Neurodiverse Love with Mona Kay Adult Children of (Unidentified) Autistic Parents: Fostering Visibility & Understanding-Laurie Budlong-Morse
Aug 12, 2025
In this engaging discussion, Laurie Budlong-Morse, a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and AANE-certified neurodiverse couples therapist, shares her insights as the adult child of an autistic mother. She explores the unique challenges faced by adult children of unidentified autistic parents, addressing themes of emotional neglect, codependency, and social isolation. Laurie emphasizes the importance of validation, self-compassion, and learning practical relationship skills, while also offering hope for healing and enhanced understanding of parental behaviors through a neurodiversity lens.
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Autism Shapes Every Aspect Of Parenting
- Parenting while autistic adds pervasive, ongoing challenges across sensory, social, emotional, and executive domains.
- These challenges make applying strengths to parenting difficult because parenting demands constantly change.
Lack Of Diagnosis Creates A 'Funhouse' Family Map
- When a parent is unidentified autistic, children lack a framework and accumulate many confusing small interactions that add up.
- This pervasive confusion makes it hard for adults to describe or trust their childhood experiences.
Five Core Impacts On Adult Children
- Five recurring adult-child impacts are distortions/invalidation, emotional neglect, child-regulates-parent, isolation/independence, and boundary problems.
- These themes explain many long-term relational and emotional difficulties for ACAPs.