Raised by Aspergers parent

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Hi! New to this forum ... so great to find you! Especially this thread! I loved reading everyone's experiences of AS parents, and so many light bulbs are going off in my head YES YES YES I can relate!

Only recently have I learned about AS ... oh my goodness, it ticks ALL the boxes for my Dad (and probably for his Dad too). This knowledge comforts me now as an adult .... understanding helps me start forgiving and accepting. It is an emotional load off.

Ultimately I am quite proud of my Dad. He is a loyal, honorable person who has financially supported his family. But there's pain, shame and frustration mixed in. I have always found being his daughter so difficult.

Looking back on my childhood, I most remember Dad's emotional distance and excessive inappropriate rules. WAY over the top. Nowadays I'm paranoid about leaving my own daughter alone with him. I trust he would never intentionally harm a child. But I also doubt he can protect. He was unable to protect me from a distant relative who sexually abused me. Not blaming Dad here - but I believe if he hadn't had AS he would have been far more clued in and may have prevented or at least stopped the abuse faster, and supported me.

On a lighter note: Some of my Dad's traits ( this will be like deja vu for some readers) include: freaking out over noise (as kids we weren't permitted to laugh too loud); pedantic old fashioned grammar (uncool but harmless); interrupting people without realizing it's rude and correcting people inappropriately (arggh I'm turning red just thinking about it) ; against his teenage kids playing sport or getting part-time jobs or having lives as we were supposed to be "studying". Blatantly uninterested in 95% of things which interest others - for example, Dad probably wouldn't know who Tiger Woods is, he probably wouldn't be able to name a popular brand of beer or name the local place to buy groceries - obviously this makes small talk and socializing difficult. Recently he ran into a close friend of mine who he has met literally hundreds of times over the past 16 years - and he says "Nice to meet you" LOL. He is brilliant at his job though - incredibly gifted and award-winning. Also I have noticed he donates quite a lot to charity which I think is very nice, he is definitely caring and generous even if he doesn't express it to the family in a conventional way.

As a child and teenager I felt emotionally unprotected. I had no meaningful male guidance. Although I know he would have liked to be close. He kissed me good night every night in the same clockwork way. I didn't feel the love in it, but somehow I know he does love me in his own style.

My adult siblings and I are all non-AS. I seem to be the only person in our family who is overly concerned with Dad's "problems", the others say "yeah he's eccentric but who cares, look at his good points". It's a great attitude to have. I wish I could accept him like that. Working on it. At the moment Dad and I rarely talk because I find too much frustration boils up. I feel bad for him too because nobody in the family is like him, he must feel quite isolated.

Thanks for reading and if anyone has constructive suggestions or advice for how I can better get along with my Dad please let me know.

Hi, I started reading this post just out of interest and got sucked in... (not literally, guys! )

I am sorry to hear about the terrible experiences of children of parents with AS. We are not all like that, but I can see that Aspies must consider very carefully before they have children. A person who really, genuinely has no empathy (in my case I get overwhelmed when another person is upset, I have empathy which renders me useless) will probably be unable to be a full-time parent, especially a single parent, as having children requires a lot of selflessness and doing what is best for the child. (before anyone says anything, this does NOT mean doing whatever the child wants all the time!)

I was amused and pleased by the children of "quirky" aspie parents, the ones who managed to love and care for their kids, although they still had their difficulties. One thing that I noticed is that NT children of Aspie parents here have mentioned feeling that they were wrong or there was something wrong with them because they were so different from their parents. I can identify with this a lot, because of being an Aspie person in an NT world! I'm not trying to trivialize anyone's experiences here.

If I was to become a parent, I'd have to consider a lot of things beforehand. Although I am quite an unselfish person and often put other's needs above my own, I also need to be alone a lot. Even now, I get overwhelmed if I spend too much time with the same people all day. I am very sensitive to noise. At the moment I lack the common sense and life skills to take responsibility for somebody else's life, but this could change with time. I do not have the damaging rigid thinking and dramatic special interests that have been described here (do have special interests but am able to take interest in other things and would not force them upon a person), but I think the drawbacks I do have could still be damaging. I don't know if I will ever be ready to devote every day and night to someone else, simply because solitude is necessary to me. (I would WANT to devote my life to a child, but whether I would be ABLE to is a different matter.) I do know that until I am sure I can be a good parent (not perfect, no parent is perfect) I will not have children. I don't want my children to have the same experiences that some people here have had.

