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Is your child unable to 'mix' (a word I hate) with other children? This particularly afflicted me during playground sessions forty / forty five years ago. For no good reason other than climbing up the housing ladder my parents had me at my third school by seven. My first, was brand new with a sympathetic first year teacher, Mrs Sewell. All things were new, bright, go-ahead. My a***hole of a father had me end up at seven at a remote backwater - a backward s**thole a hundred miles away, I call it Shithouses. By then I had shut down and breaktimes were spent squeezed up against the school building, hoping this torture would end. Where was the help or guidance? Did not one grown up see my disability? My grandmother lived across the road and I have a memory of her coming across the road with homemade toffee on a plate, circa 1964 /5 to the school gates during 'playtime' (thats a sick word). I was frozen. Certainly not bright or carefree. My grandmother could see something was wrong, no-one else intervened. I curse my parents, damn them.

Last edited by ablomov on 28 Jul 2008, 11:39 am, edited 2 times in total.

ablomov, I guess I am about as old as you. I had the SAME problems!! ! I feel the same

Nice to hear from you, my blog expands on all this. These early experiences are why I never wanted children, even now I often feel deep hatred to teenagers, I don't trust them. I have constructed my own world of interests and activity. Are you okay now?

I am sorry to hear you encountered so little understanding as a child.

You grew up in a time where no one thought of AS as a common condition, and society generally believed that stronger discipline was the answer to issues with any all child who seemed a little different. Or an institution.

Well, that got apparent compliance, but it also created deep resentment, depression, and/or confusion. As your story shows.

There still are, sadly, people who believe that.

You can get an apparently compliant child without honoring his uniqueness, but at what cost?

I am sure that my own father was AS, I think that he is part of the gene pool passed down to my son, and I have spent much of my life feeling sorry for him. And being mad at him, for taking his issues out on his family. He was treated as a problem child, and not given very many breaks in life, despite clear and obvious brilliance. I really cannot describe him as a happy person. He was a bitter person. A good person, still, who worked hard to do what he thought was right, but it is difficult to live and raise a family in any positive way with so much bitterness inside. I knew from the moment my son was born, before I had any idea that he and my father both had AS, that I did NOT, absolutely did NOT, want my son to grow up burying his pain and living unhappy like my father did.

And as imperfect as things are in our family, I have a HAPPY son. The world is changing. People know better. AS is real, it's recognized, and parents are acquiring the tools to respond to it properly.

I do think it can make a difference.

Thanks for sharing your story, for you basically confirmed something I've long felt: that squashing your AS child into conformity may appear to work, but the cost is high and not worth it. Whether or not the "different" we are trying ends up working, it's better than going down THAT road. I still get pressure from some people, to go the route your parents went, and it's good to have affirmation that I should never give in to that pressure. That while our road is more difficult, it will be worth it. I want my son to grow his gifts, not shut down. It's a challenge, to be sure.

Very interesting for you to take the time.

My parents were brainless, not drinkers thank God, tho with such limited horizons. I've no idea what my parents were, I can't and do not want to fathom them out. i could tell you some horror stories. Heres one, been in digs a fortnight and she rings 0700 to tell me she was married a week previously - to a man that stopped with us in b&b - the September after my Dad died end Feb. We had physical fights after he died, she's had me as a seventeen year old dragged to the floor by my hair, desperate to get me out of the house. I couldn't get digs in the local town so she travelled hard to make sure she could get somewhere. She had the bloody cheek years later to tell me she was still getting child allowance!

I cannot stress how awful the s**thole was that I was taken to live at age seven. Pretty in summer, tho a bigoted backwater, old folks retired there to die. The other kids were not used to incomers, narrow, mean little people. For ten months of the year it was dead. I became unable at times to go outside which became worse the longer I lived there. Even now I dread the six week summer holiday season. Around fifteen I stopped talking at school. The isolation when among others is profound. Strangely I've been married three decades.

I could always trust that my parents were wanting the worst for me. I remember there were three times my Dad helped me with reading or writing (I couldn't read till at least eight) and each time he set out to humiliate me. I am actually a very gifted man in so many areas, yet next to nothing was done to help me. Baffling.

