YEP. This was my kid. Me too, in fact.
I’ve also noticed this. I do think this kind of dynamic can still happen, especially in the middle school years, but even there it’s less prevalent.
I don’t do the actual diagnostics let alone setting level designations (and there are supposed to be separate ones for level of support of social communication and for restrictive repetitive behaviors). Honestly I don’t quite get in practical terms what counts as what level of support needed. The variety within levels is so broad that I don’t see them as communicating much information. When they are even used.
I really think of it in terms of time and services.
Some kids need weekly therapy or a 504. Extra time on tests. Fidget toys. Level 1.
Some kids need substantial therapy and services. Physical therapy, OT, speech, ABA 24 hours a week, feeding therapy (literally this is just a list of stuff we’ve done) - Level 2
Some kids are nonverbal, need round the clock caregiving, help toileting, and all-day therapy. Level 3.
I think it’s mainly useful for managing expectations for parents, caregivers, and teachers. When we got his diagnosis, Level 2 told us: “strap in.”
And I think a diagnosis of Level 2 for instance was good leverage for demanding the level of support and resources he needed. I think it is especially important for him because he reads to most people like a Level 1 child. When they tried to give him the bare minimum we were able to come back and say, “No. This is not enough for a Level 2 kid.”
Otherwise I think they might have fought us on the level of support he needed. They certainly acted as if he would transition to kindergarten with no issues and one of them said, “by the time he’s in third grade, he probably won’t even need an IEP.” This is before the school year started, without even knowing him, and it was an absolute disaster.
So the levels are a quick way to signal what you can reasonably expect from this child and the extent to which they will need to be accommodated.
That’s just my take.
In practice I think that is what they end up being, tools for service eligibility, but they (and again with per design two separate level specifiers) were intended (at least as I understand it) to be separate from language and intellectual impairment, but really hard to do that, so they seem instead to be a broader brushstroke with intellectual impairment as the main driver.
Exactly. But then how should they get labeled? By describing the various end states along various and probably many axes? By mechanism of what disruption was the prime driver? By clinical utility?
IMHO nonstandard attention mechanisms should be an axis of ASD, rather than a comorbid condition. And the edge of where it is ASD with nonstandard attention vs ADHD with some ASD features is arbitrary.
But I am not in charge! 
Yesterday I had lunch with my dad. He’s an energetic 80. We had a long conversation where I explained that I had learned what I had long suspected to be true, but he didn’t seem to get it.
He immediately brought up distant relatives and friends who were definitely at the level 2/3 category, describing how hey can’t hold jobs and need special care and so on and so on.
I think I finally was able to get him to understand that at level 1 everyone sees a normal guy, but nobody sees the sheer effort involved in living life normally, tons of workarounds and such.
I was walking on a different road from everyone else all my life and didn’t know it.
I told him the story of how my brother at age 11 reacted when he put on his first pair of eyeglasses. He looked outside and declared: “Wow, the trees have leaves!”
Of course the trees had leaves, he had seen them all of his life.
He just had no idea that everyone else could see them so clearly.
I saw this and didn’t go through everything to see full context, but…
I’m face blind–didn’t actually learn that until I read an article about in Scientific American in my 40s and failed every bit of the test, while my wife instantly spotted every celebrity they showed with masked-off hair and other features. I remember her saying “That’s Bill Clinton…That’s Oprah…” and so on. There is a whole set of techniques that face blind individuals use to recognize people–friends, family, people at work, and so on, and I never realized I was relying on those kinds of techniques.
What’s the relevant point? I looked into it, and it turns that there is roughly a 30% correlation between autism and face blindness, with decent sized error bars, of course, but that’s not insignificant.
It’s crazy to find something out and then look back and recognize the effort that has always gone into things that others take for granted.
This The Onion article reminded me of this thread. (The people comforted when they finally got a diagnosis.)
Yeah, that’s Cary.
Graduate of Cary High School here.
Wish more people would seek out that diagnosis and find ways to manage it.