We stopped guessing

When Mateo was diagnosed at three, I did what every parent does: I opened forty browser tabs. Every one of them contradicted the last. For two years, every decision felt like a coin flip — this therapy or that one, this diet or that supplement, this opinion or that one.

What changed for us was not a single breakthrough. It was being given an order to work in. Sleep first. Then the sensory routine, attached to the two transitions that wrecked our mornings. Then, months later, the feeding work — and only because the first two had given all of us more capacity.

Mateo is still Mateo. He is autistic, he is seven, he is obsessed with garbage trucks, and hard days still come. But our house is calmer, our mornings mostly work, and I can tell you why we are doing each thing we do. I could not have said that three years ago.

Every child and every family is different, and what helped ours may look different in yours. The thing I would hand any parent is not a protocol — it is the relief of a starting point.