This may just be my experience as an autistic person, but the kids I’ve nannied whose parent’s complain of ‘bad awful in cooperative selfish autistic behavior’ are… Not like that? At all?
Like, for example, I cared for a kid for a while who was nonverbal and didn’t like being touched. Around six years old? Their parent said that they were fussy and had a strict schedule, and that they had problems getting them to eat. Their last few nannies had quit out of frustration.
So, I showed up. And for the first little while, it was awkward. The kid didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, you know how it is. And for the first… Day and a half, maybe? I fucked up a few times.
I changed their diaper and they screamed at me. I put the TV off and they threw things. Not fun, but regular upset kid stuff.
Next time, I figured, hell, I wouldn’t like being manhandled and ordered around either. Who likes being physically lifted out of whatever it is they’re doing and having their pants yanked off? Fucking few, that’s who.
Next time, I go, ‘hey, kiddo. You need a new diaper?’ and check. ‘I’m gonna go grab a new one and get you clean, okay?’ ‘Wanna find a spot to lay down?’ ‘Alright, almost done. Awesome job, thanks buddy’.
I learned stuff about them. They liked a heads up before I did anything disruptive. They didn’t mind that I rattled of about nothing all day. They didn’t like grass or plastic touching their back. They were okay with carpets and towels. They liked pictionary, and the color yellow, and fish crackers, and painting. They didn’t look me in the face (which was never an issue- I hate that too, it fucking sucks) but I never had reason to believe that they were ignoring me.
Once I learned what I was doing wrong, everything was fine. Did they magically “”“become normal”“” and start talking and laughing and hugging? No, but we had fun and had a good time and found a compromise between what I was comfortable with and what they were comfortable with. (For the record, I didn’t magically sailor-moon transform into a socially adept individual, either. In case anyone was wondering.)
I don’t like eye contact. It’s distracting and painful and stresses me out.
They didn’t like eye contact either.
Is eye contact necessary to communication? No. So we just didn’t do it.
Was there ever a situation where I HAD to force them to drop everything and lay down on the lawn? No. So the thirty second warning came into play, and nobody died.
“But they never talked!”
No, they didn’t. And they didn’t know ASL, and they didn’t like being touched.
So you know what happened?
My third day in, they tugged on my shirt. ‘Hey monkey, what’s up?’ I asked. And they tugged me towards the kitchen. ‘oh, cool. You hungry?’. They raised their hands in an ‘up’ gesture. ‘you want up? Cool.’ and I lifted them up. They pointed to the fridge. I opened it. They grabbed a juice box out of the top shelf, and pushed the door closed again. ‘oh sweet, grape is the best. You are an individual of refined taste.’ I put them down and they went back to their room to play Legos.
“But they didn’t say please or thank you!” “But you should be teaching them communication skills!” “But!” Lalalalala.
1. The entire interaction was entirely considerate and polite. I was never made uncomfortable. I was made aware of the problem so that I could help them solve it. There was no mess, no tears, no bruises, no shouting.
2. Did my brain collapse into a thousand million fragments of shattered diamond dust out of sheer incomprehension? No? Then their communication skills were fine. Goal realized, solution found, objective complete. They found the most simple and painless way to communicate the situation and then did it.
Kids are not stupid. AUTISTIC kids are not stupid.
I’m willing to bet real cash money that the real reason the last few nannies had quit had a million times more to do with their own ability to cope, not the kid’s.
To this day, that was the most relaxed and enjoyable job I’ve ever had.
And I know I don’t speak for everyone. All kids are different. All adults are different. But in my time and experience, pretty much 95% of all my difficulties with children come from ME not being understanding enough. Every single “problem child” I’ve worked with turned out to be a pretty cool person once I started figuring out how to put my ego aside and let them set the pace.
Again, not speaking universally, here. I’m just saying. Sometimes social rules are bullshit, you know? People are people
Have you ever read an article about the study that found that teaching the parents to cope with autistic kids yields better results than other therapies? Because this is exactly what they were talking about.
this is a fantastic short term solution. but what happens when that child goes out into the real world as an adult and has no verbal communication skills and still doesn’t know how to properly transition between activities? by not teaching them coping mechanisms you put them at a distinct disadvantage compared to the rest of their peers and I don’t think that’s fair.
