Discussion for Parents WITH Aspergers?

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my hubby is aspie and posts on this site

I'm also an aspie mom with an aspie daughter and an aspie husband. I have an aspie father and at least 2 of 5 of my siblings are also aspie. I have 4 children and love being a stay-at-home-mom as long as I get to do just that, stay at home. When I have to navigate the world with my 4 kids, I have problems. LOL! 2 of my kids are adopted and we're in the process of adopting the third. So far, the adopted ones are NT, but my 5 y/o son has mental retardation with autistic traits, so isn't quite NT I guess.

For all the parents who posted and have aspie kids--when did you know they were aspies, too? And how did you find out, what tipped you off? My daughter is 7 months old so I am pretty sure it is way too soon to know, but I want to know what to look for and when to start?

my son wasn't dxed until he was 13. my daughter, age 9, was dxed with ADHD last year, but we're pretty certain that she really has AS.....I think much of the diagnostic process has to do with the severity of symptoms. With severe symptoms, you might end up with a dx at an earlier age vs. my children who have less severe symptoms.

My eldest son was diagnosed aged 5, while the youngest was dx at age 4.

The biggest tip-offs were the obsessive lining up of toys - cars etc...

My son is dx'ed autistic. I didn't think anything "was wrong" until the family doctor suggested it and referred us to a pediatric neurologist when he was 2 1/2 years. This was after he had had a hearing test at 20 months. He was evaluated, assessed and considered "severely autistic" until he was officially diagnosed at age 5.

We thought he was normal because he was "just like us" and we didn't know that we "weren't normal". By about 6 months, I couldn't hold him or cuddle him (he squirmed away) but I was told that I was just like that. My husband didn't speak until he was 4 years old. He wasn't potty-trained on time either. My son didn't develop picky/peculiar eating habits until he was 3+. I developed picky eating habits at around 5.

Well, for me it was kind of backwards. I didn't know Autism was really a spectrum disorder until my daughter was around 4 and I had never heard of Asperger's until she was about 7. When I stumbled on Asperger's and started researching it to death, I realized that I was reading about myself as well as my daughter AND my husband. We had wondered if she was a little autistic since she was about 2, but then she was so much like us that we didn't realize how "off" her behavior was. Now that I know about autism, I look back and there are things as early as when she was a newborn baby that screamed out autism. Here are some of the things I look back on and can see with clarity now:

-hated to be swaddled, struggled to get free
-didn't like to be cuddled and held much at all
-very content to just play by herself, very "independent"
-easily overstimulated
-she would put herself into a sensory deprivation situation by piling pillows and blankets over herself and just lie there since she was about 18 months old
-she had meltdowns so severe that we would have to hold her down for fear of her hurting herself
-obsessively lining things up- shoes, Little People, all her toys- throwing a tantrum/meltdown if her lines got messed up or she could not make the toys do what she wanted them to do, or put them in the order she wanted.
-not really playing with toys as they were intended to be played with, like not playing "house" with dolls, but just setting up the house over and over
-did not take to new people at all. I flew across the country when she was 14 months old and spent a week 1/2 with my dad, step-mom brother, and sister. In all that time, she never became comfortable enough with any of them to allow them to even hold her- she would scream and squirm away- even after 10 days. My brother knew something was "wrong" with her at that point.
-NEver showed an interest in playing WITh other kids- she still mostly does parallel play, but that is how I feel I live my life as well: Not really living and working among other people, but living and working parallel to them.

We've (my daughter and I) always been a bit "odd." I lived 30 years like that before my daughter was born, and as she grew up it was pretty apparent that... what's that saying? "The apple didn't fall far from the tree"? We could (and still can) predict exactly what the other would do, have a lot of the same unique personality quirks, and I can see in her things that I dealt with at a younger age. She appears to have less problems with being Aspie than I did. I don't know if it's somehow diluted in her or if the fact that I also deal with it and, thus, made modifications automatically to our environment/world to make it palatable to me helped/help her cope. She's doing worlds better than I was managing at her age.

I was born in the mid 1950s, and she the mid 1980s. Since Aspergers wasn't "created" until the mid 1990s, and since we didn't have access to much more than basic medical care, diagnosis as to what we "were" was kind of moot. I know I had some very severe symptoms as a young child, but they were not unknown in my extended family so I was just lumped in with the others like me as being "very sensitive".

I formally found out what people label my tendencies a few years back. It really hasn't changed a lot, except to relieve that nagging "oh, am I crazy or is the entire world really bizarre" kind of feeling that I used to have.

Parallel rants topic

I did not know this thread was still here, Aspiestudentmom. I do not usually go to this forum because my three children are NT. Gwenevyn, I did not know your child is NT.

Sometimes my children have figured it out that I am clueless about certain things. I love them dearly, but they are teens. My son defends me, but sometimes he will say that he has to make so many of his decisions. I help my kids with what I can. Maybe they have to realize earlier than most that Mom makes mistakes. The kids will just have to come to terms with this!

I know this thread started a while ago but I'm also a mum who is on the spectrum. My son has severe autism. Are there any other AS mums out there?

hi, i am new and expecting to be diagnosed in a couple of weeks. I wasnt expecting to be told to go for tests for aspergers- i thought i had attachment disorder- it was a bit of a shock. 1 of my 2 daughters is exactly like me- mannerisms/body language- we talk a lot now about this and its made us closer, but i worry that her b/f wont put up with it for much longer and i am not good with family- anyone the same?

As a result of another thread like this one in the Parent's Forum last year I started a thread, which was made a sticky, in Members Only Forum, at:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt66773.html

and which was pretty active for a while. But because it was just one thread it became difficult to hold any focussed discussions on it, and it has dwindled until only a couple of us post on it.

I think it, ( AS parenting in and of itself ), is a crucial issue. Not only is AS partly/largely a "hereditary" thing, and therefore many parents of AS children are probably on or near the spectrum, but women/girls are still hugely undiagnosed/unrecognised because of different presentation so that many AS mothers have no idea why things are so difficult.

In just the first few weeks of the thread it became clear that there were at least half a dozen aspects of parenting which were very hard for AS parents, and it would have been good to explore them in depth.

I think that almost all of the problems I have had as a mother are directly or indirectly related to my own Aspergers/Autism.

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I have a blog on word press under hrachael85
Have a look if u like

I'm an Aspie mom, and have 4 NT kids, athough I'm seriously thinking that my 17 yo could have a touch of AS. I have posted about my kids here and don't get many responses, but mainly post here with advice from the point of view of an aspie.

I grew up without a dx (didn't get one till my 40s) but my mother had other problems and went way overboard on things because of minor health problems I had. Looking back, I can see how some of those things made things more difficult for me, and sometimes I post from that POV and advise being more laid back. Sometimes, some of the things that parents post sound like the same things that go on with NT kids, so I post from the POV of a parent of an NT kid.

The main difference I have as an AS parent is that I relate to my kids very differently than a lot of NT moms.

I'm an Aspie and a parent and I just post here in the parents section. When it's relevant, I'll just mention that I have AS somewhere in the post.

I like having a mix of NT and Aspie parents here because I find that it brings a very balanced pool of responses. I also really appreciate being able to ask the NT parents about appropriate social responses and what not.