This really made me mad!

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I agree but I will also add I would like to have that day be one that I don't have to hide in my room and ignore the rest of the world. I don't count hiding from the rest of the world as a day off.

I second (third?) that. While I acknowledge that many of my abilities and personal attributes are linked to the fact that I have AS, I hate that I struggle to drag myself through the day, that a grocery shopping trip leaves me exhausted, that I am so often immobilised by anxiety/inertia and unable to concentrate on the things I need to get on with, that people talking is often a meaningless babble I can't process reliably, and that I have to put on such a front to be able to interact with people effectively. Yes, I can do it for short periods before becoming stressed out but it would be nice to take a few weeks off from it all. I have 'wasted' over a year being unable to do anything much, and I am sick of it - not my idea of a break. But I worry about how I will manage trying to hold down a job again, I'm fed up with going round in circles.
While AS has given me some gifts and I can't imagine seeing the world through different eyes, I feel somewhat disabled not purely by society but by AS itself. I can't see AS as a gift in itself I'm afraid, more a double edged sword, and can sympathise with people who wish they didn't have the condition.

Dunc

Why go too early? I don't enough aspects would show up anyway before 5 or about school age. When younger any *aspie like gaffaws* won't really matter much anyway, it only starts affecting when in a consistent social environment, school. Besides a little leeway getting familiar with oneself, whether *different* or not should not be a bad thing, but a necessary experience.

Because from my own experience with my AS son- the pre-school years were horrific. He was constantly being misunderstood and we were always being told that his behaviour was unacceptable. Do you not feel that AS children in the pre-school environment need support??

Plus aspects of AS can actually be seen from a very young age- and for those parents who already have an AS child and know what to look for it would be helpful to know if subsiquent children also have AS before all the crap with nurseries, etc starts.

Plus sensory issues could cause the child problems long before they are of school age.

Btw could you explain to me what gaffaws means????

I don't remember it being that much different then other toddlers. Do such obvious differences really show up that early? Other then a few incidents, I don't remember much, and they do not seem different. Of course, I have yet to get clarification of the ranges of NT and AS...

You know;
Hiccups, mistakes, errors, slights, mishaps, accidents, issues, whoopsies, run ins, flaws, infractions, blunder, blooper, upsydaisies, lapses,

There are differences in how AS toddlers and pre-schoolers play, differences in social interaction and sensory overload issues that can make life difficult for the child


Do you mean gaffes??? I've not seen the word gaffaws before.

I think it is a play on the same word...I am sure I heard it both ways before.

Yes, they do. My four year old seems very aspie to me, and he felt different even before he was born. His idea of playing is to go off by himself for an hour or two and run his cars around, line them up, run them around, line them up, etc. He is happy as a clam until his siblings try to play with him. Then he pushes the younger one down and turns to play again happily while the other kids cries and screams right behind him. Or, he willl throw himself backwards and throw a tantrum because the other kids are bugging him (trying to play with him). I am totally sympathetic to him, but his play patterns are definitely different from an NT child. He talks very little, and very softly. When he does talk, it tends to be really repetitive: "I found the car...I found the car....I found the car....I found the car..."

This is the sweetest, gentlest little soul I've found (overlooking his pushing kids down when they interrupt his play). I cannot imagine seeking a 'cure' for him. What I DO want is to make his life easy in the ways I didn't get, and there is no way in heck I'm going to put him into public school.

Here is another way to see it: yes, there are problems associated with having AS. This is especially true since we live in a world constructed in direct opposition to our needs and strengths. Would NT's be considered disabled and defective if they were the minority and the world's infrastructure was designed by and for aspies? There are definite problems with being NT also, but it seems to me that their weaknesses are minimized by being able to live in an NT friendly world. Just a thought...

This is why I feel that we need to help kids especially cope in the world that isn't designed for them.

If they found a cure I'd go for it. Hopefully I'd end up like the slogan of the Victoria's Secret ad for push-up bras, LOL, 'it's you, only better'. Me but without this annoying crap getting between me and the people and things I want in my life.

BTW, when I was pre-school age, and yes, I remember, people definitely could tell I was different. Of course nobody knew what was really wrong.

Hmmm...I asked my mom about the pre 5 year old years and she said I did do alot of that stuff Melvis and Chamoisee mentioned: Play by self, even sometimes over play with groups, prefering the company of adults.

I always wonder about the overload sensory stuff, I don't feel it is an overload as much as it is preference. I know for example I never liked to go outside w/o shoes, because on the occasion when I did try I did not like ground hardness, dirt rocks, mud, and sometimes even the blades of grass. But I don't see how something like that or anything else is associated as being sensory overloaded or underloaded or such.

how much different is sensory overload than having a very uncomfortable sensory experience? I know for me that my ability to deal with pain has changed over time. When I was in elemetary school it was pretty low. Know it is pretty high. I also have observed young children doing things that "should" hurt by societies conventions not crying or expressing pain. For me the difference between sensory overload and just being very uncomfortable varies depending on something I can't track. I can do some things that will cause me to completely withdrawl one time and then just be very uncomfortable the next and then withdrawl when it happens a third time.

Sensory overload is not about preferences- it is about the noises, lights, etc in an environment becoming too much after a while- well that's that way it is for me and my son. It becomes as if the volume of the world has been turned up and its painful, confusing and stressful. For me I also get visual sensitivity problems and the lights become painful to my eyes after a while.

Me too.

Yep - you seem to be confusing sensory sensitivity with sensory overload or 'meltdown', Epimonandas - I get these when experiencing a barrage of input which is hard to process or uncomfortable, or both combined. My best example is a supermarket - the babble of echoing noise and half heard voices combined with glaring bouncing light, and close proximity to so many people, all moving about, produces agitation and confusion in me from both discomfort, and inability to process all this 'on the fly' and the frustration that follows. I either explode, and/or become somehow paralysed and can't seem to process anything, glazing over until I recover. Not really to do with my preferences personally, more too much stimulation in an unstructured and hostile (for me) environment.

Dunc