However, I disagree that an Aspie can NEVER be a good parent.

Sounds histrionic to narcississtic personality type to me. No meltdowns in my corner. Extreme brains as Temple Grandin might describe though. Had to be totally face blind. Nobody mentions auditory processing issues either. Could Temple Grandin and others be wrong about the high ratio of engineers, mathemathecians and computer geeks in the spectrum? What gives?

I've spent years lurking in chat rooms and googling to find this thread. I feel huge relief already - and I've only read the first two pages of posts. Why wasn't the insight I've gained today around when I was young so that I didn't have to grow up thinking that it was all my ingratitude and paranoia and fault that our family was a total quarrelsome, screaming chaos? I used to comb libraries, bookstores, bore acquaintances (never had any friends) and sound out relatives. Got me nowhere. Better late than never. Prepare to be bored by my story.

This is it. Same and yet different to many of the others here.

My parents both find it impossible to function in the adult world. They cling, bitterly, to each other. Two leftovers who didn't get picked up by anyone else. Their biggest fear is that anyone will notice that they are Weird or Stupid and so dress, house and conduct themselves very conservatively, shun all pleasures (apart from pretending to like opera as that's seen as suitably intellectual and respectable), debate, risk and people who might challenge them. There is no physical attraction or companionship. Each despises the other. She is a shopaholic, her inheritance long spent, but her sense of entitlement still very much intact, eating away at what's still left in the bank. She regrets ignoring her clever, overwhelming mother's advice not to marry him but can't admit it often. He can no longer wield his years-before exam success as a university student like a cudgel over her and his children - he just sits sullenly and forlornly while she bullies him and attempts to play the matriarch. (She's now got some grandchildren and, while they are babies, she loves them. It's waning, though. The screaming I remember as I entered childhood is now being repeated with my little nephew as he grows up a little and develops a personality - like not always wanting to eat whatever food she offers him). She was ashamed of her total academic failure at her posh school but is younger and fitter than him and has watched him being unceremoniously kicked out of the job he slaved at for years and sees her moment. The hobnailed boot is now on the other foot.

My father agrees he's AS. He's utterly uncomfortable in any unstructured social situation where small talk, appreciation of social codes, humour, timing, eye contact and a sense of self are necessary. At such events he'll suddenly have to go and make a phone call, sort out filling cars with petrol before the drive home, do some paperwork. Anything. He can't bear to see a waste bin with even one piece of rubbish in it - he'll have to get up in the middle of a meal and open the back door to empty it in the outdoor dustbin (even if it means letting a cold breeze in).

All that's fine. I'm his daughter and look like him and identified far more with him than my depressed, violent, integrity-lacking, super-fecund-and-smug-about-it-to-people-who-couldn't-have-kids mother. I naturally turned to him for support after Terror Afternoons spent in her company after school finished. Basically she couldn't handle my physical ungainliness (I'm dyspraxic and very, very plain) and peer rejection and would say things (nastily) like 'you're not like other people', adding mysteriously and powerfully 'and if you don't know why then there's no point telling you' (when I was about five). She locked me up for hours, regularly - it was absolutely hideous - if I did anything that annoyed her (like trying to get her attention). Later on, as a teenager, too big to drag off to an externally-lockable bathroom, she started insinuating that I was gay or transgendered when I didn't get asked on dates or get rung up.

I'm angry with him because he sacrificed me to save himself. He knew the struggle I was facing in trying to find myself as I was like him. He said so. And yet he'd say to me things like 'you must have done something to deserve it' or 'you're lying' if he either found me locked up, in a heap of despair, in a room - or, with the latter phrase, shortly afterwards, when my mother would deny locking me up. And yet they rowed incessantly and she was violent, destructive and unreasonable towards him. He knew I wasn't lying. Then he'd say bitterly to my mother if my sister (who she got on with better than me) snapped at him and she didn't back him up - 'why won't you support me?' (as in 'and I cover up for you').

