The first 72 hours - what to do, what not to do
You are probably reading this on the phone, on the sofa, in the dark. Your child is asleep in the other room. The diagnosis happened three hours ago, or yesterday, or this morning. You opened a browser because you need to do something, and doing nothing feels worse than doing anything.
We have been where you are. Many thousands of Indian parents have. What we want to give you for the next seventy-two hours is not a plan. It is a short list of what actually helps, and a shorter list of what will make you feel worse. Everything else can wait until the sun comes up, and then some.
Tonight
The only thing that is truly urgent in the next eight hours is sleep. Yours. Nothing you will read at 2 am will be useful to him in the morning. A rested mother is a better gift to your child tomorrow than anything you will research tonight.
Do, tonight.
- Put the phone down after this page. Close the tabs about Ayurvedic cures and stem cell therapy and the fourteen-part YouTube series from an American parent. They will still be there in a week. We are asking you to not read them ever, but tonight is a fine place to start.
- Eat something. Warm. Even if you are not hungry. A plate of khichdi, a bowl of dal and rice, whatever is already made. You will shake less tomorrow if your body has food in it.
- Hold him the way you held him last Tuesday. When he wakes up at night for water, or in the morning when he pads into your room, hold him exactly the way you have always held him. He has not changed. You have a word now that you did not have yesterday. That is the only difference. Let him feel that nothing has changed about how you love him.
- Write down three things he already does well. On the back of an envelope, in your phone notes, anywhere. Not things he is working on, not things his therapist will fix. Things he already, today, does well. Keep this list. It will be important in ways you do not yet understand.
- Tell one person. One. A sister, a friend from college, your therapist if you have one. Someone who will not make it worse. Not the family WhatsApp group. Not your mother-in-law. One safe person, so you do not have to carry this alone through the night.
Do not, tonight.
- Do not call therapists at 11 pm. No good therapist in this country is answering their phone at 11 pm, and the ones who are might not be the ones you want.
- Do not announce it on the family WhatsApp. You do not owe anyone a public update tonight. You will tell people in your own time, in your own order. The first twenty-four hours are yours.
- Do not google 'autism cure'. There is no cure because autism is not a disease. What the search will pull up is grift, at best well-intentioned and at worst actively harmful. Close the tab.
- Do not have the big conversation with your husband tonight. If you are a two-parent home, you are both in shock. Tonight is for holding each other, not for deciding the next five years. That conversation can wait three days, and it will be a better one when it happens.
This week
Between day two and day seven, a handful of things are worth doing. Nothing else. If you find yourself doing more than this list, you are doing too much. Sit back down.
Do, this week.
- Book a developmental paediatric assessment. If the diagnosis came from a general paediatrician or a neurologist, you still want a developmental paediatrician in the loop. They are the ones who will coordinate care. In most Indian metros, the wait is two to six weeks. Book now, not because it is urgent this week, but because of the wait.
- Book a speech-language evaluation. Not therapy yet, just the evaluation. An Indian Speech and Hearing Association-registered SLP will give you a baseline. If your child is non-verbal or minimally verbal, this is where the AAC conversation will start, and you want that conversation as early as it can happen.
- Book an occupational therapy evaluation. Again, evaluation first, not therapy. An OT will tell you what his sensory profile actually looks like, which will reframe half the things you already thought you knew about him.
- Ask the diagnosing team for a written report. In writing, on letterhead. You will need this for UDID, for school, for future therapists. Do not leave this week without it.
- Tell one more person, carefully chosen. Your child's school class teacher, if he is in school. Or your own parents, if they are the ones who will hold you up. Not everyone, not yet. Widen the circle by one.
Do not, this week.
- Do not start six therapies at once. We have watched families burn out in month two because they signed up for OT, ST, ABA, play therapy, aqua therapy, and a special educator in week one. Your child is tired and confused. You are tired and confused. One therapy at a time, added in over weeks, is how you avoid a crash.
- Do not start Ayurvedic regimens that promise a cure. Some of these preparations have been found, in published testing, to contain lead, mercury, or arsenic at levels above safe thresholds for a child's body. We are not attacking Ayurveda as a system. We are telling you, specifically, that products marketed as autism cures are not regulated, not tested, and sometimes actively dangerous. Please do not put anything into your child's body this week that you cannot see a full ingredient list for.
- Do not remove gluten and casein from his diet without a dietitian. The GFCF diet has not been shown to improve autism symptoms in rigorous studies. For a nonverbal child with a narrow food repertoire already, removing gluten and casein can do real nutritional harm. If you want to try it eventually, do it with a clinical dietitian. Not from a WhatsApp group.
