"Don't 'aspie' me"

[Ylva]

Another article about how parents of autistic children shoot themselves in the foot by seeing us autistic adults as a separate demographic that has nothing to do with their children. Autistic adults apparently don't help. Not written by me.

http://www.mmonjejr.com/2014/01/dont-aspie-me.html?m=1

Each and every one of us should be proud to be Autistic, and we should be mentoring Autistic children ourselves. Not necessarily working with them professionally--not all of us have those talents--but at least finding the Autistics in our lives and our communities and connecting with them. We can be Big Brothers/Big Sisters, we can be involved in church programs (those of us who are religious), and we can simply connect to and share our stories with the people in our families who have Autistic children.

 

[Judge]

Stands to reason IMO that Neurotypical parents can be so enabled by organizations like Autism Speaks which advocate the possibility that one day autism will be scientifically cured. That it's a malady to be fixed rather than a neurology to be optimized. Giving many parents sufficient false hope encouraging them into denying the notion that their autistic child will inevitably grow up into an autistic adult.

So at the very least they view adult autism in another light. Simply put, one they don't want to deal with. Tragic given it's those childhood ages when it's best for their child to embrace self-awareness and deal head-on with their autism they will need to better negotiate a difficult and perplexing Neurotypical environment. Parents and special interests relying on a hope for some miracle cure won't achieve this.

 

[Likemathsbutnotnumbers..]

Fantastic article. Many of the behaviours surrounding this idea of autistic peoples' development as being "static", as the article points out, amount to a more subtle way of socially excluding them in practice and I've even seen this with my own friends. Making it clear here that I'll be seeking a diagnosis soon, but haven't got one yet, I have an autistic friend who is closer to the stereotype in conversation but plenty intelligent and a fantastic friend, and yet one of my neurotypical friends recently told me about her relationship with him at the moment. Apparently she admired the way I spoke to him essentially as a normal human being(imagine that!) and that I basically was the reason the rest of my friends welcomed him quite often. But she also said that she found it awkward the way he sometimes approached her, essentially to say hi, yet she continued to respond normally and she now just wants to avoid him. Through the entire conversation I was having trouble just unravelling exactly what her problem was because it seemed to me like she didn't know how to react to him and so chose to first remain polite before trying to avoid him, and I just don't understand why people don't see how frustrating this is from the other end. Socialisation for us is harder when we've only just met the person and even more so when we're excluded, yet people have this inbuilt assumption that an autistic person will continue to seem awkward and make them uncomfortable, i.e. their social skills will never improve.