When “enough” becomes an impossible question—and how to ask what is needed now

Am I doing enough?

It is such a familiar question in autism parenting that we can almost skip past the word doing and land directly on more. More therapy, more teaching, more research, more doctors, more effort, more money, more patience, more advocacy. Perhaps more sacrifice.

But what exactly do we mean by enough?

Enough of what? For whom? Compared with whom? Towards what outcome? At what cost? And where is the question coming from today? Guilt? A sense of inadequacy? Something that isn’t working? Something another parent is doing? Something another child has achieved? Fear? Or simply the wish that if we can somehow do enough now, we can make the future safe?

There may not be one answer, because Am I doing enough? is not necessarily a question we should get rid of. There is value in asking it periodically, just as there is value in re-examining our why. Children change, their needs change, our knowledge changes, our circumstances change. Something that made complete sense three years ago may not make sense today. Something we rejected once may deserve another look. Something we pursued with enormous conviction may no longer be helping.

The problem is not necessarily the question. The problem may be what we ask enough to accomplish.

Because somewhere beneath Am I doing enough? there is often another question: Am I doing enough now to make sure my child will be okay later? And later can stretch a very long way. Will they communicate? Will they be independent? Will they be safe? Will they be happy? Who will care for them? What happens when I die?

We can be looking at a five-year-old while trying to solve the problems of the 45-year-old they may someday become. It is a very parental response to look at a small, vulnerable child and want to make the road ahead safer, to want to arrive at that enormous exhale: Happa. They’ll be fine. Even when I’m not there.

But there is a trap in asking today’s actions to provide that guarantee. No decision made for a five-year-old can secure the entire life of the 45-year-old. If that is the standard against which we measure ourselves, there can never be enough.

When “I Didn’t Do Enough” Travels Backwards

When my son Krishna was diagnosed at three and three-quarters, one of the things we agonised over was playschool. He had never gone. There weren’t children his age around us in our gated community either, so he had had very little peer interaction. At the time, autism was explained to us as primarily a social and communication disorder.

Ergo: no playschool = autism.

Had we caused this? Would things have been different if he had gone to playschool? Should we have made more effort to find children for him to interact with?

We hadn’t done enough.

It is remarkable how quickly new information can rearrange the past. Something we hadn’t thought of as a consequential parenting decision before diagnosis—whether or not to send a very young child to playschool—suddenly acquired enormous significance afterwards. The outcome was already in front of us; hindsight went searching for the action that might explain it.

Krishna had surgery when he was four and a half. He spoke on the morning of the surgery. Afterwards, he stopped speaking. Like a switch had been turned off.

Forever.

Medical science still does not give us a direct answer for why his speech disappeared so abruptly. I have wondered about the anaesthesia, the surgery, the physical and emotional shock of the whole experience, whether something that might otherwise have unfolded differently was somehow precipitated by it. I don’t know. Nobody can give me that answer.

But I know he spoke that morning and did not speak afterwards.

So of course the questions came. Should we have researched more? Asked more questions? Checked something we didn’t even know we were supposed to check? Was there something we could have known that would have changed our decision?

We hadn’t done enough.

Then came schools and therapies, and the place we had chosen to live entered the courtroom. We live well outside Bengaluru, which has always complicated access to services in the city. Something can be technically available and still not be practically accessible to a child who has to spend hours in a car to reach it. Krishna gets carsick, particularly when his gut is worse than his normal, and Bengaluru traffic has an impressive ability to turn kilometres into hours. Were our choices for him being constrained because of where we had chosen to live? Were we putting our preference for our home above his needs?

Again: Were we doing enough?

Then the pandemic arrived. For nearly three years, until Krishna was around eight, much of his world contracted to home. The reasoning behind that decision was not particularly mysterious. Krishna could not reliably follow the safety precautions the rest of us were being asked to follow. Masks, handwashing, avoiding surfaces—these were not realistic expectations for a child who might quite happily lie down somewhere and lick the world as part of exploring it. Keeping him at home, in a relatively isolated and clean environment where that behaviour was less likely to endanger him, made sense.

My emotions had their own arithmetic.

Three years. No ordinary school life. Far less therapy. Far less exposure to people and the outside world. What was he missing? What was this doing to his development? What were other children receiving that he wasn’t?

I wasn’t doing enough.

