He'd been trying to connect with his son for four years.
Every Saturday he'd set something up. The footy in the backyard. The Lego on the table. The bike rides they managed twice before his son stopped wanting to go.
His son would drift away. Not with hostility — just with the quiet indifference of a child whose attention lives somewhere else.
And Tom would pack the Lego back in the box, and feel something he couldn't quite name.
Not anger. Not self-pity.
More like standing outside a room he couldn't find the door to.
This piece is for Tom.
For all the Toms.
The fathers who love their children with autism deeply and consistently and quietly, in the way that men are often taught to love — by showing up, by providing, by fixing what needs fixing — and who have discovered that this particular thing cannot be fixed, and are not sure what to do with that.
Here is what nobody tells fathers:
The parenting literature about autism is written almost entirely for mothers.
The support groups are attended almost entirely by mothers.
The school calls almost always go to the mother.
The therapy appointments, the intake forms, the parent workshops, the facilitation reviews — attended, in the main, by mothers.
Fathers are present. They're just not addressed.
And so a lot of fathers experience something like peripheral vision. They're part of the scene but not in the frame. Doing the work but not quite sure what their role is beyond logistical support for the person who knows what they're doing.
That invisibility has a cost. And it's rarely talked about.
Tom's moment came on a Sunday afternoon.
Not through a therapy program or a parenting workshop.
His son had found a documentary about trains. Narrow-gauge railways in Wales, of all things. He watched it every afternoon for two weeks.
Tom started watching too.
Not to do something therapeutic. Not with a strategy in mind. Just because it was there, and his son was there, and he ran out of reasons not to sit down.
By week three, his son was pausing the documentary to point things out.
Look at that one, Dad.
Two weeks after that, they were watching together every afternoon.
It sounds like a small thing.
It was not a small thing.
For fathers: the door into your child's world is usually not the one you're trying.
We tend to reach for activity. For shared doing. For the football or the game or the ride.
Children with autism often want something different. They want you inside their specific thing — whatever that thing is. The trains. The numbers. The particular YouTube channel about diggers.
They don't want you to bring them into your world and invite them to participate.
They want you to come into their world and stay for a while without an agenda.
That is a different kind of fathering. It is quieter. It requires less doing and more being.
But the effect — when it lands — is not quiet at all.
There's something else I want to say to the fathers.
About the grief you're not allowed to have.
Because nobody extends it to you — the loss of the sports afternoons you imagined, the friendship you thought you'd build through the shared language of whatever you grew up loving.
That grief is real. It deserves acknowledgment.
Not so you can stay in it. But so you can move through it without it becoming the thing that keeps you at a distance from your child.
Because here's what's on the other side of it:
A relationship that will surprise you. A child who sees everything, even when they don't show it. A bond that forms in ways you didn't expect — through trains in Wales, through lining up blocks just so, through the particular silence of two people who don't need words.
Your child knows you're there. Every time you show up, they know.
They may not tell you. They may not look up. They may seem entirely absorbed in something that has nothing to do with you.
They know.
Tom's son is eleven now.
He still doesn't like the footy. He still doesn't ride bikes.
But every Sunday, without being asked, he comes and finds his dad.
He sits down.
He opens the laptop.
Trains, Dad?
For dads: Find the thing your child loves — not the thing you want to share with them, but the thing they already love. Ask if you can watch, or sit nearby, or just be present while they're in it. Don't redirect. Don't make it educational. Just be there. Consistency over time builds the relationship. The activity is just the container.
I spent four years trying to get him interested in what I loved. Then I spent one year getting interested in what he loved. The second approach worked a lot better.
Fathers are an essential part of every child's development — and they deserve support too. If you want to talk about building connection with your child on the spectrum, reach out to us. We work with the whole family, and that includes you.