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.
There is no such thing as ‘low functioning’, please do not use functioning labels when speaking about fellow members of our autistic community, especially our younger neurokin. It’s dehumanising and inaccurate.
People harmfully and wrongly misconstrue some autistic people as ‘low functioning’ if they have co-occurring needs such as apraxia, learning disability or epilepsy etc. No human deserves to be defined and identified using functioning labels, our worth is not defined by how much we can contribute to society.
Please use the term ‘support needs’ instead and list what specific needs the autistic person you are talking about has.
Please read about the harm that ensues from using functioning labels to describe our autistic community:
https://www.autisticality.co.uk/functioning-labels
Support needs would be inaccurate. I’m taking about intelligence, in practical terms low vs high IQ. If you prefer we can use low IQ autism instead of low functioning.
Intelligence can be measured in many different ways, the Intelligence Quotient is not accurate or representative of all humans, particularly those who are multiply neurodivergent.
there is a statistical mean when it comes to what is quantifyable. And often (but not always) values clustor around the mean. This is definatly true for IQ tests of neurotypicals. (not so true for autistic IQ tests where you get the double hump effect)
Well by definition you can only mesure what you can messure. You have to mesure IQ by difrences that can be messured. You can't messure inteligence (or anything else) using things that can't be messured.
How does IQ work? Is it normally weighted where the average appears at one value and then you look at how you differ from the average. What sort of distribution is it?
It's literally called a normal distribution or bell curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient IQ is calibrated so that the average iq is 100 and the standard deviation is about 15 iq points. roughtly 2/3 of people have IQs between 85 and 115.
Also with the IQ test of autistic children versus ordinary children. That means it only includes the autistic children that get diagnosed, compared to the ones that don't. That might have a difference on the result.
That's fair. But since high iq is likely to make it easyer to mask it's likely those discrepencies, if they exist, are mostly present in the normal to high IQ inderviduals. Maybe there are some highly inteligent undiagnosed autistic people who test as having normal IQ because the test isn't well calibrated for them. But that doesn't really hurt my definition since I'm defining 'high iq autistic person' as someone with and IQ over 85. Which is 5/6th of the population for neurotypicals.
Peter said:ordinary children.
You mean non autistic children, there is no such thing as normal it is a societal construct.
We have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Could it be that parents of high intelligence autistics are more likely to be autistic so are less likely to ask for help? They have spent more time masking and have found ways to deal with their problems that they don't really want to confron their difference in themselves. They have grown up hearing the idea that they must try to fit in and so they might try to enforce that on their children rather then seeking out a different opinion. They are just tired of all this masking they have to do and they probably have more stuff on their plate.