- Do not read Reddit at 2 am. The autism parenting forums online skew very American, very tired, and very angry. They are not the community you need this week. The Indian community you need exists, on WhatsApp and in city-level groups, and we will help you find it later.
- Do not make big decisions. Do not pull him out of school yet. Do not quit your job yet. Do not move houses to be closer to a therapy centre yet. The first week is not the week for irreversible choices.
The first 30 days
Between week two and day thirty, the shape of your life will start to settle. The panic will not leave, but it will get quieter. You will have the paediatric assessment, the speech evaluation, the OT evaluation, and a tentative therapy plan. At that point, a few things become possible that were not possible in week one.
Do, in the first month.
- Start one therapy. Usually speech-language therapy or occupational therapy, depending on what the evaluations showed. One. Consistently. Let your child and your family find a rhythm around it before anything else is added.
- Start a little-victories notebook. A physical one works best. Every day, one small thing he did. 'Aaj usne khud kiya.' Today he did it himself. Turned on the tap, pointed at the biscuit he wanted, sat through the temple visit, put his shoes on the rack. Small. Real. Yours. This notebook will become important in ways you cannot predict.
- Find your city's parent group. Nayi Disha has WhatsApp groups in most Indian metros. Autism Parents Forum, VOICE, SCAN Chennai, Family for Autism - one of these, or a local version in your language, will be the community that gets you through the next year. You do not need to say anything in the group for the first month. Just read. You will feel less alone by day ten.
- Apply for the disability certificate. The UDID card opens access to Niramaya health insurance, school concessions, income tax relief, and several government schemes. The application can take four to eight weeks, so starting inside the first month is wise. The deep how-to is in our UDID walkthrough.
Do not, in the first month.
- Do not let your peace be owned by your relatives. If a family member insists on a 'cure' path you have already decided against, you are allowed to end that conversation. Every time. Firm is not unkind.
- Do not compare his progress to another child's. Not the one in his therapy waiting room, not the one on Instagram, not the cousin who was diagnosed last year. Every autistic child is their own child. Progress is not a race, and it is not linear.
- Do not try to become an autism expert in thirty days. You will get there, in your own time, in the shape that is useful to your child specifically. You do not need to read every book this month. Your therapist is a professional; let them do their job while you do yours.
Three things that are true, tonight
We want to leave you with three things, in case you forget everything else on this page by tomorrow morning.
The first is that your child is exactly the child he was yesterday. Everything you love about him is still there. The way he holds his spoon, the song he hums when he is settling, the way he watches ceiling fans, the way he comes looking for you when he needs water. All of it. Still him.
The second is that the next three days are not the most important three days of his life. They are hard days, and they will pass, and what you do in them matters less than the fact that you are here. Hold him. Feed him. Let him sleep in his own bed, in his own room, in the home he knows. That is enough for now.
The third is that there is a road ahead, and thousands of Indian families are already on it ahead of you. The shape of the road is in our map essay, when you are ready. But you do not have to read it tonight. You do not have to do anything tonight except be the mother he has always known.
He is already asleep. You should try to be too.
Parents also ask
Should we start therapy tomorrow?
No. Start with evaluations, not therapy. An evaluation from a speech-language pathologist and an occupational therapist will tell you what your child actually needs. Therapy without evaluation is the wrong order and usually the wrong therapy. Book the evaluations this week, start one therapy once you have the reports, and add the second only after four to six weeks.
Someone told me Ayurvedic treatment can cure autism. Is it true?
No. Autism cannot be cured because it is not a disease. Some preparations marketed as autism cures have been independently tested and found to contain lead, mercury, or arsenic at unsafe levels for a child. This is not an attack on Ayurveda as a medical tradition. It is a specific warning about unregulated products that target desperate parents. Do not put anything into your child's body without a full ingredient list from a registered professional.
Should we keep him home from school for now?
Not unless the school is actively harmful to him. Familiar routine is stabilising, and a child who is still going to the school he knows is a child with one less upheaval. If the school is supportive, keep him there. If the school is punitive or unequipped, you will make that decision in month two or three, not this week.
Should I tell my parents and in-laws right away?
Only if they will help. You do not owe anyone a disclosure in the first week. Tell one trusted person tonight. Widen the circle carefully over the next month, starting with family members who have shown they can hold hard news without making it worse. The autism will still be true in three weeks. The right moment to tell your mother-in-law is not necessarily tonight.
Everyone is telling me to try the gluten-free casein-free diet. Should I?
No. Not this week. The GFCF diet has not been shown, in rigorous studies, to improve autism symptoms. For a child who is already a selective eater, removing gluten and casein can cause nutritional deficits that are harder to fix than autism is to live with. If you want to explore it later, do it with a clinical dietitian. Not from a WhatsApp group or a relative who read an article.
More in The first week
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