Okay, first off, I don’t want you to feel that I skimmed your argument and chose to disagree on principal. I feel that I have read and understood your point of view, and am actively putting thought into composing a thoughtful response that conveys my perspective on the subject.
You have asked me what happens when an autistic child “goes out into the real world as an adult and has no verbal communication skills”.
The thing is, there are many adults who live perfectly well without verbal communication.
There are adults with hearing impairments who can’t verbalize their intentions.
There are adults with anxiety disorders who can’t verbalize their intentions.
There do, in fact, exist autistic adults who can’t verbalize their intentions.
I would not personally agree that forcing a child or adult to talk out loud -when it very obviously causes them stress, or when they are unable to do so- is a coping mechanism.
I would argue that a coping mechanism is something that one does to alleviate their own stress, not the stress of others.
Just as well there are, right now, at this very second, any number or real-life adult autistic people who actually do, at this minute, have a hard time transitioning between activities. I’m sure you could ask them what that’s like and you’d get a great number of autistic adults who do exist in the real world willing to tell you.
I’d like you to ask yourself, and I sincerely don’t mean to be condescending, a really quick question:
Is the problem Them, or is the problem You?
Furthermore, is there even a problem at all?
What I mean for you to ask, is: Is there a problem, or did you create one by being unwilling to compromise what makes you, personally, comfortable?
Are they doing something wrong, or are you valuing tradition over someone’s health and wellbeing?
Which is more valuable to you, in a society?
No child is ready to walk out and live life as an adult in the ‘real world’. That’s why they’re children. Raise them, whoever they are and whatever that means, into an adult who’s confident and kind. Let them speak to people who understand them, not just people who’ve studied them, because there is a difference, and children need more than anything to not feel alone. Everything else is secondary.
I was a picky eater as a kid. Like really, really picky; ARFID wasn’t a thing back then, but if it had been I might’ve been diagnosed with it.
My parents never forced me to eat anything. They encouraged me to try new foods, and when I got a bit older we had a system where I would get cheesy popcorn (one of my favorite snacks) in exchange for trying a bite of a new food, but they never forced me. They fed me foods that I would eat to make sure I got enough calories.
Eventually, I did broaden my diet. It is still pretty restrictive, due to anxiety and food sensitivities in addition to the sensory issues, but it’s a complete diet. All of the people who said I would end up surviving on pizza and goldfish crackers forever if they didn’t make me eat other stuff were wrong.
You know what did leave a lasting impact, though? The people who would say that. To me, or to my parents right in front of my face. Extended family, concerned lunch supervisors, and kids at school who would tease me for not having a “real” lunch, eating at the wrong speed, whatever it was. To this day, I get anxious eating in front of people outside of my immediate family and friends group, even if I’m pretty sure they’re not going to judge me.
Would my parents forcing me to eat the same things as everyone else have avoided this judgment from other people? Maybe. However, the impact of that almost definitely would have caused even more harm, and possibly even malnutrition (the logic of “they’ll eat it if it’s the only option” doesn’t work so well when eating said food is physically terrorizing for the kid).
We live in a world that is often deeply cruel to disabled people, and this should absolutely be a consideration when raising autistic kids, but the solution is not to “teach them to be normal.” Approaching kids with understanding and empathy, meeting them where they’re at, and treating them as human beings will ultimately create the healthiest foundation for helping them navigate the world.
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
The distinction between boy/man and girl/woman as societal genders is evident once you start understanding gender as an intersectional phenomenon. A boy of color who is forcibly assigned the incongruent role of “man” by institutions like the police has his very identity fundamentally undermined and a whole different set of societal expectations thrust upon him compared to what a boy-assigned-boy does. A disabled woman who is assigned an identity of “girl” through infantilization is barred from interacting with the world the way that women-assigned-women do.
Beyond just age, there are other lines along which the gender binary is revealed to actually be an amalgamation of multiple distinct social genders. “Frigid woman,” for example, has historically been treated as a separate gender phenomenon from “mother,” wherein mothers are “real” women and “frigid” women are failures who are barred from accessing true societal acceptance as women. Even among women who do fulfill the societal expectation of childrearing, the roles of “mother” and “grandmother” are different, and people fitting those roles will have very different experiences navigating the same world, both on an internal and an external level.
In cultures where there is high stigma against alcoholism, “alcoholic” is practically a removed gender from “man.” And when you consider the relationship that stigmatized perceptions of alcoholism have with traits like parenting ability, impotence, ability to work, aggression, attraction, etc, the link between consumption and gender becomes quite evident!