A decision can be rationally defensible and still feel emotionally inadequate. Knowing why we made a choice does not necessarily stop us from wishing another choice had somehow been possible.

When Krishna was eight, a developmental paediatrician told us he needed six hours of ABA every day. We could realistically manage three. Because the therapy centre was in the city, those three hours already meant roughly six hours away from home once the driving was included. They also had to fit around food routines that mattered enormously because of Krishna’s sensitive gut, hours in a car that he did not always tolerate well, and the ordinary fact that a child has only so many hours in a day.

But three is not six.

We aren’t doing enough.

And behind that thought came the familiar one: If only we didn’t live so far away.

The house was back in court.

“Enough” Rarely Sprouts in a Vacuum

Comparison often supplies the measuring stick we did not have five minutes earlier.

A professional tells us how many hours our child should receive. Another parent mentions the therapy their child does, the school they found, the specialist they travelled to see, the diet they tried, the programme they practise at home. Or it is the child’s progress that catches us. Their child started speaking. Their child learnt to read. Their child moved into a mainstream classroom, dresses independently, eats more foods, travels alone.

And almost without noticing, we construct an equation:

They did more. Their child progressed more. Therefore I am not doing enough.

But another family’s visible effort and visible outcome tell us surprisingly little about what is enough for ours. Their child has a different body, starting point, needs and developmental path. Their finances, family structure, geography, support systems and capacity may be entirely different. We do not know what their child would have done without that particular intervention, how much of the progress we see was caused by it, what it cost the child or family, or what else was happening that never made it into the conversation.

None of this means other families have nothing to teach us. Their experience can be valuable information. It can show us a possibility we hadn’t considered or give us a question we hadn’t thought to ask.

But information is not the same thing as a measuring stick.

If another child thrives after six hours of therapy, that does not prove our child would do the same. Equally, if our child thrives after something we chose, we cannot conclude that our decision produced the progress, much less that every other parent should make the same choice. Otherwise we create a strange model of parenting in which a child’s good outcome proves parental wisdom and a difficult outcome proves parental failure.

Our child’s progress cannot be our performance appraisal.

Another child’s progress cannot be evidence of our failure.

The Problem With Hindsight

Comparison becomes particularly potent when it joins forces with hindsight, because hindsight already knows what happened.

A poor outcome makes it very tempting to reason backwards: Something went badly. Therefore I made the wrong decision. Therefore I didn’t do enough. Therefore I should feel guilty.

But the quality of a decision and the quality of its outcome are not the same thing. A thoughtful, well-informed decision can lead somewhere we desperately wish it hadn’t. A careless decision can get lucky. Every decision is made at one point in time, with the knowledge, resources and alternatives available at that point; hindsight arrives later carrying information the original decision-maker did not possess.

This does not mean we should dismiss hindsight. Quite the opposite. Accountability demands that we look backwards. I did the best I could cannot become a phrase we use to absolve ourselves whenever something goes wrong. Sometimes we didn’t do enough. Sometimes we made an error. Sometimes we ignored something, acted impulsively, persisted with something that wasn’t helping, or behaved in a way we regret.

There is value in admitting that.

If something can be repaired, repair it. If some compensation can be made, make it. If an apology is owed, apologise. If the mistake reveals something about the way we made the decision, let it change the way we decide next time.

Suppose I think, I shouldn’t have shouted at Krishna. Perhaps I was exhausted, miserable and at my wits’ end. That context belongs in an honest account of what happened, but it doesn’t magically make the shouting effective. If it escalated him, escalated me and did nothing to achieve whatever I was trying to achieve, there is information there. Perhaps next time I can step away, ignore the behaviour temporarily, ask someone else to take over, recognise my own limit sooner, or try something different.

Regret has work to do there. It can repair, teach and shape the next response.

The surgery is different. I can still think, I wish I had researched the anaesthesia more. Maybe Krishna wouldn’t have lost his speech. I can review what we knew, what we could reasonably have known, whether there were questions we should have asked and whether more research would realistically have changed anything. I can exercise whatever additional caution that experience teaches me when another medical decision arises.

But I cannot return to that morning with what I know today.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest things about hindsight: sometimes it doesn’t uncover a mistake. Sometimes it simply shows us that a decision made with good intentions and the best knowledge reasonably available still led to an outcome we would give anything to change. Being better informed can reduce uncertainty; it cannot abolish risk. We make decisions without knowing exactly where they will lead. That is the chance we always take.

