So my son left the (over)protection of home, went swimming without sunscreen, and came home unblistered, just lightly pink… and feeling contented. For a few hours, anyway. At bedtime he put on a white v-necked T-shirt and showed me how his color had deepened into a new color I defined as “ouchy red”… the color of maternal guilt.

My first impulse was to slather my poor almost-six-foot-baby with burn cream, but hey, transdermal lidocaine overdose can be, well, fatal. To mask my alarm I jokingly called him “Lobster Boy.” That made him cranky. He did tolerate my application of aloe lotion but with the usual sensory defensiveness.

The experience inspired my budding Hemingway to wax philosophical about his epidermal choice. According to his writing instructor, people need to be set free to learn from their mistakes. Teachable moment, indeed – pour moi. Over the next several days my son’s rosy skin color lightened, but he admitted that some soreness had kicked in. This longstanding summer rite of passage concluded with the inevitable peeling and itching.

In hindsight I realized it was time to stop slathering him with sunscreen glop by hand and instead revisit aerosol spray– which he permitted the next time he went swimming, with no burn. Verbal child or not, parents are supposed to play medical detective and figure out these possible explanations for puzzling behaviors. We also need to critically assess treatments and medications such as chemical sunscreens that may create more problems than they solve.

Not-so-coincidentally that week a local TV station interviewed a mother whose two pale-skinned daughters got blistering sunburns at a school-run summer camp. The mother hadn’t realized that the aides were legally barred from applying sunscreen to kids. But for those aides to have yanked the kids out of the full sun after 15-30 minutes doesn’t require a legal dispensation – just common sense.

Nursing homes face similar care and consent issues as autism families in judging the ability of a resident to understand the implications of their actions, when sun-loving senior citizens lose track of their time spent outdoors. The caregiver/patient dialogue about judgment capacity and consent must be two-way and ongoing, and at times power struggles are inevitable.

As our children become teens and adults, autonomy issues become increasingly complex – whether it’s deciding about nutritional supplements or dental care, therapeutic exercises or surgical interventions. We will face questions regarding one’s ability to make the best choices for a healthful diet and exercise, or whether parents should ever use physically coercive methods to force compliance for what we consider “their own good.”

We autism families need to the proverbial village to help raise our children, but first that village must learn and respect the specific health needs of children on the autism spectrum. For families placing children outside the home, resistance may come from caregivers unwilling to question mainstream medical protocols or try emerging treatments.

Perhaps the most difficult lesson to teach the general public has been that health care choices for those with autism often involve not only out-of-the-box innovation, but also counterintuitive thinking. The vaccines that appear to help other people have damaged the brains, nervous systems and immune functions of many kids on the spectrum.

Families of higher-functioning young adults can teach their children to balance trust of non-family caregivers with a healthy dose of skepticism, using critical thinking skills to consider others’ motives and what they may stand to gain from interpersonal transactions.

Hard decisions, these, which sometimes end with hard lessons. But if parents and children can prioritize mutual education and respect in caregiving negotiations, at least neither side will feel burned by the process.