My 12-year-old son, Jake, recently spent the day ­hanging about Hastings town centre with a group of friends.
Nothing remarkable happened — they saw a film, ate chips, bought a computer game.
But for Jake, days like these are rites of passage.
The joy and significance of them is that they are spent without adult supervision.
Jake’s experience of family life is back to front. He has two older brothers, but he passes milestones of maturity and independence before they do.
Indeed, George and Sam may never reach Jake’s early adolescent level of autonomy, because they are both autistic.
George is 20, Sam 19. In both cases, their autism was diagnosed at the age of four. Though they share the diagnosis, their personalities are as ­different from one another as either is from Jake.
George is gentle, passive, anxious, dreamy and slow. He takes hours to eat his breakfast. It can be lunchtime before he’s decided which socks to wear for what’s left of the day. More sociable than many with autism, he will seek out ­company, though conversation is welcome only on his own terms.
Sam, restless, loud, energetic, strong and fast, tears through activities in seconds. He swallows drinks in one gulp, covers page after page at high speed with barely recognisable drawings of birthday cakes and ironing boards. In a good mood, he’s bouncy and humorous, but he’s aggressive and destructive when crossed.
Sam does not speak much, and has little social instinct. In diagnostic parlance, while George falls into the ‘socially active but odd’ category, Sam is ‘aloof’. Jake, meanwhile, lives for football, his Xbox, and — above all — his friends.
It has never occurred to George or Sam to hang about in Hastings. They do not notice what other people do.
This is just as well; the busy, overstimulating environment would send them into a frenzy, while their ­limited ­powers of empathy, their lack of social imagination, makes them ­clueless about interpreting human behaviour.
I’m not worried about Jake out with his friends. He’s ­sensible, cautious and observant.
His brothers, however, have little initiative or common sense.
The only way to protect them from ‘stranger danger’ has been to ensure they are never out of the presence of a known and trusted adult.
Physically, George and Sam have reached the end of adolescence — that long and bewildering journey on which Jake is just embarking.
They are handsome, healthy, young men, even if Sam has a somewhat bandit-like appearance, because, although I’ve finally persuaded him to shave his cheeks, his upper lip has never known the touch of a razor.
They are utterly unconcerned about their looks. George will pull faces in a mirror, but I’ve never seen Sam even glance at his reflection.
There was a time when George would wear only pink or tartan, and Sam’s clothes would all be inside out and back to front. But now they wear clothes more or less normally, though Sam’s shoes may well be on the wrong feet.
I’m spared the problems of one American mother I read about whose fully-grown autistic son insists on dressing as a green fairy, complete with taffeta wings.
But though the physical process is almost complete, the ultimate goal of adolescence — adult independence — may be unreachable.
Many people will be familiar with the challenges faced by autistic children. But how many are aware of what happens when those children grow up to inhabit adult bodies with, for example, the sexual urges that go with physical maturity? Will you ever see them find a job they love, or a partner who cares for them?
George and Sam have no ambition, no instinct to separate themselves from me or from home. George, the more verbal of the two, has often been asked about a future career. He usually replies that he wants to be a zookeeper and look after giraffes.
I don’t believe he wants any such thing — he is wary of all ­animals.

His reply indicates he knows he has to find an answer that will satisfy his questioner, and that in some ­children’s book or other ‘zookeeper’ has cropped up as a career option.
It may equally have been ‘fireman’ or ‘astronaut’. For the sake of giraffes and the general public, I hope his stated aim is never realised.
George does have some capacity to think about the future, but he’s reluctant to do so; like most autists, he dislikes change. In early adolescence, he went through a terrifying phase of refusing to eat, because he didn’t want to grow.
He’s calmer now, and eating has become a great pleasure, but he often states a desire to stay here, at home, with me.
‘I want to be buried in the ground at Whatlington [our village] soon!’ he declared the other day. I didn’t interpret this as a death wish — his tone was quite cheerful — so much as a request for reassurance that the environment he has known all his life will always be there for him to return to.
As for Sam, I don’t think the ­concept of the future exists for him. He’s inscrutable, but as far as I can judge, he lives in the present. He rarely tries to communicate anything beyond his immediate needs — ‘cook fish fingers’, ‘open the cupboard’.
When the boys were little, I dreaded their adolescence. So much of my ability to manage them depended on our relative size. I could strap them into a buggy or a car-seat, put ­dangerous objects out of their reach, outrun them (just!) when they set off into the far blue yonder.
How would I manage when they were bigger and stronger than me? And what about the onset of sexuality?
Well, the teenage years haven’t been quite as bad as I’d feared. What you might call reward-based ­training, both at the state-funded special schools they have attended, and at home, has instilled enough compliance for basic safety; if I shout ‘stop’, they do usually stop.
I avoid taking both of them into situations where I might not be able to control them, which is basically anywhere crowded.
