As the title says, what does the NAS offer secondary school age children with high functioning AS? I'm referring to children who don't require care services and they attend mainstream schools, or in a few cases home educated.
There is the NAS website and info about AS but there are also plenty of 'third party' sources of info that in many cases are better than what the NAS offers.
Raising awareness of AS had credibility in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the condition was more obscure and far less well known but I think it has now reached a point of diminishing returns where more and more attempts to raise awareness have less and less impact over what already is known. What is needed now are not large scale mass awareness activities for the 'mainstream' like those from the early 2000s but smaller-scale tightly focused 'infill' awareness for the less clued up corners of society.
Local NAS groups are more for parents rather than children and teenagers with AS. Parents just sit around in a circle and drink coffee whilst talking about ASD. My mother was in the NAS when I was a teenager but eventually she left. Meetings were dominated by parents and carers of children and adults who were lower-functioning at the more extreme end of the spectrum or required care services. Very few parents had any children with high-functioning AS. The discussions were repetitive and my mother eventually ended up viewed by other parents and carers as self-centred and lacking in compassion for people less fortunate than her own son. Eventually she left the NAS when she realised that (the local group at least) provided very little for secondary school age children with high-functioning with AS.
The NAS doesn't provide any help and support with life skills and social skills for children and teenagers with high-functioning with AS, which are sorely needed, but instead is more preoccupied with matters of accessing the full National Curriculum and 5 C grade GCSEs. If children are home educated, which is something the NAS doesn't support, then it's hard to see that the NAS has anything to offer.
Discussion amongst parents at a local AS support group (some of which are also members of the NAS) concluded that parents of children and teenagers with high functioning AS who are members of the NAS really are financing and supporting people at the more extreme of the spectrum or those that require care services unless they have any real tangible benefits of being in the NAS. Of course, adding high-functioning AS to the type of people within the territory of the NAS has the potential effect of increasing membership of the NAS over that when it only covered traditional Kanner autism.
