Published on 12, July, 2020
We often get posts on the form asking for advice with autistic children. And I can't help but notice the requests overwhelmingly relate to low functioning autistic children. As someone who is quite high functioning and had a very disrupted and turbulent childhood I can guarantee you it's not because high functioning autistic children don't have just as many issues. Nore is it that high functioning autistic children are particularly rare. We recently had a discussion on this point in another thread and figures I dug up indicated around 40%+ of autistic children being diagnosed these days are of average or above average intelligence.
So the question I'm asking is this. Why don't those parents come looking for help? Is it because the main stream schooling and support systems are so much better at supporting high functioning children? I doubt it. Is it because they tend to think of their child’s behaviour as 'naughty' not 'autistic?' Is it maybe they don't accept or agree with their child’s diagnosis? What do you think it is?
More to the point:
Edit ps: For the simplification of this entire discussion and to avoid a long drawnout arguments over semantics. Instead of high functioning we shall say high IQ meaning an IQ of 85+ and instead of low functioning we will say low IQ meaning an IQ less than 85. As measured on a standard clinically approved IQ test.
The issue- aside from the fact that functioning labels aren't helpful- is that people believe if that if THEY can't see our struggles, those struggles don't exist.
A child who is able to attend a mainstream school by masking all day, who has excellent grades but no friends, will be under a great deal of stress. But because it's being suppressed all the time, nobody realises anything is wrong, and that child might not have the emotional maturity to describe what the problem is- and even if they do, their perception of the world is often dismissed as them making a fuss over nothing. I know this, because I WAS that child.
I don't know how we fix it. Better understanding of the many ways autism can present itself would help, particularly in schools.
You also described my school years pretty much, except because I have a dopamine battle I was mixed academically, anything that caught my interest I excelled in, art, history, English, science, and RE, I did very well in, but and anything that didn't interest me like maths, geography, home ec', design and tech, and PE, fell pathetically by the wayside.
Team games as a form of endless torture, for someone with the gross motor skills of a newborn giraffe! Why did they not just leave me to run around a field on my own? I would have been happy and the people forced to have me on their teams would have been happy.
Ha, yes, I had zero interest in PE and was consistently dreadful at it. I think being rubbish at it came first but not wanting to do it certainly didn't help me improve!