And perhaps self-blame can even offer a strange kind of certainty in such situations. If only I had done more implies that there was something I could have done, some version of events in which sufficient research or effort would have given me control. We made the best decision we could and something happened that we still cannot explain is much harder to sit with.

That is where regret can turn into wasteful guilt. Not because regret itself has no value, and not because every past decision needs to be exonerated, but because once we have acknowledged what happened, repaired what can be repaired and extracted whatever learning is genuinely available, repeatedly prosecuting ourselves cannot alter the past or improve the next decision.

Acceptance is not declaring ourselves innocent.

It is seeing the past accurately enough to know what was ours, what wasn’t, what can still be changed and what cannot.

Enough Is About Quantity, Quality and Relevance

When we ask Am I doing enough?, it is easy to hear only one word in the answer: more. More therapy, more research, more teaching, more appointments, more money, more hours, more effort.

But enough has more than one dimension.

Quantity: Am I doing enough?

Sometimes the honest answer is no. Something genuinely needs more attention. A medical problem needs investigating. Communication needs supporting. A skill needs teaching. A harmful situation needs changing. There is no useful philosophy of acceptance that requires us to look away from something our child needs because we would prefer to believe that whatever we are already doing must be enough.

But quantity is only one part of the question.

Quality: Am I deciding well enough?

Enough is not only a measure of how much we do. It is also a measure of how well we decide.

Good intentions do not remove accountability. We need to ask whether we investigated reasonably, considered the evidence available, paid attention to the particular child in front of us, understood the important costs and alternatives, and remained willing to change course when reality contradicted our assumptions.

At the same time, be informed can itself become another infinite demand. There is always another paper, another doctor, another parent, another testimonial, another therapy, another programme, another thing we could theoretically investigate before making a decision.

How informed is informed enough?

Perhaps a more useful test is whether we can explain why we are making this choice, what evidence or observation supports it, what its important costs are, what benefit we expect or are actually seeing, and what would make us reconsider it.

At some point we have to act without knowing everything.

Responsibility requires informed decisions. It does not require omniscience.

Relevance: Does this decision still make sense now?

A good decision is not a lifetime contract.

The child changes. Health changes. Tolerance changes. Knowledge changes. Resources change. Family circumstances change. A sacrifice willingly chosen three years ago may no longer serve the reason it was made. A therapy that once helped may stop helping. Something rejected earlier may become appropriate later.

This is why Am I doing enough? deserves to return periodically. It gives us a reason to take an old decision down from the shelf and look at it again.

Was there actually too little quantity?

Was the problem the quality of the decision?

Or was it a reasonable decision then that has simply lost its relevance now?

Sometimes the answer after all that examination is that nothing needs to change. Sometimes the answer is more. Sometimes less. Sometimes stop.

And sometimes, when the thought is I cannot possibly do more, the answer is different.

If a child comes home from school or therapy upset and dysregulated every day while the family is already pouring money, driving, time and effort into sustaining it, What more can I do? may be the wrong question. Perhaps the useful question is what can be done differently. Is the environment wrong? Are the hours too long? Is there a sensory or medical issue? Is something happening that has not been understood? Does the programme need changing? Does the child need more support or less demand? Is the distress a temporary cost of something that is providing substantial benefit, or is a repeated pattern telling us that the decision itself needs reconsidering?

One difficult day is information, not necessarily a verdict. But repeated difficult days can become a pattern.

The same is true of benefit. Something does not have to be actively harming a child to deserve reconsideration. If it consumes enormous amounts of the child’s time, family money and parental capacity while producing little discernible benefit, that is information too.

Enough is not always more effort.

Sometimes it is better-directed effort.

Sometimes Two Conflicting Realities Are Both True

Our home has appeared in this calculation repeatedly.

We live far from Bengaluru, and Krishna currently travels into the city five days a week for ABA. The distance has real costs. Three hours of ABA can mean roughly six hours away from home once the driving is included. When his gut is bad, Krishna gets carsick; his food routine can be disrupted, which is not a small matter for him; traffic can turn the drive home into nearly two hours; and potholes can make an already uncomfortable child sick and angry.

There are days when I sit in the car and think, Why on earth do we live so far away?

