After our older son got the autism diagnosis it pretty soon came to the point where we discussed whether and to what extent we should tell people about his condition. The very first concern that we had was that telling people about him being autistic would automatically put a label on him with unknown consequences. First and foremost, we were concerned with how it would affect our son but naturally, we discussed it also from our perspective as parents. We took to the internet where we read about how other parents of autistic children were addressing this fundamental question about how openly the child’s autism disorder should be discussed and found that it varies substantially between people. As a result, I have summarized a few plausible affects, both positive and negative, of opening up and telling people about the autism diagnosis.

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