. Maybe you'll think they're cute. I don't know. But there's always little bits of information in everybody's stories that we can use. I do the same thing. If I hear something from somebody else, you have a friend come over, but hey man, have you done, you know, this thing? We did this, and maybe you don't want to do that thing, but you think to yourself, well, that kind of makes sense. Maybe if we we drive this way or do that, there's always a little piece that might be relatable that you can use. Now, I personally think a lot of the suggestions that I give are things that we all try to do anyway. I think most people want their kids to feel secure, to feel heard, to feel understood. So that's what I encourage people to do. Are there kids out there that don't need that? I guess. I don't know, but my kid does. Your kid probably does, but this isn't an instruction manual. This is inspiration, these are ideas, these are things that we do. You know, they always say if you met one kid with autism, you met one kid with autism. That's the old, the old phrase that people use. But I always say it's not just autism. If you met one kid, you met one kid. I mean, think about it like this. If somebody came to you and was like, oh, you have a boy? You're you have a son? Okay, well, here's how you're gonna raise your kid, and 100% of the time it's gonna work. You'd be like, dude, that doesn't make any sense. You don't even know my son. So if it doesn't work for a neurotypical boy or girl, why would it work for your kid because they're on the spectrum because my kid's on the spectrum? Now, if somebody comes to you with an idea on how to raise a boy and they say, hey, you gotta teach him these ideals and you gotta teach him integrity, that's good. That makes sense. It's not a checklist, it is not an instruction manual, but it's an idea. And it's an ideal that you should probably try to put into your kid. Same thing with Lucas, right? Lucas needs to be heard. I feel that every kid with autism, every kid who is non-verbal wants to be heard. Um, Lucas specifically is different though, overall than a lot of other kids. Like Lucas doesn't use social stories, he doesn't care about it, he doesn't really look at it. Uh, we've tried it. I had in the bathroom for a while, I used to have like the whole um, if you know social stories or little pictures of activities and things that you're gonna do. Uh, never looked at it, never cared, doesn't really pay attention to that kind of stuff. Um there are fundamental things that Lucas doesn't understand, which is difficult for me as a dad sometimes to say or explain because people will argue back at me on it. But, oh no, he understands everything. And I'm like, you haven't met him. And I've been with him like every day since he was born. So I'm telling you, I know my kid, and I know that there are moments and there are things that happen and there are situations that I don't talk about here. Some of them I do, some of them I don't, where it becomes clear to me, oh, he doesn't, he doesn't understand this. Um, and it's difficult. And I would love to, I would love to just be like, oh, he understands everything. He understands every single word you say. And I've seen those memes, and that almost falls into the same thing I'm talking about here. Like, you can't 100% apply something to everyone to the point where it would offend me sometimes. I would see uh, you know, one of those like little image memes, these quote boxes, and it would say, you know, nonverbal kids understand every word you say, every single word. And I would get mad. I would be like, I hope not. Like I because I would have a situation with him where I was like, if this kid understands what's going on right now and he's doing this, like I'm screwed. I don't tell you that. I don't know what your kid understands. I know what my kid understands. It's not everything. I could tell you 100% that day at the restaurant. And I had somebody on Facebook have pointed this out and said, and this is what I loved about it, right? I wish I could remember the name, I don't have it in front of me right now, but he had said, you know, it's not necessarily that they that your son thought he wasn't going to get fed when he left, and he provided this kind of alternate idea of what it could be. But then he said, I also know that I don't know your son, and maybe it's true in your case. I'm saying that in other cases, and that's the way you handle it. I can tell you 100%. He thought we were leaving without eating. He thought that I didn't understand that he wanted to eat. He thought we were just like walking in, walking out, and he got upset. And that's from knowing my kid. And if you have a kid, verbal, nonverbal, whatever, you know your kid, right? Like I know my daughter. My daughter's 17. She's neurotypical, she's going to college soon. I know her. I've known her since she was a baby. I know when she's tired, I know when she's moody, I know when all these different things are happening ahead of time. I can almost, you know, telegraph her mood based on what she's doing. Same thing with my son. Same thing with all of our kids. So that's it. I think a lot of us, um, we're experts in our own children. Talk about parenting experts, we talk about autism experts. I think for the most part, if you are somebody speaking from a place of um having a personal situation where you're around someone in your life who has autism, I think that you probably know a lot about your own kid or your own family member that somebody else won't understand or won't know. And that's how I feel with Lucas. I understand my son very well. And I will be honest with you, man. When he was little, I never thought we would get to a place where we had that common understanding. I didn't think he'd have receptive language. I didn't think I could bring him anywhere. I didn't think he would ever understand anything. And now, I mean, every day it's more and more of like, oh, look at that. And we're more in tune with each other. He gets me, he trusts me, he understands me. And that was the most important thing for me to teach him trust and to teach him that I have his back no matter what. He's gonna get fed, he's gonna be taken care of. If he has a need, if I don't see it coming ahead of time, when the time comes for me to know, I'm gonna know what it is. And that's consistency and that's showing, and that's um honestly just like focus and patience and love. And that's something I think we could all get behind. So whether your kid follows along with the exact same protocol my son does or doesn't, I will tell you safety, love, trust, patience, understanding I can go on and on about the list of things that we have to do for our kids, and those are the kind of things that we all need to do. Uh, whether you do it in the same manner that I did or not, that's up to you. But there are certain things that are universal. And that and the things that I do with my son are universal, not just for him, for every kid on the spectrum, and for every kid who's not on the spectrum, for every kid, for every person in your life, patience, trust, understanding, love. We all need it. Uh, my son needs it too. And that's what I give him. And that does it for me, guys. I will see you back uh on Monday. No, next Friday is the podcast. But Monday, hiblogomdad.com, brand new blog. Check it out. Uh HiPod I'm dad. I'll be back next Friday with a brand new edition of the podcast. Follow me on social media, H I James Gubman. Hi, James Gubman. Hi, two teasing gutman. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, you name it, everything except for X. That does it for me. Until then, James Gutman saying, be well. Byepod. I'm dad.