He really wanted me to do well at school. Almost as if my failure to do so would prove what I guess everyone suspected - that neither he nor my mother were clever and so, with their genes, what else would you expect? He didn't buy me books or encourage me - but he connived to somehow get me a place in an expensive, wholly-inappropriate-for-me, competitive school and told me to be grateful. It was a disaster. And he was very angry with me.

I have a younger brother, extremely close in age to me, who found the whole atmosphere in our family unbearable too. He never got on with either of my parents and also got locked up by our mother in the same way as me. My father tended to react angrily, though when my brother reported it to my mother and told her not to do it. My brother was very scathing of me and my dismal efforts to fit in and win approval. He was very aloof and had no respect for either of my parents. I was blamed for this and it took me years and years to get over it. My mother used to assure me that I had been horribly crushing of my brother when he was tiny and that's why he lacked self-confidence. She applauded him when he was violent towards me, saying it was payback time. She frequently said "it was painful to watch so much bile coming out of such a little girl". I used to read that even serial killers like Myra Hindley had seemed normal as kids and thought that I was hopelessly cursed and was bound to end up in some kind of maximum security institution. Now I see my toddler nephew with his baby sister, I'm not so sure.

I also feel angry with my father for making me feel like I was some kind of sexual temptress. I'm not saying he was a paedophile, but he would blow kisses and wink suggestively at me when I made eye contact with him across the dinner table from about the age of nine. He always told me to cover myself up - eg if I was wearing a short skirt - from way below the age of puberty and I instinctively recoiled from wanting to be alone with him or have him touch me. I grew up thinking you had two choices with a guy - either keep totally out of their way or else just let them do what they wanted. I never realised that I had a right to negotiate and assert what I wanted and that you could interact with men without them thinking you were flirting.

Very long post. Too long. Maybe this will help someone out there by making them see they're not alone.

That's a lot of painful history. I hope that the self-awareness you have now is helping you move past it.

LifesNotFair,

Thanks for sharing your story. Would it be accurate to say that you believe your father was / is AS and your mother - - something else? Her issues sound different than AS to me, but are very real issues that negatively affected your childhood. The difficulty being that your father didn't have the skills to deal with the issues she had, or to force her to confront them, and so the damage ran unchecked. She sounds to me like she was emotionally abusive, as well.

I am sooo glad to have read this thread! I thought maybe I'd just got carried away after discovering autism, but many of you have similar stories about multiple aspies in the family.

I reckon that two of the five of my brothers and sisters warrant a definite asd or aspergers diagnosis. I think myself and my other two siblings could be classed as mild or borderline. One of those who is mild/borderline is definitely without a doubt ADHD, still ADD now but dropped the H a little in his teen years. God he was a violent monster after E numbers and video games he was. Back in the 80s he was just classed as gifted and bored with school though. Think they sent him to a psychiatrist first.

My Dad is ADHD but I don't think he's particularly ASD or Aspergers. Deffo ADHD though, god he is like a walking advert for it from his mispent youth up to his present day neat-freakiness and inability to ever locate his keys, glasses or wallet. Think he's onto his third mobile phone this year already. He can actually fall asleep while you're talking to him, it's a bloody talent I swear.

My Mother, oh my god I'm sorry to say this as I do think I might be ASD and my son definitely is (who I adore) but my Mother was and is an evil b**** of an aspie. They diagnosed her manic depressive but I know they are wrong, wrong, wrong. She was an abusive piece of work. I had major food issues and good food rammed down my throat more times than I care to remember. One time I threw it up so she scooped up the vomit and thrust that down and all. I got upset when she tried to make me wear a knitted jumper dress that itched me immediately, so she just screamed and then smacked the coathanger around my head. Not like a little smack, like an 'I'm gonna kill you thwack'. She threw juice down me when I didn't drink it and would threaten to cut all my hair off while yanking my head back when I didn't stand still to have it brushed for school. She bought me up with all the wrong life lessons and I was in my 20s before I realised I'd been raised on utter b****cks. There's a lot more to what she did but I wouldn't want to air it all on a public website. The big things that make me think aspie are not the abusive behaviours on their own, but the fact she never had any friends, couldn't understand why no-one liked her, got bullied from the day she went to school and the 'funny story' about how as a kid she would write rows and rows of the letter 'A' in little notebooks. Apparently in those days it was considered 'cute'. Argh I hate her still!! !! !! !! ! ASD or no ASD - if you've got an above average IQ you should be able to use it to realise you've done wrong and say sorry - not "well you made me do it...".

