‘My autistic sons have taught me so much’

James Hunt used to spend his days commuting to London, where he ran a successful marketing firm.

But his children Jude and Tommy were diagnosed as autistic when they were toddlers, and he later decided to care for them and his parents full-time.

James, from Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, started blogging about their lives nine years ago and now has more than a million followers on social media.

Here, in his own words, James speaks about his hopes for the future for his teenage sons.

When my eldest son Jude was a baby, he was slow to crawl and didn’t respond to his name. He used to stare out of the window, he was quite distant and almost in a different world.

His mum Charlotte, my ex-wife, first raised concerns when he was eight months old but I just thought he was a bit behind because he was premature.

We went back to the doctor quite a few times before we got an autism diagnosis in 2009 when he was 18 months old.

At the time, the information out there was very clinical, most things we were reading were from the NHS website and medical journals. I felt like I couldn’t take it in and I had so many unanswered questions.

Three years later we went through the same diagnosis with Tommy at a similar age.

I knew a lot more about autism than when we had Jude, but the boys have always been so different.

I didn’t enjoy the first year of Tommy’s life as much as I could have done because I spent so much time watching him and looking for signs.

He hit certain milestones much quicker than Jude but he wouldn’t make eye contact and would get easily frustrated and enjoyed playing alone.

Around the same time, when Jude was four, he started having huge meltdowns and was physically hurting himself.

Jude is non-speaking, so it’s very difficult for him to explain what’s wrong. That was the hardest period of my life.

He used to wake up in the night screaming and hitting himself. Thankfully as Jude has gotten older, and we’ve learnt more about how to meet his needs, this has got much better.

Unfortunately at the time Tommy was a huge trigger for him because he was loud and unpredictable. His self-harming would scare Tommy so we used to have to keep them apart a lot.

In 2016, my wife Charlotte and I sadly decided to separate. We took the incredibly difficult decision to split Jude and Tommy up and we felt guilty, like we were failing.

But Jude was immediately like a different child, you could sense his anxiety going, so we knew it was the right decision.

I live in an annexe at my parents’ house and help care for my dad who has Parkinson’s and my mum, who has dementia, though she is now in a home.

It’s opposite my ex-wife’s home and I have one of the boys for several nights a week and then we swap over, and I have the other one. They both need one-to-one care and it’s impossible for them to live together.

You never imagine life like that. I don’t know if they will ever be able to live together but they will always be part of each other’s lives.

I wish I could