Anyone else here the child of academics?

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Whale_Tuune
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07 Feb 2021, 11:12 am

I've heard a lot about Aspies being children of academics at higher rates than regular children.

For me, it's made my life a struggle. ASD caused a lot of problems with schoolwork. My mom was valedictorian of her high school class, while I struggled to finish high school at all. My dad graduated with the highest gpa of his chemical engineering PhD program, I'm only at a 3.69 college gpa. They're both professors, and a lot of teachers in my life tended to believe that the only reason I wanted to go to college was to appease them, so they kept "nicely" telling me that I wasn't going to achieve what I thought I could.


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07 Feb 2021, 2:36 pm

Both my parents are teachers so I guess so. Never caused me trouble though...


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dorkseid
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07 Feb 2021, 3:41 pm

No. My mother is a science nerd but not in any professional capacity.

Anyway, academics have always been the only area of life I didn't struggle in. School was always easy for me. But none of that mattered once I graduated college and discovered that I possess none of the life skills that are actually important for daily survival. I was unemployed and homeless for years while possessing a useless degree that contributed nothing to my life other than debt.



Joe90
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07 Feb 2021, 4:08 pm

I struggled academically through school but I think it was due to my attention issues that were never addressed. I had a very good imagination for creative work but I struggled with learning facts or following instructions.

So if the teacher told us to write a fictional story about whatever we wanted, or paint a picture of whatever we wanted, that was the only time I could actually get my head down and complete the work without hardly any help at all. But it didn't exactly class me as more intelligent than the other children because most of the other girls were the same.

But I was the last girl in the class to catch up on my reading. When I was 6-7, I think all the other girls were on higher levels with their reading, while I still dangled on level 1 with a lot of boys.

In fact, you might say that I was the dumbest girl in the class. I was the only girl out of the class to need extra support with my work, so I usually found myself on the special ed table with a small group of inattentive boys.


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Joe90
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07 Feb 2021, 4:22 pm

Apparently I "passed" some sort of theory of mind test when I was 5. They gave me a box of candies and told me to look inside, but there were marbles instead of candies. Then they brought one of my (unsuspecting) classmates into the room and they asked me what I thought my classmate would expect to find in the box, and I said, "candies."

They were doing this test on all the children, not just me.

Edit: I posted this post in the wrong thread. Mods - is it possible to delete this post but transfer it to this thread "Studies debunking lack of theory of mind in autistics" ?


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Last edited by Joe90 on 07 Feb 2021, 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

kraftiekortie
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07 Feb 2021, 4:34 pm

My mother was a homemaker, then a secretary, in my childhood and most of my adolescence. She got her MSW when I was 20.

My father was a businessman.

Our home wasn’t an “academic” home.



Edna3362
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07 Feb 2021, 4:43 pm

Definitely not me. And not mine.

Mom's a former health worker turned housewife then turned local politician.
My dad was a handyman slash technician turned to sailing at some point then went overseas.

No spectacular academic related achievements within my family. Not even straight up honor rolls.

I have no issues in academics myself. Probably because I figured my learning style too soon...
Otherwise I might've ended up diagnosed with some learning disorder and struggle with that.

And I hadn't ever taken academics too seriously. Parents didn't pushed me to that either.

My main issues at school at mostly social related.
It's the only thing that truly gave me trouble the whole time.


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cberg
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07 Feb 2021, 5:23 pm

I was raised by a molecular bio PhD & electrical engineer from Cornell. The struggle is real.

I am the only one of my entire extended family without a degree. I still work for huge corporations on & off with lots of brand new software though. Overachieving is practically the path of least resistance in my family, even for the black sheep.


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Joe90
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07 Feb 2021, 6:05 pm

I don't think I answered the thread properly earlier.

No, both my parents were always in menial jobs. In fact my whole immediate family have always been in menial jobs like retail assistant, factory worker, cleaner, gardener, etc.


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07 Feb 2021, 8:58 pm

Neither of my parents are were academics, but both are/were more intelligent than many academics. Both did very well at school but chose not to go to university . I know my mother's reason was not wanting to put another financial burden on her mother who was a nurse and a single parent. My father was from a lower middle class background, and got a scholarship to King Edward's Birmingham . I think his motivation for training to be an army officer rather going to university was very much the same.

Neither were demanding/pushy when it came to how my brother,sister, and I did at school. In fact they were too much the opposite IMO. A slow decline academically by me was met with no concern.

To be fair-this was decades before Asperger's,2e, gifted but learning disabled(US terminology) etc.