Life can be a grind sometimes, and it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day minutiae. This can be even more true for families with kids on the autism spectrum – sometimes just getting through a day is all you can hope for! It's those days in particular when I like to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of how much progress Calvin has made.

When you get caught up in the mindset of looking at each day as a success or failure, the failures can outweigh the successes, and it can drive you crazy. "He had a good day today. He had a bad day today – meltdown. He had an ok day. He had a bad day – wouldn't work. He had a good day. He had a bad day – no sleep." Etc. Etc. It becomes very hard to see any progress, and the bad days can wear you out.

I plotted "Relative Happiness" against "Each Day". Notice the highs and lows from day to day. ps – this is a hypothetical graph (I haven't been charting happiness every day!)

As time passes, you might find that he has more good days in a row before a bad day, or that the bad days aren't quite as bad as they used to be. But if you're still looking at daily results, you might not see it. You'll be too stressed out from yesterday's bad day, fretting over when it's going to happen again.

Notice we're higher up on the "Relative Happiness" scale, and we're having more good days than bad days. But it's still hard to see any kind of trend.

It's when you can take a step back and look at the bigger picture that you really see the positive results of all your (and your child's) hard work. How is he doing today compared with 3-6 months ago? How about compared with a year ago? Pull out your pictures from last year (or your video or journal) to remind yourself of what the struggles were. You'll probably find that today's bad days are better than yester-year's good days. And today's good days were unimaginable – a dream – not too long ago.

This is the full chart that the previous two were excerpted from. Now, looking at a 2-year block of time, it's pretty easy to see the forward progress.

Keeping things in perspective is something that I find helps a great deal.

Ad: Nothing beats a Digital Camera for taking great pictures.