Adults: do people ever treat you like a child?

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I've been treated like a child by my mother for 20 years. And it's got worse the last 9. I need to move out and nobody will help me, I've asked my sister 4 bloody times and she still won't. I was ordered not to buy my other sister any Christmas or birthday presents and my sister and Mother spend loads on me for my birthday and Christmas and they tell me what to do as well.

I can't fight two of them. And I feel guilty over it and was suicidal because of it, like I've got no control over anything.

It's not just at home either - it's visitors saying "is your Mam in?" like I'm about 10 years old! And at work when I was there.

I don't know how to make it stop.

Not like a child, but people my own age do treat me like I'm younger than they are, if they don't know me well enough to know my actual age. Although aging is catching up on me, none the less I still look younger than my age, and it makes people condescending to me even if they don't always mean it.

The other day an acquaintance was surprised when I revealed that I'm her generation, and I realized from this that she had always thought I wasn't and was "under" her somehow. She seemed shocked and was seeing me in a different light in the talk we had after that, I could tell.

It's annoying though, because "condescension" is the order of the day in what I experience from other people, and I never feel like the full years of my life and my experience of life is appreciated. My whole life I've been treated like the "youngster who doesn't know yet". Now that I finally "know" some things, I'm still not being taken seriously.

Well that's true, age is just a number and is not a real indication of how mature or immature, knowledgeable or ignorant, worldly and wise or foolish and naive a person might be. This is true.

But it's very dismaying when someone of your own age makes assumptions that, first of all, you must be younger, and then they base their attitude toward you on that assumption alone, and then secondly because "you're younger" (in their mind), they assume that you have nothing to offer because "automatically" you don't know as much as they do or you haven't had the experiences they've had -- in this case it was a very universal one: we were talking about menopause, and men, and relationship difficulties.

The woman I was chatting with, the one who expressed shock that in all the time she'd been acquainted with me she had thought I was younger than her, only then seemed to change the direction of the conversation based on actually discovering that I knew what I was talking about in terms of life experiences one could reasonably expect a person of that age to know something about.

It's the feeling of having to "prove," in a sense, that I knew what I was talking about, that annoyed me.

I mean, I'm glad she made the discovery that I'm not younger and not clueless about the specific things we were talking about, but at the same time I felt kind of pissed off that she had clearly had a wrong perception of me that made me "less than" in her eyes, rather than a generational peer.

Not so much now, perhaps because I've grown a beard and couldn't pass for a child under any criteria anymore. Up until my 30s or so, yes. It really used on get on my nerves.

people feeling the need to explain every little thing to you:

"did i ask you what that meant? no, i didn't. please stop answering questions i didn't ask."

Strange you should ask this question.
Before (certain) people at work found out I was on the autism spectrum, they treated me (almost) like everyone else... almost like an adult but since finding out, they do speak to me like I'm a child. And they're not wrong in doing so. I am very childlike/innocent like a child in mind.

Some may consider this to be rather condescending but I find it kind of endearing because I know it doesn't come from a bad place. It comes from a good place. A protective place.

But people have always treated me like a child (in a good way, almost protective).

I don't mind at all. In fact, I think that's why I've had this feeling of being special/different all my life.

Yes. All the time. Mostly, I like it because people make me less responsible for things, but I hate it that no one ever takes me seriously. I command absolutely no authority whatsoever, even in subjects or situations where I am the most proficient in the room.

I suppose because i am too nice to speak up and let people know that they are being condescending when they talk that way. I never reveal that i am on the spectrum, or i would've given them a reason to treat me this way in the first place.

No but I do get told pretty much all the time "oh really? you look so much younger" or "I thought you were ____". It's supposed to be a compliment but it makes me mad because it reminds me of how much I wish I was younger.

I'm 36 and people don't talk to me like a child. I didn't know Aspies were often subject to this.

Probably because I don't set anyone's Aspie alarm off (more evidence that I don't have Asperger's). Some people guess Tourette's, and a lot of them guess OCD. Some think I'm "just mentally ill".

YES!! !! My older sister treated me like a child. My mom passed away & she told my sister to look after me & be there for me, it's a long story. I'm just going say I don't get along too good with her.

[Adults: do people ever treat you like a child? [/quote]
i do not currently know any children, so i can not compare how people treat me with anything to do with children in my sensorium.

Ugh always , I have Aspergers Sydrome . I hate being talked to like a baby. But I'm not a baby , which the dumbest tho .

I am treated like a child by my parents and many people, including the employment setting.

I just ignore it now, its been going on for so long I am indifferent... People get upset when I tell them to stop doing it.

If you do it to me, I automatically then put you in the stupid category and treat you accordingly. My current boss is having kind of a hard time getting to grips with that..