Aspies: Would you/do you have children?

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Interesting post, Garyww.

Where you say:

, and even



, your comments could be seen (for obvious reasons) as supporting the view of the ppl u described here:



Maybe parenting coaches (a mushrooming prefession here in the UK!) should try and work out how to get aspies to successfully parent NT adolescents-?



My take on this is that is that aspies who develop a genuine interest in some purely mechanical aspect of the world and then (not being severely autistic) use it to develop a career are indeed neither a curse/burden nor deficient from the point of view of a whole society.

I am concerned not to pass on my version of my condition, because my complete lack of interest in physical objects has prevented me from using my 'aspie' intelligence, to the point where I have spent most of my energy developing my social awareness. I'm only now (aged 29) starting to put a proper career plan into effect, and this is in working with people with learning disabilities; I wouldn't know whether I can become a music therapist / 'special needs' teacher, as is my goal, since I was diagnosed as an adult and therefore can't say I'm no longer clinically affected by my AS.

Anyone who is likely to have contributed an obvious net loss to the economy and who hasn't experienced a reasonable about of fulfilment by the end of their lives shouldn't be having kids, at least not unless they find that opposites attract. This is a moral issue for me; I'm thinking of the well-being of every1 involved.



That's the great insight of 'postmodernism' IMO - The knowledge that there are even more realities than there are minds, with only their isolation and atomization held in common on an absolute level - There can be no understanding of or belonging to an over-arching sum of all reality.

Old values of community, cohesiveness, and unity are blown apart by modernity and - with the absence of significant overlaps in the nature of NT and AS experience - finally obliterated by autism. Any1 who values the kind of useless but emotionally-appealling ideas I've described would be expected to push for a cure for autism.



Evolution - the reason why we're not technically slimeballs - depends on the absence of reproduction among the weaker members of a species, which IMHO is why so many female aspies are asexual and so many poorer male aspies single. I grant that Bill Gates, aspie or not, is clearly not one of the weaker members of our species , but it's only the strong that exist in order to reproduce. This means that severely autistic ppl are not relevant to the grand scheme of things, i.e. evolution by natural selection, unless autism charities start bankrupting economies trying to 'help' them . I'm sorry if I sound heartless, but we know on reflection that this is how the universe works; we could make it sound nicer by adding that the weak exist in order to serve the strong, although that could end up medieval

I don't know if I would raise a child successfully. But I sure as heck wouldn't pass on my autistic genes to offspring. That would be extremely selfish not to mention burdensome to the gene pool. I would adopt instead.

My basic assumption about life is that even if we are mindless masses of slime we owe it to some as yet unborn entity to bring it forth if we can on the outside possiblity that the resulting life is something that has the potential of being 'incredible'.

I'm very sorry that you feel you've been a net loss to the national economy or that you feel you will not become whole until you get a 'real' career as I personally think neither of these two conditions are very important with respect to who you are as a person. To me you seem perfectly fit to be a parent and in fact a good one considering how deeply you think and feel about things in general.
We both know that it is extremely unlikely your specific conditions, especially your specific feelings about it all, will be transmitted to your children.

Not sure what you mean there. People may see aspies as 'incredible' given that we each appear to have a conscious mind but no 'self'



To quote Patrick Bateman - 'The inside doesn't matter'

Except that if every1 turned out to be a net loss to the economy (because of how their insides determined their outsides), the human race wouldn't stick around for long.



You haven't met me. To continue a fictional tangent, Virginia Woolf was thinking of my sort when she paraphrased Socrates: 'The over-examined life cannot be lived at all'. In any case, I wouldn't really want to raise children



I don't know that, since I'm not a scientist, let alone a geneticist; the general public tend to assume, from whatever scientific conclusions they've heard of, that most of their 'specific condition' is transmitted to their children. As I hinted though, it depends who you have children with

I'm sorry but I have a hard time interpretting the way the posts come thru with so many panels and colors so bear with me.

I don't think that the 'incredible life form' would be autistic. It could be NT, or something else. That doesn't enter into my thinking

I did not understand your last two statements. Sometimes I can't communicate since I'm not smart enough to understand what the other person is saying. I try. I think I know what you're saying but I'm not sure.
In general I'm not disagreeing with your individual position but just trying to understand it better. Bear with me.

I have one biological child (my 16-year-old NT daughter) and three grown stepchildren. I absolutely love being a mom, even though it has been challenging. It's challenging for everyone, AS or NT, and anyone who says it isn't can't be paying much attention to what they're doing.