Did you read my blog, long time since I've read it tho I think it enlarges on all I've started here.

Few understand our intricacies.

Our only revenge and penance for the past is to help educate the future, to make sure no other child suffers the brutality that NT's display toward our kind.

Often, our suffering in the past allows us to better aid our own children. We've seen hell and come out stronger for it.

If your child is gifted with AS, don't force them to interact. Or, find other children with AS and then encourage socialising.

*Shrugs*

They will probably feel more comfortable around their own kind.

Regards
GM

As far as I can remember nearly at all times any desire for friends would be thwarted particularly by my mother at the place I lived aged seven to seventeen. I see now that she steered me to 'posh' boys, she herself was an uneducated highly pretentious nobody. God, how I hate her. She was fiercely judgemental and very aware of the 'pecking order' in life. Now heres a novelty - she was engaged five times before she met my Dad! World record? I only was told that by an Aunt twenty eight years after my Dad died. A well kept secret. Yet it always has been that I'm the last one to be informed of anything, there are many instances of this, her second husband attempted to burn the house down after she flitted when he was at work. It was half burnt down (I think) and I was only told nine months after the event. I actually was on holiday and leaving that day when my aunt blurted out the impending house move for the next day, two hundred miles away. The delay in telling me abt the subsequent fire made me very angry. My wife has told all my mothers relatives very bluntly and forcibly to never contact me again. You couldn't invent this crap! Theres more, she spent her way thro the equiv of two houses, ie £320k sterling. She made a point of telling me "theres nothing left".

With any potential schoolfriends my Dad would do his best to embarrass me, no social graces or any attempt at good manners or light conversation - a sort of reverse snobbery. Certainly no role model. What a hand of cards to be dealt! Yet its probably just as well he died when he did. We were starting to have fierce arguments, often about what I was learning at Technical College, he couldn't stand I had a doorway to better things.

I've just remembered, among other things in our last conversation together the cow told me two things, firstly that every day she had to drag me screaming to school - all year. Secondly, that my first teacher Mrs Sewell told her only a few years ago that she had never met another child like me because of my conversation, what I spoke about at age five, space and rockets probably I guess. Yet I would think speaking with other kids would or could be difficult. I've always felt that - I'm on another planet. I doubt if I ever socialised with any children before being dragged to school. The noise and random movement and unpredictable behaviour would frighten me. Even now, you'll never see me at a football match, a game I detest as with all sports. What fun we weave for ourselves. Yet I remember at that first school making friends with dark haired David, and a blonde American girl - I even remember playing with her in our back yard at V Square, my Dad would have liked to do his best to destroy all that. I'm tearful now.

I haven't clicked over to your blog because I'm always on such a limited time budget when I come to this forum, but what you've written is heartbreaking. It sounds like your parents weren't just poorly suited to raising an AS child, but poorly suited to being parents, period.

It sounds like that first grade teacher understood your gifts. What a shame that your parents felt the need to move you.

At least schools (some, anyway), now recognize that some children simply cannot handle the sensory environment of school, much as you couldn't. By understanding that, they can work to mitigate. And many parents of AS children choose to home school, to avoid dealing with the sensory issues altogether.

It sounds like you found a wonderful wife. For that, I am glad.

difficult childhoods are hard to overcome.....i had my share of bad things happen to me as a child- by my parents, grandparents, other kids......no one listened, no one seemed to care......IMO, perhaps things would've been easier had i not been as emotionally aware of what was going on. being NT, i realized that everyone else was f**ed up & didn't care. i turned this into: " i suck. there's something wrong with me".....only as an adult have i been able to turn it into: " wow, they were really f**ed up. i can't believe i survived that mess."

instead of going the "i'll never have kids " route, i chose the " i'll make sure my kids have a damned better life than i had" route.
......unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen. no amount of good parenting can prevent bullys from attacking your kid. sure, you can try to stop the situation once you know about it, but sometimes it takes awhile to know about it.