Why do my children stim?

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I often get asked this question. I get tired of it.

Then, I ran into this video clip about Richard Feynman answering "Why do magnets repel each other?"


Feynman's answer was priceless. Keep in mind that he was the creator (or one of the main contributors) of Quantum Electrodyanmics (QED), so he could perfectly have gone into U(1) Lie Group/Algebra and Lorentz Group of Special Relativity, plus renormalization, and explain magnetism as the necessary consequence of all that. But that's not what he did. His answer at the end was essentially: "That's the way it is." He was trying to explain things at the level that the journalist could understand. And at that level, the journalist's question deserves no good answer: it's a question that cannot be reduced or explained by other terms.

People are often offended when I tell them the right question is not "Why," when they ask me about "Why do my children stim?" Sure, I could go into renormalization theory, show them the dew-drops-on-a-leaf model's picture, explain to them about chaos theory, and all that. But they would be lost. So, I usually just tell them: don't ask the "Why" question. Ask instead the "What" question: "What can I do to use my children's stimming to help them develop?"

People get offended because they think they can explain things at their level. But they can't. It's not a matter of pride nor anything like that. People have to recognize that they have their limitations. And us, humans in general, we have our limitations, too. We process information. And information, by nature, is discrete. Mother Nature is not discrete. Mother Nature is much more complex than we can comprehend. Ever after Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we know there are questions that we cannot answer. Similarly, we know very well that all those quantum theories we have are basically some tools to capture our ignorance: the real world is simply way more complex and complicated than we can ever truly comprehend. At some point, the only valid answer will always be: "That's just the way it is."

The question on my mind is "why don't NTs stim?"

Because it helps to comfort them.

It helps them concentrate?

I stim while reading, and it helps me concentrate I imagine...because my hand I'm not holding the book with, just starts doing it and I don't even notice. But if someone interrupts me about why I am ruffling the pages then I get distracted.

When I was a little kid I also had a thing about wanting to smell every book, IDK different books smelled different so I wanted to get the smell of the book I was reading.

Plenty of non-autistic people bite their finger-nails when nervous, pace around when anticipating a visitor, jiggle their legs when made to sit too long, twirl their hair when considering how to reply to a question, doodle when trying to concentrate in a meeting, gesticulate a lot more when having fun, etc.

The forms that this kind of thing takes might be a bit more distinctive or diverse for many autistic people, and we might do them in a different set of situations; but I don't believe that there's any fundamental difference. I think of my stimming just as something which calms any overwhelming or distracting emotion or sensation, positive or negative, that I can't let out any other way (whether through lack of ability to express it or because it seems inappropriate to express it in the current situation.)