When a Parent Suffers Moral Injury
Personal Perspective: Navigating systems that interfere with caretaking.
Posted May 27, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
There were seven of them and one of me. I knew this firing line and had been in front of it hundreds of times over the two decades since my son was diagnosed with autism.
They were all women. There were three from the New Jersey Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services and four from the contracting agency that runs my son's job coaching : a youth employment specialist, her supervisor, two skills trainers, a case manager, the case manager's supervisor, and one DVRS staffer I had not heard of until her name appeared in the CC line.
The seven of us were here because my son had been fired from a part-time job cleaning equipment at a gym. It was his first job, the kind of bad first job everyone has. He hated it, the way most people hate their first jobs, and that was part of why I wanted him to have it. He is 19. He is autistic . He has a cognitive disability. He is going to be an artist. I can see that clearly. But before he becomes an artist, I wanted him to know what it felt like to clean up after other people for a little more than minimum wage.
The job program was through the New Jersey Department of Rehabilitation, which contracts out to another agency. He had a couple of months of online training, and the contracting agency gave him the choice of working at a supermarket or a gym. He chose the gym, probably because he had spent years working out with me.
My son’s job at the gym lasted six sessions, then the contracting agency paused to request more funding. They wanted an assistant to teach him how to clean gym equipment. “We usually train them maybe two or three days, and then they are on their own,” the assistant director told me. I was shocked. Not only did most non-disabled people take more than two or three days to learn a job, but I had been completely transparent, showing them his IEP, his cognitive tests. They knew exactly what he was capable of, and taking only two or three shifts to get the hang of a job was not it.
I asked the assistant director and director to call me so that the second attempt at the gym would go smoother. I wanted to make a plan, a real and concrete way forward. I had been nagging at him to clean up his room and now apartment for years, so I knew how to get him moving. I asked for a meeting repeatedly for two months. At the same time, I kept lying to my son about why he wasn’t working. He was proudly semi-independent. I didn’t want to hurt his self-esteem , which had taken years to build up. But the director never called me because she left during those two months. Her replacement never called, either.
When I was finally asked to be in a meeting, it was not the one I had asked for. It was a wall of seven women. I had been with these seven women once before, when they needed my permission to ask for more funding to teach my son to clean gym equipment. I had consented. This second meeting, though, I entered in a fury. I was furious that no one had called me to create a new plan. I was enraged that I had spent two decades building up my son’s self-confidence , and in the blink of an eye, they were knocking it down.
During the call, the case manager interrupted me and called me “unhinged.” That word has lingered in my mind ever since. It is the kind of word that keeps systems, like the one comprised of those seven women, alive and breathing.
Moral Injury in Parents and Caregivers
In 2009, the psychologist Brett Litz and colleagues published a paper proposing the construct of moral injury to describe what happens to combat veterans forced to participate in or witness acts that violate their deeply held moral beliefs. The construct was meant to capture something PTSD did not quite capture; not fear -based or flashback-based, but a wound caused by being inside a situation that one's conscience cannot metabolize.
In 2018, the physicians Simon Talbot and Wendy Dean argued in STAT that American doctors were not, in fact, burning out. They were morally injured by working inside healthcare systems that prevented them from caring for their patients the way they knew how. The literature has expanded since. Nurses, social workers, teachers, refugee aid workers. The common thread is a worker who knows what good care looks like, a system that will not let them give it, and the slow accumulation of having to participate in that failure.
There is plenty on caregiver burnout . There are scales for it. There are interventions. Dr. Mitzi Waltz, a critical disability studies researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is currently running an EU-funded project called PreBurn that studies burnout in autism care staff.
Mitzi is also a mother. Her autistic adult son stayed in the United Kingdom when she moved to the Netherlands thirteen years ago. The biggest issue for him in the Netherlands, she told me, is the lack of support for disabled adults. I understood this because my son also lives far away, outside the Netherlands, simply so he can also get proper support.
I have known, since my son was 4, what kind of help he needs. I have written it down in books and articles. I have paid out of pocket to have it formally documented. I have moved continents to find people who could deliver it. I have also sat through seventeen years of meetings in which professionals told me, with full confidence and unified voices, that I was wrong about my own child, only for me to prove myself correct one round later, and then ushered into the next room to be told I was wrong again. That is not the work of caring for a disabled person. That is the work of being correct in rooms structured to make correctness irrelevant.
Being correct does not end the rooms. Being correct keeps you in the rooms. Every time you win, you confirm that you are the person who has to keep doing this. Vindication becomes the prison, and it makes you “unhinged.”
This is what moral injury looks like in a parent.
What happened when I raised my voice yesterday was not a parent losing composure. It was me finally noticing that the room was a copy of a room I had been in many times before, in two countries, with different people sitting in the seats, reading from the same script, but perhaps in different languages. A group of professionals coalesced. A unified verdict. A single parent across the table whose assigned role is to receive that verdict.
I never asked for the role of vindicator. Worse, I am writing this knowing it will probably be quoted back at me as evidence that I am abdicating. I am not. I am still in the role. I went to the meeting. I will go to the next one. I will probably keep going to meetings like this until the day I die. In fact, I am sure the next meeting is already being scheduled somewhere, in some cubicle. But these meetings are beginning to take their toll.
When I told my son he had been fired, he was crushed. I wasn’t going to lie this time or sugarcoat it. Getting fired is part of life, and just because he is disabled doesn’t mean he needs to be punched with kid gloves.
And that night, he did something that we all do when we lose a job. He fell into something he loved that filled him with joy. He drew a picture, a yellow page covered edge to edge in color. A piano in one corner. Plant Waves Music System was written across the middle. Bass boom mushroom. Mark mushroom. Shen zou mushroom. A sound system made of mushrooms, part of his sensory-based art. He drew the painting based on a field recording from a trip he made to Canada last month, translating the sounds into an image.
He sent the picture without comment. I nearly cried. I had been vindicated. Again. The room yesterday had been structured to evaluate him, but had no language to describe moments like these. It was just us, as it always has been, moving forward, no matter which room was in session.
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Erik Raschke is the author of many articles and two novels; his most recent, To the Mountain (Torrey House Press 2021), centers around a single father struggling to care for his young autistic son.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.