And it really wasn’t all that long ago when the functional framework for queer attraction within sexology was to understand homosexuality as a third (bio)sex assignment. Being gay and being trans used to be one and the same; “attraction to/has sex with men” was a core requirement of the “woman” gender and “attraction to/has sex with women” was a core requirement of the “man” gender, such that what we think of as a gay man of today would have been just as effectively conceptualized as a woman back then, and vice versa. The first known use of the word “bisexual” was to refer to somebody “possessing characteristics of both sexes,” ie somebody who could perform relationships with both men and women, ie somebody who could perform as both a man and a woman. The concept of gender being something distinct from attraction has only been a mainstream concept for a handful of decades now.
Basically, if an anthropologist with no bias towards binarism looked at how human society behaves, they would see quite a lot of genders, even among people who the binary system currently considers to be cis. They would see boys, girls, partnered mothers, single mothers, partnered fathers, single fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, twinks, bears, dykes, femmes, working women, homemakers, alcoholics, asexuals, manual laborers, white-collar workers, and so many others.
A poststructuralist lens specifically would tell you that all the lines in the sand are arbitrary, whether that’s the binary or any other taxonomy we come up with around any other criteria. At the end of the day, categories are what we use to try to make sense of the world, but challenging the supposed innateness of those categories through intersectional analysis is important and necessary work. The fact that the gender binary is so easy to deconstruct via the intersection of age demonstrates how flimsy of a model it is for describing real human diversity.
weird anti ideology finally leaking out into the mainstream
I’m so exhausted by all of this.
I think we’re seeing the consequences of surveillance, honestly. Like they’re policing themselves this heavily because they’ve never had privacy before, not from their parents, not from their peers, not from advertisers, not online, nothing. And with all that constant and conflicting criticism, there are no consistent rules for when they’re going to be attacked so they’re responding by making elaborate, false rule-sets as a coping strategy. LIke “maybe, if I act this way, I’ll finally be safe” but it doesn’t work so they get more desperate.
Add on all the school shootings in the US, inaction on climate change, and a pandemic that was allowed to rip through schools unchecked, kids and young adults have a deep sense that their lives are disposable. And they’re right! Our society is systematically hostile and abusive to children in so many ways! However, the only child abuse society gets riled up about is pedophilia. Adults act like pedophilia is the only kind of child abuse that counts as abuse.
And that’s why I think we are seeing kids stretching the meaning of pedophilia. They are looking for language that encompasses all of the kinds of abuse that they’re experiencing. All of the emotional abuse of children is normalized, quite a bit of physical abuse is normalized, and the lack of privacy, agency, and bodily autonomy is all socially enforced. The truth is that all of these other forms of abuse can and do lead to sexual abuse, too. These kids are on to something, but it’s getting deflected and warped by the fact that they still live in the dangerous environments they’ve been abused in. I think more specific language will be empowering here and will also bridge the gap between the current generation of young people and other anti-violence movements.
So if you are a child or young adult who resonates with any of the above, I want you to know that as a child abuse survivor, I believe you when you say that you’ve been abused. I think the anxiety about fandom websites and queer people and kink is misplaced because strangers don’t usually have the structural power and access to you to hurt you but I know that there are people in you life who dohave that power and I’m worried about you. I think ao3/queer/kink are just the issues that you feel safest speaking up about. I see you speaking up and I think there’s more going on.
So what I can do for you, as a random stranger on the internet, is give you some resources and language so you can start to articulate your experiences and find solidarity with others.
Here’s a copy of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. The US has refused to sign this but it’s still a good idea of what the rest of the world believes you deserve and what we know will help you thrive.
Here’s a copy of the power and control wheel for child abuse. Power and control wheels are commonly used in many forms of victim advocacy to help map abuse. To be clear, we count these things as abuse because we know from research that they are traumatic. Many laws have not been updated to include all these forms, so you’ll notice that many of the things on this wheel are completely legal even though we know they are harmful.
Additionally, I’m including a zine I found on peer support for suicide ideation. I know that growing up, my friends and I were always told to tell a trusted adult but we didn’t have one and ended up trying to help each other through some really awful shit. This is a guide written by someone with a similar experience and it details ways to informally support someone who is feeling suicidal.