You know, there's only so long you can look back. Then you have to move on. Because if you continue to look back at how unfair life was, you will NEVER move on from it. When you no longer have the need to stay and wallow in the past, you will be able to pick yourself up and make a life. The catch is, knowing when you are wallowing - and why.

ToKatzfraut and others. I have read the posts with interest as I am the op of what may be considered harsh posts. I said that I don't think people with the classic symptoms of aspies should have children. I will temper what I said after reading some of the replies. It seems that people with aspie have an easier time with relatives who are similar. So maybe the offspring of aspies are ok if they too have the disorder or if the parent has only a mild case. In terms of me, as per the speculation on some of the posts, I don't think the dx fits. I don't think finger pointing is helpful but I will reply to it. I'd be ok with the dx if it fit but I would try to be attentive to the things that appear to interfere with parenting and that are problematic for others and I would try to change-as I do when my kids tell me that something I do is bothersome (no, they don't always get their way but I listen and consider because they are right sometimes and I am wrong sometimes-so listening and considering the different perspectives makes me a better parent). I don't think anyone would dx me as having aspergers but if it were the case I would be sensitive the the parenting issues. That is not to say that I don't have limitations or that I am a perfect person or parent. I don't have the characteristics that are consistent with aspergers. For instance, I prefer being in groups and with lots of people to being alone-although I am fine with being alone too. I have fun hanging out with friends and with my kids' friends and their families. I like most kinds of music and love doing things spontaneously I get a kick out of doing things like eveyone else cause it makes me more aware of the links between people-sort of a we are all in this together feeling-that is a rush for me. I am physical and like cuddling. I enjoy meeting new people, being in crowds and just hanging out. I'm pretty attuned to the prevailing mood in a room and to the emotions of those that I am with. I've always been able to anticipate the needs of my kids and they are happy and well adjusted. My idea of a great day , if my family were into it, would be to be at the beach with my kids and our friends, having a picnic with nice wine and a nice spread, to spend a day at Disneyworld with the hot sun but a water slide nearby with our kids and the express pass or to lounge on a razy river with a nice marlot. When I have conversations-except on the internet where I do go on in Aspie fashion on this site-the discussions are very much give and take. Rarely will I talk on about myself or my interests. Most people are actually far more interesting than me so, if anything, I am lucky to learn more about the person I am talking with than the other way around. I have few intense interests and hobbies although I keep busy and I enjoy most kinds of recreation from movies to putt putt. We can safely assume that I have few Aspie characteristics. I'd consider the dx for myself if someone pointed out characteristics that I have that would meet criteria for Aspergers but that seems unlikely. Being pretty definitive about a topic like if Aspies should parent is not necessarily a Aspie thing but I would say that I can see how one might speculate about that. In contrast, I am likely to be seen as mundane and ordinary and lacking in depth by some Aspies. My thinking is rarely black and white although, like anyone, I can be stubborn sometimes. I try to change and consider the other side or view point when someone thinks I am being stubborn0maybe they are right. NT people don't lack the behaviors of the Aspies because all behavior is on a continuum. It is not the presence of a behavior that leads to the dx but where the person's behavior lies on the continuum. And how clusters of behavior co-exist and interact. We can all be insensitive, self focused, lack perspective. The dx of Aspergers is made only when those characteristics are present at a level that exceeds normal and is problematic. I think the characteristics of the classic aspie are inconsistent with good parenting but perhaps people with fewer of the characteristics or mild cases can be good parents. People on this thread appear to think that to be the case so I would be less definitive now than I was initially.

