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Xantippe
Guest
Very likely. And if you were a kid today with engaged and well-informed parents, you’d do social skills groups, your parents would make sure you had playdates and would very consciously cultivate your social life for you, and they’d make sure that you had birthday parties with classmates, no matter how much the idea made them want to change their names and move to a different state, and they’d make sure that you had whatever other therapies or activities you needed, and they’d give you pointers about social life at college. Parenting today is not what it used to be.
My 12-year-old has friends, she functions fairly well socially and is well-liked at her small private school, she’s doing well academically (with some accommodations here and there), and she no longer falls out of chairs, walks into doorways, emits a steady and very disruptive moaning noise in class, throws multi-hour tantrums, or any of the other serious problems she had as a 6 and 7-year-old. We had issues, let me tell you.
When you get a diagnosis of Asperger’s for a child, you look at yourself, you look at your spouse, you look at your parents and siblings and various ancestors, as well as your spouse’s parents and siblings and various ancestors. A lot of the time, certain patterns emerge as as with many things, there is a large genetic component to autism. There’s a lot of stuff my daughter has that I wish I had had as a child, but of course once you change one thing, who knows how differently life would end up? As I am basically contented with my lot in life, I don’t regret the fact that my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t do the stuff that I do for my daughter.
It’s actually more cheerful to believe that one fits into a particular category with particular predictable issues, rather than either believing that either a) the whole world is being mean to you (what I believed as a child) or b) that you are horribly and uniquely flawed as an individual (which is what you may believe about yourself).
