This also is worth returning to and I’d love to bring it out for broader comment from those here who have the autism diagnosis and those who are their loved ones:
My sense has always been exactly that. There is strength in learning individual examples well but weakness at generalizing and applying the more abstract generalizations which have varying details.The classic bit I see is a kid great at knowing the lists of facts in history class, acing every test, so gets moved to the honors class … where they flounder because in that class it is less the dates and the names but the compare and contrast at more abstract levels.
As an educational entity, it is our ultimate goal. We identify forms of autism and how they present, and then we create a program in conjunction with the parents that brings out and develops the best in those children. Doing this when they are very young is a big positive.
Though I started this thread, I haven’t acknowledged all the experience and knowledge shown by all of the participants, so I apologize for that. Having read them all, as well as stories I’ve heard elsewhere, I certainly recognize that I have it relatively easy. We have a friend who is also Level 1 and recently diagnosed but, if one was to have a Venn diagram of our respective symptoms and behaviours, the overlap would be minimal; I would far rather have my symptoms than his.
Thank you for that, but it is a challenge - just ask my wife . Let’s just say that we sometimes have “spirited” and “lively” discussions.
One conundrum that I often deal with is the conflict between me as the victim of autism vs me as the perpetrator of hurtful, confusing, and/or irritating things.
…I don’t really know what’s going on there either… but I’m just gonna say (@DSeid, want to comment here as to your experience?) that I think it is common for autism to be comorbid with other conditions as well. ADHD is one that shows up a lot, for instance, and e.g., a GI ped once told me that it was very common for autistic kids to have digestive issues (though happily our kid does not).
To some extent, yes. My son I think has some ability to think abstractly. It hasn’t really been tested academically yet. But he is constantly asking (usually silly) hypotheticals. I told him this morning I had to keep an eye on the road and he giggled and said, “What if there really was an eye on the road and someone ran over it with their car?” So he clearly understands the literal vs the figurative and is amused by it.
We’ve also had conversations about history, racism, capitalism, marketing, etc and while I wouldn’t say he has a profound understanding of these things, he asks questions you would think of as more abstract reasoning. Where it really shines though is his ability to extrapolate math and science. To use a humorous example, I told him it was cold down in the basement. He said, “It’s not cold! It’s warmer because it’s closer to the Earth’s core!” He was being intentionally silly but to come up with that reasoning on the fly, I thought was pretty cool. He’s not just memorizing facts, he understands how to apply the things he learns in other contexts.
(In case it’s not clear, I have a really silly kid. I was no less silly as a child.)
But as you’d expect, he really struggles to do this kind of extrapolation socially.
My son is as much ADHD as autistic. I can’t know for sure it’s ADHD that gives him his creativity, but he has traits I would associate more with the positive aspects of ADHD - great imagination, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. And not to overgeneralize too much, but I rarely meet someone with ADHD who is not at least a little bit silly.
This is true. The rate of ADHD comorbidity is really high in autism, as well as anxiety disorders, eye, sleep and digestive problems. People who are autistic are also more likely to be trans, which is not a disorder of course, but I find it interesting. I’m not sure if it’s because of some shared genetic or developmental pathway or simply the fact that a lot of autistic people either DGAF about gender or don’t pick up on the cultural differences very well.
When I was looking into risk factors for autism, they found a positive association between any mental disorder in the family history (Bipolar, psychosis, OCD) and a diagnosis of autism. A parent with ADHD is a strong predictor of autism. And - this made me laugh - if you have engineers in your family, you are more likely to be autistic.
I also learned that most children who are hyperlexic (fluid, early readers) are autistic. Both me and my son were hyperlexic.
Right now he’s reading books about chess. Just paragraphs and paragraphs about different moves you can make. He’s become very interested in chess and plotting out different scenarios on the chess board to figure out how it all works together. He’s not destined to be a grandmaster but he is really applying himself. I wasn’t sure if it was going to sustain his attention, but he’s spent his free time reading about it and is plotting out scenarios every morning at breakfast, so I think it’s an interest that could stick. He just needs to stop announcing his strategy aloud as he’s doing it.
