My daughter was diagnosed with a very mild form of Aspberger’s 2 years ago at the age of 15, and what I’m wondering is… do you notice any changes as they get older? Meaning, do they appear to ‘grow out of it’ at all? Does it morph or seem to stay the same?
Welcome to the SDMB, Nica. I think you’ll find us a knowledgeable, very opinionated, and usually helpful crew. In order to help you get access to the knowledge, opinions, and help on tap, I’m going to move this thread to IMHO, which is where we put threads seeking medical and psychological (and legal and financial) advice.
Again, welcome!
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Thank you! I wasn’t sure where to put it! 
I’ve got a four year old that has a preliminary diagnosis from our pediatrician of high functioning autism with an emphasis on a lack of social skills, which pretty much translates into Aspergers. We’re still waiting for an appointment with a medical team for a more complete diagnosis.
I’m curious if once you got the diagnosis you were able to look back on your daughter’s childhood and see the signs. We certainly could. We also consider ourselves lucky to have caught it early enough that therapy can make a difference (hopefully).
Also, you said that you got the diagnosis two years ago at the age of 15, which makes her 17 now. In that time did she recognize how she’s different and does she try to change her behavior to meet expectations of how she’s supposed to behave?
Finally is she a excessively engaged with any hobbies such as anime, comics, gaming, etc? How does she do in school and does she care about a career?
Sorry to hijack your thread but I’m always curious how things worked for other parents.
Yes, looking back I can absolutely see signs. OC behavior, later that turned into self-harm, and then social anxiety and panic attacks. Also a slight lack of understanding of general concepts that we would normally understand clearly. She is highly intelligent (as most are) and has received a full scholarship to a university. She is driving now and becoming more interactive in a public sense and even has her first job! It’s really a joy to see her grow. I often wonder what residual behavior will continue to manifest though.
We saw her issues arise from self-harm and OTC pills distributed amongst her friends at school. She became depressed and gave up on school… we even had a few trips to the emergency room. We thought it was typical puberty and depression at first because she had been fine before (or possibly acting out after my divorce), but after seeing a counselor and having her do some testing, they came up with the diagnosis. Upon reading about it, I definitely saw the signs from even when she was a child.
As far as being excessively engaged in certain activities, she does seem to become obsessed about one hobby or interest over a long period of time. Then she’ll switch to something else. Anime was one. She actually taught herself to speak fluent Japanese as a result, so I don’t know if that was a pro or con. 
She will be majoring in International Relations and Linguistics. Chinese is next!
My nephew is a teenager with a primary diagnosis of Aspergers. He went from full Special Ed classes in 8th grade to main stream classes in 9th. It was not totally easy, but he assimilated himself rather quickly. Social skills and appropriate behavior in public were his primary issues, and with “training” he knows what he can say around his friends and what he needs to keep “under wraps”. He loves to play by himself, and he gets bored in a nano-second if he is not stimulated - and if he forgets his medication, forget it…but as he ages he is getting more and more aware that being an adult means taking responsibility for his actions…all of his actions. We’ll see how he does when he finishes high school, but for now, lot’s and lot’s of activities are needed to keep him in line. I tell my SIL all the time she is going to have to beat the girls away with a stick because he’s a looker…her common retort is that he doesn’t even notice the girls…I tihnk that may change soon !
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We’ve actually got a few people with Asperger’s on this board as posters - some of which were even diagnosed by a doctor, instead of self-diagnosed.
While people don’t “grow out of” Asperger’s Syndrome, they can learn coping strategies so that their lives, and the lives of those who love them, are easier. The important thing is to have her working with someone who knows how to teach her that. A person with Asperger’s may never have the *intuitive *ability to hold a “small talk” conversation at a cocktail party, for example, but they can learn a set of rules which makes it possible to get through it (stand at least 12 inches away, use the person’s name in your first sentence, use open ended questions that can’t be answered with just “yes” or “no”, include as many questions as answers in your conversation, etc.) so that they can make friends and professional contacts.
Depending on how her Asperger’s manifests, she may be ideally suited for particular jobs over others - perhaps even more ideally suited for some jobs than neurotypical people. If she likes and is good at repetition and detail, for example, a job going through computer code looking for errors, or quality control on a production line, might be a great one for her. (And, reading your reply before I post this, Linguistics is probably a great choice she’s made already!)
The important thing is to get her or keep her working with therapists and/or specialists in teaching people with Asperger’s, so she can learn her strengths and learn how to overcome her weaknesses. With enough training, she can appear to have “outgrown it”, but left alone, it won’t go away, and can be a source of great personal and interpersonal stress.
Thank you so much for your input.
[nitpick]It’s actually Asperger’s (no ‘b’)[/nitpick]
And yes, I have a teenage son who’s diagnosed Asperger’s / high-functioning autism. He’s pretty socially impaired, though it’s improved a lot over the years.
I’ve spoken with several adult Aspies and my impression is that once they knew what was going on, it helped a lot - they could learn coping skills.
I don’t have kids but I have been close friends since I was 8 with a girl with Asperger’s. We’re 26 now. She has grown and changed socially a ton, over the years I’ve known her. She was diagnosed very young, her parents are very supportive and she’s had a lot of valuable assistance from professionals and her schools as well.
I think the best thing she ever did for her social development was take the leap and attend two years of college away from home. It was scary for her and we were all worried but it went very well and she gained a lot of skills and friends.
