Art therapy for parents of autistic children: making space for your own experience
By Jannie Olsen, Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and Art Psychotherapist
When you are raising an autistic child, a great deal of care, attention and energy flows toward your child — and rightly so. But in the middle of appointments, therapies, school meetings and everyday advocacy, it is easy for your own inner life, as a parent and as a person, to quietly slip into the background. This piece is about making some space for that inner life, and how art therapy can help.
When the focus is always on your child
Families raising an autistic child often carry a great deal: assessments and waitlists, funding and paperwork, and the ongoing work of understanding and supporting your child well. Support services, understandably, tend to orient around the child's needs and development. What can receive far less attention is how all of this lands for you.
Many parents describe a complex mix of love, worry, grief, guilt, joy and exhaustion, alongside real shifts in how they see themselves — as a parent, a partner, and a person in their own right. In my clinical work, and in the research literature, a recurring theme is that parents, and mothers in particular, are seldom given a space of their own to explore these feelings. Yet those feelings are common, understandable, and worth attending to.
Why words are not always enough
Some experiences are difficult to put into words, particularly the tangled, contradictory ones. Art therapy offers another way in. It uses creative processes — drawing, painting, collage, working with simple materials — within a supportive therapeutic relationship, so that what is hard to say can be expressed and explored in another form.
One thing is worth saying clearly, because it stops many people before they start: you do not need any artistic skill or experience. The work is not about making something good to look at. It is about what the creative process opens up, and about having a therapist alongside you to make sense of it, at a pace that feels manageable.
What art therapy can offer parents and carers
For parents and carers, art therapy can provide something quite specific: a space that is yours. Not a space to plan for your child or to solve a problem, but one to notice your own experience, and to reconnect with the person you are alongside the role you hold.
Depending on what you bring to it, art therapy may offer a way to express feelings that are hard to name, to sit with and process the complex emotions that can come with parenting an autistic child, to notice how you are coping, and to find moments of calm, focus, and even play. Outcomes are different for everyone, and art therapy is not the right fit for every person or every moment. But for many people, having a dedicated, non-judgemental space to attend to their own experience is valuable in itself.
What it looks like in practice
Sessions are unhurried. Your therapist offers a calm space and a range of materials, and there is no pressure to create anything in particular. Art therapy can be one-to-one, and is sometimes offered in small groups, where parents with shared experiences create alongside one another. What matters most is that the work is shaped around you.
A note from Jannie-
I am an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and Art Psychotherapist at Therapywell, with a Masters in Mental Health – Art Therapy. Much of my work has focused on creative and relational approaches with parents, women and families, including art therapy with parents of autistic children. It is work I care deeply about, and my hope is always to help people find a little more space for themselves.
If you would like to learn more, you can read about art therapy at Therapywell, or get in touch to talk about whether it might suit you.
This article is general information and is not a substitute for individual advice. If you would like support specific to your situation, please get in touch.