APSPERGERS - Live HAPPY? HERE'S HOW!

hopefillsme said:

I'm supporting him in that transparency, at the age of almost 12, I think he can make a decision. There has been lots of discussion around this.I think he wants to raise awareness as he gets older, and perhaps become famous one day for being a face for awesome Aspergers.

I don't want this to become an argument and you have clearly given this a lot of thought but I note that you haven't got a lot of people supporting this approach and would like to offer some more thoughts on the issue.

People with autism are often immature in a lot of ways as they have not processed and made sense of a lot of the social input that their peers will have processed. They are at risk of being taken advantage of because they are relatively naiive. It is a common problem (a real problem involving very real risks) that they do not know the distinctions between family vs friends vs strangers and we are often far too open and trusting as we tend to treat everyone the same. Stranger danger is a much bigger issue for an autistic child than it is for a non-autistic child.

His ability to argue may be stronger than his experience. He may be able to persuade you of things that your age and maturity should identify as dangerous. You are the parent, you have to be able to define, and reinforce behaviours, that he will need for the rest of his life. (Are you on the spectrum yourself by any chance?)

His desire to become the face of autism is admirable but he really does not have the experience or wisdom to do this. He can do this later if he still wishes to. He really should not be making that decision now.

Hi

A difficult call was made (my me) not to remove this post given the information was already published in the associated blog. Community members have been able to point out their concerns based on life experience. Dear hopefillsme .. at the NAS we use case studies of families and children but are very careful to point out the issues and risks around doing this. The members make very good points about the indelible nature of the internet. For the moment as long as no additional personal information is shared in this community I will leave this thread published and open for comment.

Bob: Digital Services Manager

Thank you for your concern. Appreciated. I can understand your worry and it's not something I haven't thought long about. Caleb really wants to be a you tuber and video himself . This would be totally public and he'd be very exposed to trolls. This is my compromise . His email or contact details are not linked in any way to the site. I am hopeful you can't link to my full name either - but even if you could I do not share the same surname as my son. I do not refer to our location and I have not identified any other personal info such as school name. My son wants to include pictures of himself and let the world know he is Aspergers , even if some people don't like him for it. I'm supporting him in that transparency, at the age of almost 12, I think he can make a decision. There has been lots of discussion around this.I think he wants to raise awareness as he gets older, and perhaps become famous one day for being a face for awesome Aspergers. If he changes his mind and wants to become annonymous, I can always shut down the blog or change the images. An comments on the site have to be 'approved' by me before they appear on the blog.

Hi,

There have been repeated concerns from myself and other members of the forum about your repeated broadcasting of your child's name and face etc onto the internet. This forum has rules about restricting the use of names, to identify individuals, and you are breaking those rules and encouraging others to do the same by example.

Please think a bit harder about the impact of this on everyone else and about your son who is not old enough to give informed consent on this sort of issue.