I am very thankful to find this discussion thread about Aspergers. I'm pretty sure my father has undiagnosed Aspergers. My oldest nephew has diagnosed Aspergers. I believe I have traits, although I have learned to function as best I can. I do remember standing on the playground in elementary school waiting for the kids to invite me to play. I didn't know how to just jump in and participate! I also cherish some solitude and am rather introverted. I wish I could be more social - I just don't know how.
As a young adult, I knew my dad had not "connected" with any of us. I remember asking my mom why he had consented to even having children. Her response was that he knew of her desire to have them, and so I guess he was trying to please her. I always thought he just didn't like me, until I realized he has so many traits described on this thread.
My family took him to a high school play once because one of his younger grandchildren had a leading role. When the play ended, I asked him how he liked it. I was expecting him to complement the grandchild, but all he could talk about was how
the music had hurt his ears! Everything he comments on is negative!
I know I suffer from low self-esteem because of never being able to please him and rarely hearing any complements from him.
He just never seemed happy with us. My mother is very social, and I told her she deserves a lot of credit for guiding him along all these years (he never complements her, either) - everything is always about him!
As an adult, I've had the opportunity to "run into" childhood friends in my hometown, and two of them (independently of each other) said "As a child, I was always scared of your dad!" I was able to laugh, and say "I was too, and still am!"

A functional child.

My father is undiagnosed 60 year old man with Aspergers (as well as Bipolar)

My Sister is an Undiagnosed 30 year old woman with Aspergers (mimics Bipolar, not very well)

Which explains why to this day, i have never had an honest conversation with my father... never a conversation, not one. It explains why when they would both gang up on me, the younger sister being young as 8, and say hurtful vile things and berrate me with insults and tell me what kind of person i was because i made a mistake, mispoke, spilled a glass of water, or sang a tune.

They wouldnt acknowledge me crying alone in my room.. they acted happy as if their whole goal was to vanquish me from existence. It was because they had no comprehension of my emotions.

They could not connect.. My father should not have had children, without proper knowledge of his condition. He is not interested in my life of what i have to say, he doesnt see me as a person, he sees me as a fictional character in his head, based on paranoid ideas. I am supposed to be just like him and think what he thinks, how can i not think how he thinks. He projects on me how i lack common sense yet i see the hypocrite he can be on all sorts of things... He is Very intelligent, its difficult to understand he is in his own world.

I'ts been hard to me to connect to my own feelings as well as my desires. I am so used to ignoring everything, and taking care not to annoy my father or let him slip into a rampage. I never understood why everything had to be exactly so, or my father we get frustrated raise his hands in the air and shake his head, no no no!! !

He never looked at me... i gathered i wasnt much to look at anyway..

The only time i saw his eyes were in a dramatic portayal of a story he was telling, i think he felt if he did that it meant it was really wild... Or when he was having a tantrum and directed things on me very briefly never more than 5 seconds has my own father looked me in the eyes.

I taught my father to hug me... I was very loving, and by my insistance only was he able to become "okay" with it, not great not good just okay...

Maybe if my mother had not been a Narcissist... i wouldnt be left with these pains i have. But she was, and i believe many people with Aspergers couple with a Narcissistic partner, as the narcissist only sees themselves and is completely self consumed to the point of overlooking and completely not noticing this lack of intimacy... because they themselves are uncomfortable with it.

Had my father gotten help things may have been different, vastly... BUT Adults are overlooked when it comes to Aspergers, they mimic normalcy in an effort to fit in somehow... So you cant see them clearly, unless you know them WELL.

I think its possible that an Aspergers parent can raise a functional child... If they have the right training and the right help. If not, That child will have to be the strongest little soul in the world.

chickachicka,

I am so sorry to hear you've had a difficult time of things. I hope that someday all your family will reach a better understanding of their own limitations and learn to build bridges.

I do think knowledge is power. I do think it helped that my mother seemed to understand what my father needed, even if she had no idea why he was the way he was, and that helped put some balance in my childhood that seems to have been missing from yours. I am sorry for that, that you didn't have the balance.