At home, I can’t overpower them any more, but I can outwit them. Things that Sam may want to ­consume (deodorant, dishwasher tablets, paint) are kept under lock and key, as are china and glass, which he loves to smash.
And then there is the issue of sex. Both are sexually mature, but they know that sexual activity needs to be private and confined to the ­bedroom. The staff at their schools should take far more credit than me for instilling this all-important ­lesson.
It’s a measure of the profundity of my older sons’ difference to other boys their age that neither has yet identified another human being as an object of sexual desire, but I have to say this makes life easier for me.
In fact, the most difficult aspects of these years have been George’s refusal to eat, which slowly sorted itself out, and Sam’s mood swings, which are ongoing, extreme, and unpredictable. In the grip of a rage he will scratch, kick, bite, punch his fist through panes of glass — there’s little one can do except wait for the storm to pass.
This behaviour may be due to his personality type rather than to the frustrations of being autistic. If Sam were not autistic, I’m sure he’d be the kind of boy who’d crash cars and get into pub fights, whereas George would languish moodily in his bedroom watching his hair grow and writing introspective poems.
I’m hoping Sam’s rages are ­hormonal and that soon, like George’s quasi-anorexia, they’ll be a thing of the past, but I can’t be sure. Meanwhile, the biggest problem for me is the dwindling number of ­people able and willing to take care of them when I need a break.
The teenage years are tough for most parents. I’m very aware of that, and sometimes I even feel I have an easier ride.
The sheltered lives my sons necessarily lead mean I don’t have to worry about drink, drugs, smoking, the internet (about which they know nothing), unprotected sex, money mismanagement, heartbreak or dubious friends.
I will not return home to find the place trashed by a horde of partying semi-strangers. I don’t have to fork out for driving lessons, only to lie awake, rigid with anxiety, ­awaiting the return of the novice driver out on his own for the first time.
Take the book group I belong to; eight middle-aged women with 28 children between us, most of them in late adolescence. I’m the only one who still has to employ a babysitter.
But when I listen to my friends’ tales of depression, bullying, unsuitable love affairs, ­substance abuse, academic crises, dangerous gap-year travels, misery about personal appearance and, of course, the ignoring of parental advice, I feel almost lucky.
The difference is that there will come a time when even the most awkward of these other mothers’ beloved but complicated fledglings will have left the nest.
Parents never stop caring and worrying about their children, but in most cases my friends will reach a point when they can look back with their offspring and laugh indulgently at the excesses of adolescence.
For a special-needs parent, the responsibility never ends. I have to balance the fact that I must continue to be chief advocate for my sons with the knowledge that I am neither infallible nor immortal.
It’s essential to move them on in a way that will ensure that, when I am incapable or dead, their lives will not fall apart. Ironically, state support fades away, just when it needs to grow stronger.
Until the age of 19, the special needs child has a right to appropriate education — not always easy to find (though we’ve been lucky) but at least the right is there.
After 19, it comes as a shock to realise that provision is patchy and nothing is guaranteed. Legally, there’s nothing to prevent George and Sam ­living at home with me doing ­absolutely nothing.
Of course, there are excellent options, and George has just ­completed the first of three years’ boarding at a Rudolf Steiner ­college, studying horticulture as well as arts and crafts — Jake calls it ‘George’s university’.
The gentle, spiritual, creative, carefully structured programme suits George’s particular eccentric temperament, but state funding is provided for only a year at a time, so although the assumption is that he’ll be able to finish his course, there’s no guarantee.
And after college, what then? I can’t prepare him for what lies ahead, because I don’t know. It’s hard to plan, when everything is at the mercy of a local authority budget.
Sam leaves his state-run ­special-needs sixth-form next July. He’s not suited to the Steiner environment because his personal needs are more demanding.
I don’t believe that he’s ready, yet, for a residential placement, and even if this were appropriate, I’ve been told I’d be unlikely to get funding. (Apparently we’ve been extremely ‘lucky’ to get any for George.)
There is a local college course in life skills and cookery and so on, well staffed and well organised, but it’s in an enormous, new building in the ­centre of Hastings, as bustling as a swanky new shopping mall.
This is probably right for mainstream sixth-formers who go there to take A-levels or do vocational training, but it is the exact opposite of Sam’s ideal environment.
Sam is highly sensitive to his surroundings. He needs a calm, thinly populated, rural space with a nook into which he can retreat to feel safe. Too much environmental stimulus will send him into a frenzy, or cause him to ‘shut down’.
I really can’t see him coping at this college, which means my plans for his future are back to the ­drawing board.
I know what I want for my sons — all three of them. I want them to lead active, healthy lives in which their own particular tastes and ­talents can find expression.
Jake, with a guiding hand at his back during his developing years, should be able to find his own way.
For his brothers, there need to be many guiding hands, whose ­support can never be safely withdrawn.


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