Scholes plans to continue punditry roles with TNT Sports which does not require him to travel to games regularly, and will also continue to appear on his new podcast, The Good, The Bad and The Football, alongside Nicky Butt and Paddy McGuinness. Television personality McGuiness has three autistic children and took part in a 2022 BBC documentary titled Paddy and Christine McGuinness: Our Family and Autism.
“Everything I’m going to do now just works around him, I do studio work, but everything is built around his day,” Scholes added. “Last season on Thursday nights I’d do the Europa League for Man United, that’s the night I’d usually have him, so he was getting all agitated, biting and scratching. He knows the pattern’s not there straight away. And I did that for years really, always thinking I’ve got to stop this at some point, so I had the chance to do the podcast and I thought that would suit me more, well not me, Aiden.”
Scholes explained that Aiden has to bite and scratch when he gets frustrated because he is unable to communicate his feelings, and revealed that he would go into training at United during his playing career with marks on his face that initially he did not want to explain.
“He’d bite your arm or scratch you just out of frustration for him because he didn’t understand things, couldn’t tell you how he was feeling. I never got a break from it, even when playing. It was very hard in those days, feels like it was years ago.
“I don’t think they [doctors] diagnosed it until he [was] 2½. But you knew early something was wrong, but then you get the diagnosis, and I’d never heard of it. Then all of a sudden you start seeing everything, I don’t know if it just consciously happens, I don’t know. I remember the first time after we were playing Derby away and I just didn’t want to be there. I remember the manager dropped me the week after actually, and I hadn’t told anyone [about the diagnosis]. I ended up telling them a few weeks later, I think, as it was quite hard.
“We didn’t know what was in store for us. There’s some kids who don’t speak at 1½-to-two years of age, then at five or six, bang they’re speaking… they call it a late development stage. But we just knew it was never going to be like that.
“I didn’t speak to anyone at the club about it. Even now I don’t want sympathy or anything. I just thought even if I did speak to someone about it, it’s not going to help Aiden. I don’t know what would help me. The big concern now is because you’re getting a bit older, what happens when you’re not here? That’s the thing that’s now on my mind all the time. There are times when it’s not in your head, it’s like anything, then there’s times like now when you do start speaking about it, it’s at the front of your mind.”
Scholes explained that Aiden’s inability to communicate what he is feeling reuslted in him suffering from painful toothaches for nearly a year as he was not able to go to the dentist.
“There was a time last year I took him away and he kept feeling his mouth and not sleeping, and I had no idea what was wrong with him,” Scholes said.
“He kept doing it and doing it, so I put numbing gel on his lips cos he can’t tell you what’s wrong or got pain anywhere and he won’t go to a dentist. He won’t sit there and have someone open his mouth, he just can’t do it.
“We got him to a special needs dentist and they had to put him to sleep with gas. He had to have fillings and all sorts then had an operation because his mouth was a mess. But he can’t tell you what pain he’s in. That must have been going on eight-to-nine months, imagine having toothache for nine months?”
Scholes has recently decided to share content of Aiden online, and was enthused by the response it received from parents who are struggling with similar circumstances. “It was just the response he had from people, parents, the amount of people saying ‘God that helps’, ‘we’ve got a kid that’s the same’ or something like that. That’s why I carried on doing it.”
This week’s Stick to Football podcast with Paul Scholes is available now on YouTube and all leading podcast platforms
