Don’t say your kid is autistic

Detail of The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage (1874) by Edgar Degas

Researchers studying autistic kids give secret autism tests to parents because it’s so easy to see that parents are autistic, but it’s such a huge pain to try to get the parents to understand. Think about it: no one benefits enough from telling you that you’re autistic that they are willing to try to convince you. But research becomes much more useful when we can label parents as autistic for studies even though parents would say it’s only their kid.

Having the label of autistic is not stigmatizing; pretending it’s just the kid is what’s stigmatizing. Because then the kid carries the label alone, while the parents pretend to be neurotypical. The hardest part of being autistic isn’t school. Or other kids. It’s having parents who don’t see their own autism, so they can’t adjust their empathy or their ability to self-regulate.

Think about your own parents. If you’ve gotten this far, you probably had a difficult childhood. You had parents who either enmeshed themselves with you and made you think it’s your job to take care of them. Of you had parents who made everything about themselves, and you had to be a high achiever to get any attention from your parents – as if your achievement shined on them.

If your parents had understood their own autism — what made them parent in extreme ways— then you would have felt more loved and supported during your childhood. And your adult life would have begun with fundamentally different footing.

You might think: that’s not nice to blame parents! But what’s really not nice is to act like it’s not the parents, because then there are all kinds of people talking about helping your kid when all your kid needs is you: You parenting in a routine and connected way.

You are not going to hear this from anyone else because they want you to like them. They want you to listen instead of shutting down. Lucky for you, I don’t care. I have more interest in just saying what’s true.

What I’m talking about is seeing clearly. Like this Degas painting. Did you know the Paris Opera was bankrupt so the ballerinas had to give sexual favors to attract donors? Now things make sense: those men in the corner for example. What I’m telling you is that everything is more interesting and more meaningful if you can really see. Including your own family.

So I’m talking about this topic live, on Tuesday, October 21 at 8pm Eastern*. If you want to argue with me, this will be a great time to do it. If you want to tell me there is no data for xxx, this will be a good time. We’ll also talk about what we can do to make childhood great for kids with autism. And what we need to do now, when autistic parents did not make childhood great for us.

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