Published on 12, July, 2020
My son was diagnosed with autism at around 18 however its hard to.know whats autism.and what's possibly caused by his mental age being younger than what he is...for example with everything he will say oh yes I'll just do that..for example I wantdnto renew his passport as if he buys a ber online in the shopping they need photographic evidence at door etc...anyway as we r isolated and we don't have any family and it was covid we couldn't even ask.neighbour to sign the photos for the passport as they had covid...so my son said we'll take it to a solicitor hell sign it...I try to suggest this might not be possible.but thought I'd go along with it as I wanted to ty to trust him and give him independence etc..anyway it was a disaster when he was in the solicitor office the solicitor had to explain.over and over how he couldn't sign the photos but he just didn't understand..anyway he has this attitude with everything he doesn't seem to grasp the details of things which he really should as he is 24.now..I came on here to ask ho I can tell if he is developmental delayed as.i don't want to out him.througg anymore crap with doctors as finding out he was autistic made him suicidal and I've only just got him stable again and I think iff he did find out anythingnelse ia different about him he will get depressed again.
When my partner and I got our first passports we were in our late thirties, and we got a solicitor to sign ours. Admittedly it was a solicitor we were using for conveyancing work at the time, but basically all he did was look at us, look at the photos, signed them to say it was a likeness of us, then charged a fee for doing it. So I don't see why your son having that idea means he has a "younger mental age". Was the solicitor unable to sign it due to some sort of covid rules? If he was working in his office he would have been handling paperwork anyway, and he could have sanitized his hands afterwards. Was it because your son didn't have any proof of who he was? (birth certificate, bank card or statement, etc) Lots of people his age don't know about stuff like passport applications, mortgages, etc.
Autistic and neurotypical people often think quite differently and have different ideas about how things could/should be done. But thinking differently doesn't mean there is anything "wrong" with someone.
Your son will have problems communicating with neurotypical people because he is autistic. All of us autistic adults on this forum have experienced that. I suggest you research the "double empathy" problem, which explains this.