Found this to be very disturbing, your opinions?

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I was looking something up and there was an ad for a "aspergers parent resource guide". I read the description and it seemed to have a very negative view of us, describing us as the cause of great distress in our parents and friends, and basically acting like our existence was nothing but a problem. Is this the message the description gives you all, or am I misreading the tone? What are your thoughts on this "guide"?
http://www.parentingaspergers.com/forpa ... QgodBlwAXw

it reminds me of the lehman "total transformation" program to deal with problem kids.

I wouldn't pay it much mind, it looks like an Internet scam...especially since they want money. They are just saying whatever they think will suck frustrated parents in. It does seem to pretty negative in nature.

This definitely makes AS sound way worse than it is. It makes it out to be entirely problematic without any good in it at all. I also hate it when people label my interests as "obsessions". This guy doesn't seem very sensitive.

It's written with pretty extreme wording, as a Briton I have a particular view on those type of Americanised shock! horror! websites as they tend more to the extreme than ours do.

Having said that, as a parent with AS with two children, who are both on the spectrum, there have been many times when I have felt highly stressed, highly despairing, and a whole range of other related emotions because of their behaviours. You don't go looking for advice over your child's good or acceptable behaviours, only the behaviours that are driving you crazy. This is what the website caters for (if a bit tackily).

It's a sad fact that often ASC behaviours in children are so extreme and so frequent that they do outweigh the good side of your child in how they make you feel, even if not in the volume, definitely in the negative impact it has on your emotional wellbeing and health as a parent.

As a child I was the passive subtype who was withdrawn, so hopefully I didn't have that type of impact on my parents.

my late parents considered having me institutionalized but found it was not affordable nor practical.

I skimmed it. Too much to read. I do see truth to it. having an aspie child can be so overwhelming. You can't punish them out of their behavior and expect them to just quit it. Just an example here for honesty is a bad thing, offends people and even aspies don't want to hear the truth how hard we can make it for our parents. I am sure I made it hard for mine and from the stories Mom has told me, I sounded like a difficult child and made things hard for everyone. It was just the way my mind worked and how I processed things and the black and white thinking I did made it hard for my parents. They also had to be careful how they explained things to me because I would get an idea in my head or miss the point of what they were teaching me.

Cry me a river. That is such crap. My little sisters are NT and they gave my mother way more trouble growing up than I ever did........

I'm sick and tired of all these supposed autism "advocacy" groups treating people on the spectrum as sub-human burdens and their families as saintly martyrs. Don't buy into it.........

I also find it very disturbing, but I'm also sad to say that it's very true that our parents see us that way. My parents were a somewhat harder on my NT sister because she didn't have any problems. I recall that from my own experience as a child and I see examples of it in department stores and when I see or hear young families walking past my window down below. It used to cause me flashbacks, but I keep myself grounded by reminding myself that was 25-30 years ago.

Perfection means the world to a lot of parents out there in the real world. I like the parents on here because I can relate to them and their children.

Last edited by CockneyRebel on 01 Mar 2013, 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd agree there was some truth to it, I know I made things more difficult for my parents, even though they did not know about the autism...both have acknowledged in their own ways they also made things more difficult for me but did their best. I think it goes a little too far with what it says about divorce I mean that is borderline blaming divorce on the child with autism when at best that's only a factor....I mean for the autistic with divorced parents it kind of re-enforces the 'it was my fault.' feelings though it's not entirely false either since the difficulties that come with it could contribute to tension leading to divorce but its likely there are many other factors as well. For instance my parents main problem was they didn't agree on their lifestyle...they got married when my mom didn't approve of my dad's more deviant lifestyle she did at first but she decided she was done with it and he didn't so conflict was bound to happen. I went to their wedding actually, maybe that says a lot lol.

What offends me about it is, it really does kind of reek of those 'work from home, make thousands' internet scams I get in my email from time to time.

I found the man who wrote the advertizement to be very disturbing, though. I find it disturbing that he could say such nasty things just to suck desperate parents into his web. I have this feeling on the inside that tells me, "Wow....my parents really did hate me."

That doesn't tend to work with NT kids, either, as I found out to my misery in my early years of babysitting.

Kids in general are a lot more complicated than punishment/reward. AS kids respond to punishment and rewards pretty much the same way that NT kids do - partially and inconsistently.

No wonder so many people support Autism Speaks. Between the article and Rain Man, it's a wonder that we're all still alive.

So?

If parents are unwilling to deal with the possibility of disabled children, they shouldn't have children in the first place. My sister was significantly more of a problem for my parents than I was, and my father was significantly more of a problem to everyone else than anyone else in the family.

I am not going to deny that I caused my parents frustration, but all children frustrate their parents. I am also not going to deny the fact that my parents' responses to me made things worse for me. I really dislike the whole one-sided narrative of how terrible it is to be a parent. It's an objectifying narrative that turns autistic children into irritating objects, and strips them of everything from agency to feelings to humanity,

I only read the first few lines (without even scrolling down the page) and knew it's a scam to get parents who don't know better and are desperate for a 'solution' to their AS children to buy their stuff. You can tell from the language and style they use. I won't take it seriously - you'll see many other similar ads on the internet about various other issues in life.

Last edited by WrongWay on 01 Mar 2013, 8:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Totally agree. It's not the childrens' fault if they're disabled, in fact they didn't even choose to be born so it's very much unreasonable to place the blame on them.