I wasn't diagnosed with AS till recently, but I'm an abuse survivor and I did a lot of recovery work before I had a child. It was important to me that I be as emotionally healthy as possible, and I'm glad I waited till I was 34. The only thing I regret is not having had more children. In my next lifetime, I'd like to have 12.

I don't think AS is any kind of deficit when it comes to raising a child. In fact, for me, it is an asset. I have always verbalized my thoughts and feelings to my daughter, and encouraged her to verbalize her own thoughts and feelings as well. Many children do not have any kind of emotional or spiritual language, and my daughter has both to a very high degree. She is kind, loving, inclusive, funny as all hell, very intelligent, very creative, and very much her own person. I homeschooled her for eight years, and her transition to regular schooling has gone very well. When I told her about the AS diagnosis, she was cool with it. Her friends all love me because I'm completely off-beat, and that seems to work well with teenagers. I've always enjoyed her friends, many of whom have considered our home a "safe house" for various reasons.

The thing about having a kid is that however much you prepare, there are ways you grow up and things you learn from having a kid that don't come about any other way. I am a completely different person than I used to be, and much closer to the kind of person I used to dream of being. So if you're thinking about having a kid, it's good to wait and get some maturity, but having the child also creates beautiful changes, so don't get all perfectionistic about it beforehand, because it takes all the fun out of it.

I wouldn't care if my children had autism as long as they had above average or higher IQ's and were exceptional in academics.

I have never liked kids, and never wanted kids of my own. I personally perceive my Asperger's as a detrimental shackle on my life. It may have given me certain niceties, but its like being born with such a crick in your neck that your head is permanently slanted 90 degrees to the left. Its cool seeing the world on its side but it makes life a LOT more difficult.

I cannot begin to express the ineptitudes and emotional difficulties that I have experienced at the hands of AS, and I won't patronise you all by going into it coz you all know full well exactly what I mean.

So with all that said, how can I justify bringing another life into this already over-populated world with the same defect? How can I justify bringing yet another child into this world when this planet is ALREADY overpopulated with millions of unwanted children with no love, no homes and no food. I say take care of the children that are already here first, THEN think about squeezing out more.

I admit many times throughout my life I have cursed the very day I was born. Being permanently several steps behind everyone else. Suffering 24/7 the debilitating symptoms of this condition. Yes there is joy in my life now. But no more than any NT who may be in my exact position.

I'm not a savant in any way, I have nothing but weaknesses. The only trade off is my deep passions for the things in my life and the things I see in this world which cause me even more ineptitudes.

I rant passionately about TV shows like the X-Factor and how fake it is and how blatantly orchestrated is and I get shouted at and told to shut up. The voice AS has been given to me is being constantly silenced by people who don't wish to face my intensity.

And the idea that I could have brought a life into this world with the exact same problems as me, well that idea sickens me. If that child didn't already curse me with every breath I would curse myself for conceiving it.

In a much more light-hearted way I say to people "One of me is bad enough". Its coz I'm precuring an act of ALTRUISM. The selfless act of remaining a childless man. People say to me so many times: "You'll change your mind."

No. I never will. And I know this may sound very pessimistic, but that is how I feel about the issue. By all means feel free to discuss with me what I have written, but my mother always said to me when I was growing up: "You're unique Adam. There never has been anyone like you in the world ever, and there never will be anyone like you after you die."

it depends who I end up with

How can you be so self-hating as to think that we shouldn't have the privilege of existing from an evolutionary perspective? I have Asperger Syndrome and I'm not weak, submissive, or asexual. I am making a 4.0 GPA and plan on taking the MCAT within the next 2 years. Once I receive my bachelor's, I plan on applying to at least 20 schools and will even go so far as to consider a Caribbean school. I was born to rise above. I was reading college medical textbooks in the 5th grade and yearned to be a doctor since I was a young girl. After a period of depression, I now returned to my old passions; science and medicine. My verbal, mathematical, logical, and scientific intelligence has made up for my social deficits associated with AS.

I agree in that the weak/strong thing was kind of mixed up as to who was really who and Bill Gates in my opinion would not most likely be on the the top of gene pool list of mother natures.

Never. I was hell as a kid, and hell + possible AS in MY kid?! That would be hell.

Funnily enough, my daughter is 22, she's in the territorial army (a bit like the reserves) and married to a guy in the regulars who she might while training.

We've had ups and downs also, but things are better again now.

I'd love to meet someone and settle down and have children, start all over again.

Being Aspie isn't a problem for me.