did your parents force you to make friends?

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did they get angry at your aspie traits? did your teachers?
my mother was told by teachers that at school i dont play with the other kids and i walk by myself in the backyard, pacing back and forth. i was six. she was angry and yelled at me.
my parents yelled at me to make friends. my mother opened the door and said, "dont come back till you visit a friend." during one summer vacation i was told i must go to a friend once a week, at least.
first time this happened, i was six or seven, so i went to a calssmate's house. she wasnt happy to see me and had no idea what i wanted, because i never talked to her before. both of us didnt know what to do and it was very embarrassing and frustrating to me, maybe to her, too.
when i was about seven, i went with my mother to the grocery store, and suddenly i saw two girls from my school walking and talking. they were deep in conversation and looked like the least thing they wanted was to be bothered. my mother yelled at me, "Those are your friends." (i barely knew them. i only knew one girl's name.) "Go after them, run." she pushed me and i ran, but slowed deliberately and let them get away. my mother growled because i lost them.
when the nieghborhood's kids threatened and bullied me i told my mother and she said, and those were the first words that came out of her mouth, "it's your fault. you never bothered to make friends with them and were never interested in them."
my parents were always complaining that i dont make friends, that i dont act like others my age, they even got angry that i liked animals and acted like it was something to be ashamed of. we walked down the street and i called the dogs and my father said one day i'm going to get bitten and that will be the end of my love for animals.
did anyone get angry at your aspie traits, during childhood or adulthood? anyone tried to force you to change?

Yes!
They forced me to go to meals at restaurants and join sports clubs because they didn't think I was sociable enough. If my friends wanted to go out shopping, I was expected to go with them. It was horrible. It made things worse for me too, because I often had panic attacks in social situations as they were noisy and/or I didn't know how to behave in them.

I think they've given up trying to get me to change now I'm an adult, but they don't accept the diagnosis of Aspergers.

My parents did not force me to make friends or socialize. They are not sociable either, and they only have a few friends whom they rarely in-person.

My parents were the same way. They just couldn't grasp the fact that I didn't have (or want) any friends.
Starting from the age of 12 or so, they became embarrassed of my friendlessness and wouldn't do any activities with me. (Kind of ironic, since it's normally the other way around). For example, sometimes there was a film I really wanted to see at the cinema but they wouldn't go with me because at that age I should be "doing things with friends". So I never got to do stuff, which made me even more isolated.
Now that I'm 20, they've started to accept that this is just the way I am. In fact, my mother is taking me to see the new Aardman film on Thursday.

I have the opposite problem, DS really wants to have friends but he struggles with understanding how to interact and the games the other kids play. When he was 4, at kindergarten he used to walk around asking everyone, "are you my friend" constantly until the kids would tease him, run away from him or ignore him. Some days I see he gets overwhelmed with it all and doesn't go outside at all to avoid having to socialise...As a mum, it is heartbreaking. He is starting a social skills group in a couple of week and I really hope this goes some way to helping.

Yes.

Of course when I was growing up we didn't know about Asperger's, it was unheard of. I was just labelled by my parents as "not ordinary". Especially my father who would walk around the house shouting and banging things... that was just the emotion he felt at having a son who was not "ordinary". It was very bewildering being an adoptee at a relatively late age to parents who were very social, who held 'social' particularly dear. My lack of friends was certainly frustrating to them... at least the lack of appropriate friends. It's always been easy for me to make inappropriate friends. This thread reminds me of one summer holiday from school where, approaching the end of the holiday, there was a big inquisition about how much socialising I'd done over the holidays. I explained I'd socialised only once in the whole of the holidays (7 weeks) which caused a vicious rage from my father towards me.

Frotunately not. My mother pushed me in many ways and controlled my life in several areas but thankfully my painful shyness was not one of them. She actually did pretty well at compensating for that until I was 19 and started talking to people on my own.

She did, however, harp on my (lack of) eye contact with herself specifically and force me to sit in the room with her until I was able to say "I love you" which was never.. I find those words very difficult and I'm given to believe that is somewhat common on the spectrum. She tried to take away my stimming tools but I resisted and still have one to this day. She didn't like to give me reasons for things but used the "You're a kid, you don't get a say/have an opinion" a lot and I was forced to accept this or be hit. She hit me for disagreeing with her. My aspie husband would not have been able to handle this, I know for sure. And indeed it was difficult for me too who always likes to debate things and come up with a reasonable conclusion.

Seems like she has some serious issues.[/quote]
well... actually, she does. she says her parents loved her younger sister and didnt pay any attention to her. my grandparents always went on and on about how my aunt's kids are great and how we dont know how to do anything (which isn't true, by the way. my brother is a straight a student and my cousins are simply annoying).
it was very important to her that her kids are "normal", meaning exactly like everyone else. she can't accept that someone is different and believes in following the herd.

I think my mum was more in denial than anything. She wanted me to be the perfect child. I first started getting problems in kindergarten. I wouldn't look into anybody's eyes. My kindergarten teacher and her talked about it and my mum punished me and made sure that I looked into peoples eyes after that. Also, when I started stimming by wiggling my fingers, I'd do it a lot, I'd even do it at school occasionally and it scared my mum but she didn't get me help. I got a bit of intervention at school but they could never pinpoint what was wrong with me. I guess Asperger's Syndrome was a new thing back then and I didn't show every single symptom of it plus it was even more rare in girls than boys. Now, my mum admits that she should have gotten me early intervention and she regrets doing it. I think my mum was just in denial a lot and she wanted me to be "normal" so badly when I was younger.

Also, I'd have the odd friend but they were mostly the really motherly types that were super nice and kind of protected me or they'd be somebody who was similar to me...usually really shy. I didn't have a whole pack of friends but I usually had one or two each grade.

They tried to when I was a kid. But it wasn't in a mean way. They just thought I was really shy and I did too at first.