But Krishna is not always sick, and the drive is not always miserable. When his gut is doing well, he often enjoys it. There is music and food in the car, traffic and people to watch, cows to inspect through the window. He has adjusted well to his therapy centre and enjoys being there, and sometimes the journey includes the added pleasure of my buying him a Krishna-gut-approved snack from a restaurant.

Even the potholes refuse to remain neatly in the disadvantage column. When his gut is bad, they are awful. When he is well, Bengaluru’s roads have apparently provided the rollercoaster ride of the amusement park he has never been to.

And then there is the home at the other end of those drives.

Where we live is peaceful, clean and safe. When Krishna cannot sleep, I can take him out even at midnight and roam around. When he is restless, uncomfortable or in pain and wants to drive, we can go round and round inside the gated complex with the windows down, where he can poke his head out and feel the wind on his face in a way I would never allow on a city road. He has a garden, a terrace, empty roads and enormous amounts of outdoor time. When the mood takes him, he can simply go out and run.

Ironically, many of these advantages exist precisely because of the thing that creates the disadvantage. Distance reduces access while increasing freedom.

Both are true.

So when the question returns—Are we compromising Krishna’s needs by continuing to live here?—kilometres to the therapy centre cannot answer it. We have to bring in the whole reality. How practical would relocating actually be, financially and logistically? What would he gain? What would he lose? How many sick days are there compared with the days when he enjoys the drive? What does this home give him during all the hours when we are not travelling to therapy? How would city life change his everyday freedom?

So far, when we put the whole life on the scales, we stay.

That does not mean I won’t curse the decision during the next two-hour crawl home with a sick and furious Krishna. A sound decision does not remove the disadvantages of the option chosen. Nor does a sacrifice stop hurting merely because it was made intentionally.

Sometimes revisiting a decision simply means remembering the WHY: Yes, this costs us. Yes, we still choose it.

But the answer is not guaranteed to remain the same. If Krishna’s needs change, if the balance between healthy and sick days changes, if finances or family capacity change, if what the city offers becomes more important than what this home gives him, then the calculation changes too.

Acceptance does not always resolve a contradiction. Sometimes it means allowing two conflicting realities to remain true while still making a decision.

Neither reality cancels the other.

Sacrifice, Capacity and the Whole Family

Parents of autistic children can give up a great deal: time, sleep, money, work, places we might have lived, experiences we might have had, sometimes versions of life we genuinely wanted. Calling all of that joyfully chosen would be dishonest. There are situations in which finances, lack of services, profound disability or the absence of another caregiver leave very little meaningful choice at all.

But where a choice does exist, there is value in owning it. If we understand the cost and still choose the child’s need because the WHY matters more than the thing being given up, the loss remains a loss, but it need not automatically become a debt the child owes us. The pang can remain. We can even occasionally resent the cost. Then the WHY may need examining again: Do I still choose this? Does this sacrifice still serve what I thought it served? Has something changed?

Capacity belongs inside that decision rather than being tacked on afterwards as a reminder to practise self-care. The theoretically ideal intervention is not automatically the wisest one if implementing it destabilises the child, the parent or the rest of the family. Six recommended hours of ABA did not exist in a vacuum for Krishna. They existed inside a body with a sensitive gut, a long commute, a six-hour day away from home even for three hours of therapy, and a family life that also had to continue.

The question is not merely Could more theoretically help? It is also What benefit are we actually seeking or seeing? What does more require? What does it displace? What does it cost the child? What does it cost the family? Can this be sustained?

“I cannot do more” may sometimes be the answer.

At other times, it is the beginning of another question:

What can I do differently?

Responsibility Does Not Require Omnipotence

We are responsible for our decisions and our actions. That means learning, asking questions, examining evidence, paying attention to our child’s responses and changing course when something is not working. Love and good intentions do not exempt us from accountability.

But neither effort nor virtue gives us control over developmental outcomes.

Responsibility does not require omnipotence.

Not owning an outcome does not mean becoming indifferent to it. Outcomes give us information. If something causes suffering, that matters. If something produces meaningful benefit, that matters. If it helps but its cost becomes unsustainable, that matters. If it is doing very little while consuming enormous capacity, that matters too.

The outcome is not necessarily proof of our wisdom or our failure.

But reality gets a vote.

