Long story short I started dating my now fiancé 3 years ago when her son was just 8 months old, fast forward we’ve now learned he’s autistic just not where on the scale.He is 3 and a half, can’t feed himself or express emotions, he’s still in a crib and mainly eats puréed food, he doesn’t know his own name yet, not even close to potty training. Throws tantrums when she tells him no when he shouldn’t be doing stuff IE getting into the cat foot, slapping the TV to the point he’ll throw himself on the ground. She still has to feed him most of his meals. He’s still in a crib he’s too big for because there’s no way we could put him in a toddler bed. I’m thinking he is on the far end of the spectrum not near the middle where he’s going to have a normal life to be quite honest but I don’t voice my opinion much on any of this and kind of just am there to help as much as possible and support her in the decisions she makes regarding the autism thing and how to handle it and offer suggestions where I can (like oh I read this at work today etc)We’re living with her mom right now because it honestly takes 3 people or one of us would have to quit our jobs, and neither of us have fantastic jobs and her mom is on disability.Recently she’s been talking about how she wonders if there’s housing that can take him for like a month and work with him cause she’s at a loss, she’s got no idea what to do, not being my biological son but I do look at him like a son since I’ve been around since he was 6 months old. I see the toll it takes on her daily i work graveyards she works mornings her mom fills in the gaps. So I mean I’m sleeping most of the day for work and can’t help as much as I’d like but that’s just my schedule I’d have to take a decent pay cut to switch to days.Neither of us have great jobs to really get her son the help he needs, we can’t afford the specialized therapy he needs, or the neurologists and dr visits were kinda just doing this on our own. I’m 32 she’s 30, raising a child is hard and a learning experience on its own but this is just getting unreal to where she’s breaking down cause she’ll get home from work and her mom will be exhausted so she’ll take over until I get up and we get a few hours of team parenting in until I have to go to work and then a few hours in the morning getting him up, breakfast etc before I have to go to sleep.Now that she’s talking about basically putting him into like a residential home I’ve been doing some research on this and I don’t think you can do that without paying like 50-100k a year, but you can if sign over the rights to custody to the state but in that scenario he’d most likely end up in foster care.She feels like a horrible person and mother for even thinking about that type of thing with her own son and breaks down into tears and I can tell she’s getting depressed now that she realizes no matter how much she works with him or how hard we try to teach him things, his autism is never going away and with our resources is more likely to get worse. All I’ve said is stuff along the lines “you’re not a horrible mother for thinking that we aren’t trained or have the resources to take care of an autistic child it’s gonna be hard and probably get harder as he gets older and can actually start breaking things if he doesn’t get over this tantrum stuff it’s not gonna be an easy road I think any mother would have thoughts like that you just want to give him the best life possible and I think you think we can’t do that for him” and she’ll ask what I think and I’ll usually respond with “I think that whatever you wanna do is justified either way and you’ll have my support regardless of your decision”I personally think that it’s getting to the point none of us know what to do, and I can just kinda feel in my he’s far on the autism spectrum, not near the middle or anywhere where he’s going to have a life where he can really function on his own as he can’t feed himself or really use a spoon at his age and doesn’t know his name I dunno if that’s telling or what signs would indicate where he’d fall on the spectrum we took him to an early intervention place and he was watched/interacted with by 3 specialists that showed us a piece of paper of where he should be at his age and the middle being average they had him listed in all 6 categories as far left (behind) as possible except in motor skills aka throwing he was slightly below average and the way the we’re talking they woulda scored him even farther to the left if the chart went that far they were very i wanna say blunt to the point it was rude. And that maybe she should consider giving up her custodial rights in the hopes he may have a better life which makes me also feel like a terrible person but we’re clearly just failing at raising this kid cause we got no idea what we’re doing.Thoughts? Advice? Possible resources? Should I let her know how I feel about the her giving him up? via /r/Parenting http://bit.ly/2INX1cU
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