Customer Reviews

My Son Fred- Living With Autism: How Could You Manage? I Couldn't, I Did It Anyway

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I am a mother of a child with special needs. I had just read "Smiling at Shadows" by Junee Waites and Helen Swinbourne. and was so impressed by the insight it offered that I looked forward to reading "My Son Fred". The two autistic boys, now grown up, appear to have been born at about the same time although one was born in the States and the other, Fred was born in Sweden and also had an intellectual disability.

The two books are very different. "Smiling at Shadows" was a far more positive book that gives great insight into why many ASD children behave as they do. The mother did not in any way understate her own pain and described her journey with great honesty, but we also learned a lot about her son's way of behaving and looking at the world.

"My son Fred" is also about a mother's journey but there is somehow not much about Fred except how he impacts on his mother. There is though a great deal about the mother's feelings throughout. She is searingly honest about these but it is only towards the end of the book, when her son is grown-up, that she begins to describe her son's viewpoint and why he possibly behaved in certain ways. I found her writing style quite irritating, with many words written in CAPITALS or with a Capital First Letter, and some of the language quite cringey. It is translated from Swedish but no doubt the Swedish version contains the same writing style.

Having said all this, it is still worth reading for the terrible way children with intellectual disabilities were regarded at that time. The mother was told by doctors and so-called friends to put him into a home and forget all about him and was condemned for not doing so. She was unsupported and her decision to keep him at home had an enormous and draining impact on her family, yet they all loved him as much as any parent loves their child - something others could not see. Had Fred been born today it is hoped that he would have received much more enlightened care and education and his parents would have been far better-supported.

There are many good things about this book. Had there been a better balance between the writer's feelings and her son's story(as we got in "Smiling at Shadows") and the writing style had been different, I'm sure I would have closed the book feeling enlightened rather than irritated.