Umm, yes . . . if you love your child. I know my autistic son has an almost instant ability and desire to run away the second someone distracts the adult who is with him. Secondarily, he does not understand that standing in front of cars is dangerous, so one of the first places he would go would be to the parking lot to enjoy the visual stimulus of seeing cars come at him. The mom behaved in exactly the way I would expect. The McDonald's worker distracted her and her special needs son took advantage of the distraction to escape. If her son is like mine, she took off immediately to potentially save her special needs son's life.
Ahh... the old ‘my child is autistic’ excuse.
“Autism is such a complex disorder. It is easily misdiagnosed,” said Allen, a speech and language pathologist with Henry Ford Health System.
If you are so out of control from distraction that you can’t restrain yourself from tossing a potentially dangerous object the direction of another person (the example given by allmendream was a coffee, and everyone knows the danger of McD’s coffee!), please stay at home or separate from your child in public until you can learn to overcome endangering others.
I’m very supportive of parents of, and caregivers for, persons with autism, but the condition doesn’t provide an excuse to endanger others.
You must have a messy floor if you think this is acceptable behavior. How about setting the coffee cup on a table or placing it in a waste container instead of throwing it on the floor?
Maybe I am missing something so I am honestly asking this without any passive aggresive attention. Forgive me if it appears to be not as intended.
How is it faster to toss the cup on the floor than to just set it on a table as you are walking to the door? Or faster than tossing in the garbage? What if you tossed it on the floor and then slipped and fell yourself, therefore preventing you from saving your child at all?
No, you don’t “have” to toss whatever you are holding. You can set it down.
It concerns me that you believe one *has* to throw one’s object in order to rush out and save one’s child. That is a poor attempt to absolve one’s self of responsibility should, say, the tossed coffee cup burn another customer or should another customer slip on the spilled coffee.
Exactly! It’s the same with my autistic grandson.