A simple sequence can help: Name. Face. Act. Adjust. Name the reality rather than the story we wish were true. Face what is difficult, uncertain or unpleasant about it. Act where we have agency. Then look at what actually happened and adjust.

Adjustment matters because it prevents agency from becoming stubbornness. I made a thoughtful decision does not mean therefore I must defend it forever. A good decision-making process allows new information to change the next decision.

Acceptance is not the opposite of accountability. Acceptance is seeing what happened clearly enough to distinguish what was ours from what wasn’t, what can still be changed from what cannot, and what the present now asks of us.

Preparing for 45 From Five

The 45-year-old still matters.

Thinking about the future is not the problem. Communication at five may matter enormously at 45. Safety matters. Health matters. Daily living skills matter. Financial planning matters. Relationships and support systems matter. Independence, wherever possible and in whatever form is possible for that individual, matters. We plant things now precisely because we hope they will grow across decades.

The difficulty is that the five-year-old whose future we are trying to protect is also five now. This child has a body that becomes tired, hungry, overloaded or sick. They need to play, rest, enjoy things, have relationships and simply live. The future adult whose wellbeing we are protecting and the present child whose capacity we are spending are the same person. This might help someday cannot become an unlimited cheque drawn against the child’s present life.

Nor can all those present-day decisions provide what frightened parents may secretly be asking them to provide.

Please make my child safe.

Please make them independent enough.

Please make sure somebody cannot exploit them.

Please make sure they can communicate what they need.

Please let me someday know that when I am gone, they will still be okay.

There is no amount of therapy, research, teaching, money, sacrifice or parental effort that can give us that guarantee.

The trap is not thinking about 45 when our child is five. The trap is believing we can solve 45 from five.

We can prepare for 45 through what can wisely be done at five. Then we ask again later, with more information about the person our child is becoming, what helps, what harms, what support is needed, what circumstances have changed and what the family can sustain.

The future is built through the aggregation of present decisions.

It is not guaranteed by them.

So, Am I Doing Enough?

Perhaps the question deserves more respect than either reassurance or guilt gives it.

There is accountability in returning to it periodically rather than assuming yesterday’s decision deserves permanent immunity from examination. But there is little value in using it as a performance appraisal: Am I a good enough parent? Did I try hard enough? Did I sacrifice enough? Would a better parent have found another way?

Those questions become infinite when the hidden standard is an outcome no parent can guarantee.

Instead, when Am I doing enough? returns, we can examine the quantity of what we are doing, the quality of the decisions behind it and the continuing relevance of those decisions to the reality we have now. We can notice where the question came from. We can examine comparison without allowing another family’s life to become our measuring stick. We can look backwards without demanding that yesterday’s self should have possessed today’s knowledge. We can acknowledge mistakes, repair what can be repaired, carry regret where it has something to teach us, and recognise when guilt has finished its useful work.

We can re-examine the WHY.

And then the enormous question can become small enough to hold:

What Is Needed Now?

For whom? Who needs this? The child? The parent? The rest of the family? Several people whose needs may not fit neatly together?

What? What problem are we actually trying to solve? What suffering are we trying to reduce, what ability are we trying to support, and what action makes sense given the evidence available, what we know about this particular child, what has already been tried and what alternatives actually exist—not in somebody else’s life, but in ours?

Why? Does something genuinely need attention? Does this action serve something that matters deeply? Or are fear, comparison, guilt or the desperate wish to secure the future making action itself feel virtuous?

How? How much, for how long and in what form? What will it require? What benefit do we expect? What will tell us whether that benefit is actually occurring? What will it cost the child and the family? What can realistically be sustained? And what would make us reconsider?

Then we make the decision.

Not with certainty. Not with a guarantee.

With the best knowledge and judgement we can reasonably bring to it.

Then reality answers back.

Perhaps something needs repairing. Perhaps there is something to learn. Perhaps the decision still makes sense despite its costs. Perhaps it needs to change. Perhaps all we are left with is a regret for something that cannot now be altered.

Name the reality. Face it. Act where action is possible. Adjust as reality gives us more information.

Resistance depletes. Acceptance frees. Agency empowers. Capacity sustains.

And then life continues. The child changes. We change. What we know changes. What is possible changes.

Sooner or later, the question will return.

Am I doing enough?

It should.

Look again.

What is needed now?