I really think that at least for some it’s the DGAF about gender / not good at cultural differences thing. I don’t think of myself as trans and I present as female, more-or-less, but I always feel like being “feminine” is like acting out a part (which I don’t mind, but I don’t find it particularly natural). And if tomorrow the powers that be were like “you now must present as a male and use he/him pronouns” i’d be like “ok sure whatever.” My child on the spectrum is the same way. Whereas the other two in my family who are not on the spectrum I think would not be okay with that at all if they had to change genders overnight.
Haha, yeah, my older child and I were both hyperlexic. My younger, non-autistic child was a relatively early reader but not nearly as early as my older child and I. I don’t know whether this is relevant either but I could see the younger child making incremental progress with reading skills, whereas my older child just sort of busted out basically being able to read almost all at once.
Yes, same. I was the same way. I think I tried phonics with him but I’m not sure I learned that way, I think reading just made instant sense to me, and he’s the same way. My obsession with words led to my becoming a writer. My son will probably not be a writer. Unless he’s writing numbers. But it’s important to me that he’s a reader, and his reading is starting to break away from picture books. We’re trying to raise him to be a skeptic in a country full of gullible people, and the best way to find out if something is true or not is to read about it!
I have said time and time again, whatever happens with this kid’s education, whether he is ever fully independent or not, he’s going to get a great education even if I have to give it to him myself. And mark my words, he’s going to be an informed registered voter.
There’s a lady who used to post on another website (that site shut down; it’s not autism-related) whose son appeared as a toddler to be severely autistic. They asked about trying a gluten-free diet, and the doctors said, “You have nothing to lose; go ahead and try it.” His condition improved so much, they actually suspect he may have an immune or metabolic disorder that is triggered by gluten, with autism simply being a symptom. When the site shut down, he was in a mainstream class in elementary school, with an aide. I don’t know how badly he would “relapse” if he had something with gluten in it, but he did feel so terrible when he ate it, having him avoid it wasn’t that difficult when they weren’t around. He knew to ask.
That’s a misdiagnosis caused by the fact that autism is a spectrum disorder, not something that you can say… have a blood test for, and say “Yes, this kid is autistic.”
The kid likely had all the signs for being on the spectrum, so they said he was autistic. Which he was, at least in the diagnostic sense, in that autism isn’t a specific condition. Even if gluten was the cause, he was still autistic in the sense that he met the diagnostic criteria, whatever the root cause was.
It’s a preponderance of evidence kind of thing, not incontrovertible proof. It’s entirely possible that autism may have many causes, many forms, and the only thing that links them is similar behaviors and issues. Of course it’s also possible that they’re all exactly the same thing, just in different severities, and there are people among us who have that thing, but don’t show the signs enough to be labeled at all.
FWIW there are indeed anecdotal reports of kids tried on gluten free diets who have improved.
Problem is that studies have been done taking those specific kids, and in a blinded fashion putting some on a diet that reintroduced gluten and others still gluten free. No difference.
Still I can imagine a few toddlers who get less chatty and more repetitive self soothing behaviors if they have an upset tummy and maybe even if not by celiac disease mechanisms gluten can do that in a few? That is a symptoms consistent with an autism label caused by something else story. And it isn’t crazy to think that gut microbiome can impact behaviors.
My concern with the “You have nothing to lose; go ahead and try it” bit is that many of these kids are already very challenged to have variety in their diets. Eliminating a whole bunch more of the options makes the variety world that much more restricted. That is something significant to lose.
And for my kid, if you eliminate something from his diet, even for a short time, good luck getting it back. A long time ago his pediatrician recommended he stop drinking milk for two weeks to see if he was willing to eat more (or something. I can’t recall the exact reason.)
Or a wheat intolerance that caused a stomach ache. That’s actually a lot more common than gluten intolerance, and if you go gluten free you generally stop eating wheat.
But yes, eating disorders seem to go hand in hand with autism.
Yes. In the jargon dense abstract I posted a bit ago that is what they meant by “transdiagnostic” - there are highly probably multiple entities all lumped as ASD right now, which each have various levels of severity, and varying manifestations, including sometimes poor focus and other time excessive focus just not on what their caregivers or teachers want them to focus on. For now we have to describe them as having multiple comorbidities; in the future maybe they will be split in ways that are actually useful for determining most effective approaches, just not today.
. Let’s just say that we sometimes have “spirited” and “lively” discussions.
