Ugh. We had to ask a teacher directly to drop this with our daughter once. For some reason the teacher really needed the eye contact, but both my wife and made it clear we weren’t going to let her turn this into a fight with our kid.
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LOOK AT ME WHEN YOU’RE TALKING
or away, or something
or when I’m talking
it doesn’t really matter and it depends on what the local culture is BUT IT’S VITALLY IMPORTANT YOU DO THE SAME THING AS THE OTHER KIDS
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Let me generalise the argument:
— YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG
— What? What am I doing wrong?
— … THAT! um. You know, that thing that… Well, everything I suppose, but mainly THIS! THIS SPECIFIC THING IS A THING YOU’RE DOING WRONG AND IT’S CREEPY AND BAD
— Oh dear. How am I supposed to be doing it?
— DIFFERENTLY!
— Yes, but how?
— NOT LIKE THAT!
— Is this better?
— NO!
— This?
— GOD NO THAT’S MUCH WORSE
— How about this?
— NOT PERFECT BUT BETTER JUST KEEP DOING THAT WHENEVER ANYONE CAN SEE YOU OR WHENEVER YOU THINK ANYONE MIGHT SEE YOU OR YOU KNOW WHAT JUST DO IT ALL THE TIME IN CASE SOMEBODY SEES YOU DOING IT WRONG
— It’s hard, and I need to concentrate to keep it up, and it’s starting to hurt.
— THAT’S NOT MY PROBLEM. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SOME OF THE OTHER THINGS YOU’RE DOING WRONG…
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Australia:
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One thing I’ve wondered: do parents of boys jump much more quickly to get a diagnosis so that their son can get extra services to help him do well in school and thus get into a better college or training program, because it’s more important for boys to be able to make a good living, whereas girls just grow up to do housework and take care of babies anyway?
It might be the prejudices of the parents as much as of the doctors, diagnosticians, or researchers.
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When I started looking into this whole “Autism” thing, it struck me how much of it was like the LGBTQI+ experience. And a large part of that was in masking, which I first learned as “passing”. The need to pretend to be other than you are, with the possibility or likelihood of suffering consequences if you fail, from social exclusion and job loss up to enforced medical treatment and death.
And because there’s the whole passing thing going on, there’s a closet. And because there’s a closet, people who wonder whether they might be on the spectrum don’t have anyone to talk to about it, so they live in denial, or they keep it secret and stay in their own closet. And if they decide to disclose, they discover that “coming out of the closet” is an event, and a process. Once someone other than you knows, then it’s out there, but at the same time you have to keep coming out, choosing for the rest of your life whether it’s safe or necessary to disclose to new people.
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That one hits close to the bone.
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I fear it’s more common than people like to think.
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Nice to see a parent who gets it:
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the new technology can find markers of risk in a hair sample long before symptoms appear.
Um, wat? I do not know of any biochemical marker for autism, reliable or otherwise.
Beyond all the excellent points made by the author about acceptance and learning to love the person, not trying to “fix” them from being themselves; if the team in question has developed a test for a biochemical marker for autism which works any better than a coin toss, that should be all over the everything. It would change all the games.
My bullshit meter just went ping.
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Oh, yeah, I wasn’t paying any attention to that part!
With all the emphasis on trying to make autistic children as ‘normal’ as possible, it was nice to read about a parent who sees the flaws in that assumption.
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Agree. I am in the field, and a biochemical marker would be huge news. I got nothing. Sounds like woo to me.
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No. Didn’t get it.
Being a parent these days can sometimes feel like tending a bonsai tree, carefully trimming a root here, or snipping a branch there to achieve what appears to be a perfect specimen but is, in fact, something of a simulacrum. I fear that by knowing my daughter’s diagnosis earlier, I might have become one of those bonsai moms.
I would like to suggest something to that mom.
Something in the line of: You might have adapted your own actions and reactions to the needs of a kid who is an outlier on an multidimensional bell curve. Might have understood why your kid did not react as you expected to your pruning and probing, your trimming and testing. You could have had information, training or even help for those situations in which you have been next to a breakdown. Which you have been. Because you are a parent.
What happened to “trying to be a more understanding parent” or “trying to make reality better for neurodiverse kids”?
Yeah. That, too. Definitely:
I’m in one of those moods. This didn’t make things better.
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It makes me think of my mother who has (had?) a similar lifetime pattern of being with abusive men. If I was still talking with her I’d suggest she consider it, but her abuse towards me put an end to that communication.
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Sorry! I was thinking of it as the glass at least being half full, but I can understand that it’s still triggering. Didn’t mean to do that. I’ll be more careful next time.
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No worries, the mood was already there so I was rather easily triggered.
I still think the piece you linked is quite restricted in some focal points, and a wider lens would be good to catch more of the pictures. However, any lens for any focus comes with some distortion, and the true thing cannot be depicted. So, that’s that.
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I suspect it’s a wider and more general problem: people who are diagnosed on the spectrum who desperately hide it from their workplace, or people who are on the spectrum and suspect it, but won’t do anything to confirm it for fear of people learning.
And, be sure, there are consequences. An autism Dx is a reason for an insurance company to deny coverage, and it has happened to me. And people can change attitudes in such a way that what used to be quirks become problems, to second guess someone they’ve known for years. And even if they don’t, autists, being so bad at interpreting motivation, may well become paranoid that that’s what people are doing. (I don’t know about others, but by reflex I take both criticism and praise badly.)
And, I suspect, at least part of this is because people don’t see autistic people being people, much less successful people. Neither NTs, who don’t know how to act around autists, not autists, who have no models for autists in the world except Sheldon Bloody Cooper.
We need more good examples out there. The trouble is, it’s something people have to volunteer for. Nobody can be blamed for choosing the safer route and staying hidden, nor should they be.
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