Do you think your parents are or were autistic?

dude ... no ... tell me you are joking!  The complete fraud of a study that led to that is written by a corrupt PoS who was simply trying to get the NHS to buy his combined vaccine rather than the one his competitors produced.

Perhaps my Gran, but not so much anyone else. 

I still reckon that it was the MMR Jab which gave it to me. 

Yes strong family history,  my mum certainly is and 2 out of 3 maternal uncles 

That said I do sometimes wonder if my father’s mother may have had some autistic traits. She was one of the kindest and most generous women I ever knew. But she could be stubborn and she had a peculiar sense of humour. She had a massive collection of odd ornaments, a huge back catalogue of detective novels. it’s difficult to tell with old people, but in the last few decades of her life it seemed to me like all of her friends were members of her family or next door neighbours. And I’m told when she was younger she was incredibly difficult to work for. She effectively became a nurse in charge of a ward, and as sweet and as kind as she was to us grandkids, i’m told the junior nurse's lived in terror of her and her exacting standards.

Not really. My mother had really good social skills, like really good, she was very good at persuading people to do things. She was certainly a massive bookworm perhaps a little bit avant-garde, marched to the beat of her own drum a bit. She was quite strongly into her hobbies and quite focused but not to the extent that it was all that she could think about; to the extent that it had to come into every conversation, not like me.

my dad on the other hand. Well I’ve never met anyone more eager to conform. He’s a kind of person who believed in children being seen and not heard. Read books by motivational speakers and studied people skills. His entire career revolves around sweet talking clients. The only real autistic features if that could be so might be his willingness to embrace a banality of accountancy, not that the kind of accountancy he did was very technical. That and his almost complete detachment emotionally from anything other than my mother. At least that’s how it was growing up. He’s a kind of guy who 10 or 15 years ago if you said you were depressed would’ve told you to pull yourself together. He’s mellowed a little in old age.

neither one of them really had the huge social difficulty that’s associated with autistic people or the repetitive behaviours and  interests that are associated with autistic people.

that said I’m willing to bet the autistic gene comes from my mothers side. Both of my cousins on her side are autistic and reasonably high functioning.

I was only diagnosed this week so I'm still learning but when my mum completed her informant questionnaire for my assessment she cried and said that she 'felt' the same as me. I can see that her mum probably had traits too but that was always laughed off as her being a 'whittler'.

We've never been close, I thought she didn't like me but now we've talked about traits we've suddenly got each other. It's been an absolute revelation and I'm so glad it's happened - we might finally have a relationship at last!

My Dad, he is less cuddly now but still verbally affectionate, but once he starts on a topic you can't derail him easily and I now retroactively recognise his stimms, rumblings, and meltdowns.

There are little things, like my sister refusing to eat any food other than a small handful of things she was comfortable with or my dad being bothered to an extreme amount by sounds. But I don't think anyone in my immediate family has more than a few boxes ticked. 

my mother was definitely autistic (now passed).  no hugs or any other expressions of affection.

My mum definitely has a lot of sensory issues, and she's routine-oriented in the same way I am, but social things seem to come very naturally to her so I don't think she's actually autistic herself. Autistic traits are very common on that side of the family though and although I'm the first to be officially diagnosed, I'm definitely not the only autistic person in my extended family.