She is very slow at reaching social milestones, but she just started seeing a serious boyfriend for the first time in the past year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up marrying. She graduated with a 4-year degree a couple years ago, but she is still living with her parents and struggling to find a ‘real job’ (but has been working full-time for years, just not using her degree). She doesn’t feel her interview skills are quite up to par, in fact she recently commuted quite far to take a weeks-long course for people like her to learn interviewing and job skills, which she feels helped her a lot.
It’s not a matter of growing out of it, but you can learn to cope and progress quite far when you’re not socially normal. Making sure an aspie kid feels supported, loved for who they are despite being different, and never giving up on trying to help them learn to cope with the rest of the world, is pretty key I think.
Yes, my son. He’s 16 now (well, two weeks from now) and goes to boarding school. He was diagnosed with PDD at 2, and finally AS at about 9 or so. He was on medication for co-morbid ADHD until last year.
We had a very, very rough time for a few years, but boarding school has helped tremendously. The tight schedule, the heavy involvement in sport, his own AS interest shifting from Yi Gi Oh (he was a national doubles champion) to weightlifting, the fact that it’s a boys only school, all this has helped him more than I can express.
We started when he was little teaching him to cope (the concept WhyNot mentioned of a ‘space bubble’ that everybody has an you shouldn’t stand in it, and nobody should stand in yours is where we started). Also, I finally got a good psychiatrist - counsellors have been great but the doctors, my god, I have horror stories. The psychiatrist encouraged him to learn to self manage and come off his medication if he was ready. Last year he led the discussions about coming off his ADHD medication, and that was that.
His grades aren’t fabulous, but I suspect he will do ok on his HSC and we’re talking about uni. His grades aren’t bad because he’s not smart - he does awesome in areas of his AS interest, like science - but because he can’t be bothered if he doesn’t care. He’s got friends, real friends, for the first time ever. He’s had a gf, and he dumped her in appropriate circumstances, I was so proud of him. I realise that sounds weird, but…she was behaving in a way that upset him, saying angsty teenage girl stuff, and he just said no, not dealing with that, and when she continued he broke up with her - face to face, gently. I know, because we practiced it. (He still does that, if the situation will be new or different.) When she then texted him 30 times in an hour, he lost her number and unfriended her on FB. But he did it without getting upset or anything - I mean, he was appropriately upset about his gf, but not upset and confused about what to do about his gf, which is the distinction.
So, he’s going to be ok. He won’t grow out of it but he has learned to cope and to make strategies to work it all out. He’s taking a gap year, and going travelling. A whole year of no set schedules and new places, people and things. I’m so proud of him for wanting to do it, and even though it will be stressful for him it will be so fun, too.
So it can work out, I guess. I’ll stop bragging on the kid now.
I have an adult child with a mild case of AS. He hasn’t grown out of anything. He has a serious girlfriend and a job, though he is underemployed, given how smart he is. He’ll always have trouble reading social cues and handling new situations and stress. The best I’ve been able to do for him is to try to keep his trust so that he’ll listen to my explanations about people, feelings, and behavior, and what he’s expected to say and do. He has often needed to be shown how to do certain types of basic, practical tasks and transactions. Luckily his girlfriend is now his partner in that regard as they make their way through young adulthood.
It sounds like your daughter is on the right track. I had terrible troubles with my son’s education. He refused to work on any subject that didn’t interest him. If you continue as you are, she should be fine. Be prepared for her to flounder more than you’d expect with sudden problems and, at times, with seemingly trivial and obvious everyday issues.
Pardon me for intruding here, but I have a question. One of my oldest friends, very much loved in spite of being very difficult and high maintenance much of the time, has personality quirks that in many ways sound like “mild Asperger’s” (my own made-up terminolgy) to me.
Can anyone here point me toward a particularly good website or book that might enlighten me?
Thanks.
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It sounds like she is really growing and on a good path.
I do have a word of mild caution. What is her goal with international relations? I’m pretty entrenched in the sphere of IR right now, and it seems like it may be a potentially difficult path. Most IR fields eventually boil down to politics or communication. Making strong personal connections and being able to communicate across cultures (including learning to read and use whole new sets of social norms and signals) is fundamental. It’s a field that is friendliest to natural extroverts who can make friends with anyone, feel at home in strange situations, and adapt quickly to social situations where you don’t quite know all the rules. It’s a field that is good to people who can really put themselves out there, and who naturally put people at ease.
She may be good at these things- maybe her practice brute forcing our social signals gives her an edge in learning to use those of others. But she may also be entranced by the freedom that a foreign language can give the socially awkward. It can initially cover a lot of social sins, and there is something comforting about finally being as awkward and out of place as you feel.
But as a very-mildly introverted Mandarin speaker, all I can say is that if you have trouble making friends in English, oh man, it is much harder to truly connect with people in Chinese. Even for social butterflies, cross-cultural communication can be extremely challenging.
She may want to think about her career goals a bit more thoroughly. I can see room in international law, on-paper translating (not a great bet with Chinese- there are millions of Chinese English speakers wh work cheap. Indeed, don’t count on speaking Chinese alone to contribute much to a career), some types of economics and maybe one of the more quantitative aspects of research and analysis.
If her plan involves any kind of living abroad, she should spend a semester abroad ASAP. About 35% of neurotypical people freak the heck out, don’t enjoy living abroad’ and leave early. It’s better to know if you are one of those people before you invest much into the idea.