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Disagreeing on something without feeling attacked is a lost art.

Sometimes, someone who is not a parent dares to share their opinion, but it’s dangerous territory.

In this case, a woman noticed how her nephew spends too much time online and how things got tense when she basically expressed to her sister-in-law that an iPad addiction doesn’t just happen.

The plot thickens because her nephew was diagnosed with autism, but she doesn’t believe he actually has it.

Now she’s wondering if she crossed a line.

Read the full post below.

AITAH for telling my husband I don’t believe his nephew is actually autistic

We have a nephew (my SIL’s son) who is 11 years old. As some background, I have known him since he was 3 and had already been diagnosed with autism.

When we first met, he showed no signs of autism to me other than having delayed speech.

It was clear he understood everything we were saying he just struggled to form words on his own.

He was a very sweet and affectionate kid and I remember thinking when I met him that he did not strike me as autistic like my husband had told me he was, but I never said anything because I know autism is a spectrum and not all cases present the same.

But there’s more to the story of his diagnosis.

Over the years my SIL has made some comments that have made me doubt the way he was diagnosed.

She has claimed multiple times she had to fight his first pediatrician to test him for autism and had 2 different pediatricians test him and both said they did not believe he showed signs of autism and that he just had a speech delay.

She found a third pediatrician who told her they believed he might be “slightly on the spectrum”. However, this isn’t what she tells people.

She feels that it’s a bit performative.

She constantly posts on Facebook of the struggles of raising a kid with autism. Any bad behavior he exhibits is blamed on autism.

Any issues in school are blamed on autism. They gave him an iPad when he was 4 and he’s been playing it ever since.

They blame his iPad addiction on autism.

It’s clearly turning him into a very spoiled acting kid and he gets away with everything.

She decided to speak up.

Finally after 8 years of not saying anything, I made a comment to my SIL the last time she blamed him playing 8 hours on his iPad on autism.

I said ‘I don’t think iPad addiction stems from autism and that lots of kids will get addicted if no boundaries are set’.

She took this as a full on attack on her parenting.

Which I guess in hindsight I can understand why she would feel attacked. She said I had no right to judge her choices as a mother to an autistic child.

I apologized immediately if I had hurt her but I still feel someone needed to say something.

AITA?

I think it’s okay to respectfully express one’s opinion and different perspectives, especially in cases like this. But what did Reddit think?

Yup.

Someone shares their opinion.

This person challenges her stance.

Another commenter chimes in.

Something to consider.

I think that just because someone shared their opinion, it doesn’t mean they’re not “minding their own business.”

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a grandson who is tired of driving 5 hours one way to work on his grandparent’s investment property for free.

Of course you need to be careful how you phrase things, and raising a child is challenging, period. Autism or not.

But as cliché as it sounds, I do believe it can take a village to raise a kid in the sense that having different opinions and perspectives can enrich the way the parents see different situations.

So maybe even if they don’t fully agree or want to entirely change what they’re doing, they can still take advantage of having others share their opinion. It comes with having a family and living in a society.

Maybe the diagnosis itself doesn’t need to be questioned, but his iPad addiction certainly does. It’s a worldwide issue, and everyone is talking about it anyway.