Scroll through Facebook on any given day and you’ll find it: a parent sharing a moment with their child, and buried in the comments, a pile-on. Someone calling them lazy. Someone asking why they haven’t “fixed” it yet. Someone offering unsolicited advice wrapped in thinly veiled judgment.
It happens constantly in disability parenting spaces. And it needs to stop.
The People I Follow And Why This Matters to Me
I want to be clear upfront: I follow a lot of autistic people and autism families on Facebook, and I do it because they’re genuinely worth following. The autistic people I know personally are cool, funny, thoughtful, and totally normal.
They are just navigating a world that wasn’t really designed with them in mind. The families I follow online are doing the same: showing up every day for their kids, sharing the good moments and the hard ones, and being more honest about their lives than most people are willing to be.
Some of those families have kids with severe autism. And some of those kids are in diapers or pull-ups. When I see that, I don’t see failure. I see a family that’s figured out what works.
When strangers on the internet see it, sometimes the reaction is very different.
What People Don’t Understand About Severe Autism and Potty Training
Potty training isn’t just about learning a habit. It involves sensory awareness, the ability to recognize and interpret body signals, motor coordination, communication, and the executive function to stop what you’re doing and act on that signal in time. For kids with severe autism, any or all of those pieces may be genuinely, neurologically difficult, not because no one tried, but because the wiring works differently.
For some kids, traditional potty training isn’t a realistic goal at least not on anyone else’s timeline, and maybe not ever in the conventional sense. Pull-ups and diapers in those cases aren’t a sign that parents gave up.
They’re often the result of years of trying, working with therapists, adjusting approaches, and ultimately landing on what actually preserves the child’s dignity and the family’s ability to function.
When someone fires off “have you even tried potty training them?” in the comments. They’re not helping. They’re showing how little they understand about what that family has already been through.
Pull-ups and diapers aren’t a sign that parents gave up. They’re often the result of years of trying, working with therapists, and ultimately landing on what actually works.
I Have Some Skin in This Game, Too
I’m not writing this from the outside looking in. I have cerebral palsy. CP affects muscle coordination and spasticity throughout the body, and for me, that includes my bladder.
What that looks like in real life: there’s sometimes no gradual warning. One moment everything is fine. The next, my bladder is spasming and I have a very short window, sometimes no window, to get to a bathroom. It’s not a matter of planning better or paying more attention.
That’s just how spasticity works.
So yes, I use pull-ups. It’s practical. It’s smart. I’ve made my peace with it and I truly don’t care what anyone thinks.
I’m sharing this not to make the post about me, but because I want to be honest: I understand something about making practical choices around a body that doesn’t always cooperate. And I understand what it feels like to have those choices be nobody’s business but your own.
You’re Only Seeing a Snapshot
Social media gives you a moment. One frame from a film that’s been running for years.
You don’t see the context. You don’t see what was tried before. You don’t see the appointments, the therapy sessions, the late-night research, the hard conversations, the small victories that don’t look like anything to the outside world but meant everything to that family. You don’t see the grief, or the resilience, or the way a parent has quietly rewritten their definition of progress a hundred times over.
What you see is one post. One photo. One moment.
And yet that’s enough for some people to render a verdict.
What to Do Instead
This isn’t complicated. It just takes some intentional effort:
- Pause before commenting. Ask yourself: does this person need my input, or did they just share something from their life?
- Ask instead of assuming. If you genuinely don’t understand something, curiosity is more useful than criticism.
- Believe people when they say something is hard. You don’t have to fully understand a situation to respect that someone is doing their best in it.
- Amplify instead of critique. If you see a disability parent or a disabled person sharing their reality honestly, share it. Normalize it. Help build a space where people feel safe being real.
The World Could Use More of This
My original thought was simple: if there were more people willing to support instead of judge, the internet — and honestly, the world — would be a better place.
I still believe that. Disability doesn’t come with a handbook, and every family’s path — every person’s path — looks different. The least we can do is show up with some grace for the moments we don’t fully understand.
You only see a snapshot. Make sure the story you’re telling yourself about it is worth telling.
Written by someone who knows this isn’t theoretical. 💙
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