Looking back to your childhood...

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What do you wish your parents had done differently when parenting you as a young child? Is there something you think would have made a world of difference in your relationship with your parents? What is something specific you wished they had understood better? What made you the most happy in your childhood? What is something that made you feel and know your parents loved and valued you as a person? What do you think is the most helpful way for a parent to deal with their AS child's "challenging" behaviour that they don't understand?

I want so very much to be a good mother to my son with AS. I want him to feel safe and happy and loved. I want us and our home to be the safe harbour because I know the world will be hard for him. But sometimes I feel like I'm failing at this in many respects. I know some of this is normal parenting guilt but it seems like my failures with my son affect him more deeply than they would an NT child. Like when I lose my temper (happens too often) or when I don't deal well with his behaviour that I know is because of AS. He has a memory like a steel trap and his scars run deep.

It's helpful to read the experiences of adults who grew up with AS but I find there is so much pain caused by parents who didn't understand. (I was just reading the thread about emotional abuse ) I hope if some of you can think about and answer the above questions, it will really help me in going in the right direction. I know I understand my son better than if I didn't know he has AS (and I have a lot in common with him), but I'm far from perfect when it comes to dealing with the challenges. It's almost every day that I regret something that happened with my boy and feel so terrible for him to have to deal with ME.

[I was going to post this in the parenting forum, but I thought it would make more sense to post here because I don't want to hear from parents of AS kids, I want to hear from adults with AS who can recount their childhood experiences]

Thanks.

The four A's: attention, affection, approval, acceptance. These are the parental building blocks for a child's emotional well-being.

I think it's important to encourage special interests. They can be a huge source of pleasure and self-esteem. They can also lead to a satisfying job later in life.

I also think that comparing a child with ASD to other children can be enormously destructive to self-esteem.

Accepting them for who they are rather than trying to make them normal through training them like a dog. I've encountered Aspies like this and it really doesn't work. NTs will always think there's something different about us and acting "normal" can be more off-putting than being yourself.

I wish my parents had not treated me like a piece of human trash to be discarded as a young child.

As an older child I wish they had not been so abusively dismissive of me as ret*d, even when I was the most sensible voice in the room.

But then I realize even if I had been NT my parents were incredibly cruel and selfish/self centered. I recalled my dad berating me after I became verbal because I did not know what was going on in some central american countries at the time like civil war, I told my wife this and she was aghast saying even the brightest normal child would have no clue WTF was wrong with your father.

I wish they didn't view me as someone who's inferior to society. My dad viewed me as broken and disabled, he viewed me as the child who will never work, never marry and live at home until he dies. And, he treated me as such. I was never expected to do homework, learn responsibility - and, I can't fault them because growing up I neither wanted to be responsible or do homework, but I was also never pushed for either. I wish they had viewed me with potential to be a successful and happy person, I wish they made more effort to guide me into adulthood.
Some discipline.. I think.. well, perhaps I'm at fault - but my parents seemed to be genuinely afraid to discipline me because of a risk of a meltdown. They catered to my behavior so I wouldn't have such meltdowns, and I grew up learning to manipulate that to my advantage. A little discipline is actually good for someone. In the long run I suppose it's my own fault though.

I guess it's not something easily understood but the 10 year old version of me screaming incoherent curse words at my mom, calling her names or telling her I hope she dies, aren't genuine. That's a meltdown, a sensory overload. It's more than an average tantrum, it's not just anger and it's not at all something in my control (at the time.)

Just doing the things I loved doing and more importantly, having someone to do them with.

They were always there when I needed them, if I couldn't make it through school or just needed someone to answer the phone.

To remember that a meltdown or a sensory overload is usually not in their control. The screaming, the punching of walls, it's not always in their control, and it's not something they're proud of doing or even want to do. But to also remember that these are things that both can and will happen.

The best thing my parents could have done to have improved my life immeasurably and which effects would have formed a person more able to cope with adult life, would have been for them to put me in a Children's home far earlier than at the age of 5.
The next best thing they could have done was to leave me in the Children's home until I grew up, not take me back at age 8 for even worst abuse and neglect then they had exposed me to before.

When I was a child I used to feel sorry for my school friends who never experienced the safety of a Children's Home and had to spend all their time living with their parents.

My parents were excellent parents, and anything I could say to suggest improvement given the options they had at the time would be extremely picky.

Some things that other people mentioned, like proper discipline and encouraging special interests, were things that my parents did. My parents never treated me like I was weird or incapable.

I grew up before Aspergers/HFA were considered part of the Autism spectrum, so all the issues I had were kind-of blown off by both my teachers and parents. I wish that my social and organizational difficulties at school were picked up on by teachers and reported to my parents, but no one was thinking that way back then. They only cared that I was getting good grades, and since I was, there were no problems. (haha)

Because of that, all my EF difficulties were due to my being "irresponsible and lazy", and all my meltdowns were due to being "disrespectful." Now, I am not saying I was *never* any of these things, but I was a good kid overall. It really, really hurt to have my character cut down by my parents in this way. But they didn't have any other way of looking at the world. No one suspected that there was something else going on.

Also, I think (again, because I was smart) that everyone expected me to be good at everything. This caused me to be very stressed about a lot of things and made me overwork in areas that really meant nothing to me. My special interest (music) could actually lead to a career, so I wish that I hadn't had so much else competing with it, all these difficult school subjects that I had to do just because I was smart and that was what was expected.

But, my parents weren't musicians and my music teachers really didn't get involved in making suggestions/giving guidance. So, I don't blame my parents. They could only do what they knew how to do.

Based on my experience, I would say
Be gentle.
Don't assume the cause of a behavior is a negative attitude
Learn about your child's special interest as much as possible
Continue to get guidance from others - and ask for it, like you have here, instead of expecting teachers and others who are supposed to know things to just step in and help without being asked.

I wish my parents listened to me and my problems, instead of helping me they just let me deal with everything and it ended up hurting me in the long run.

My parents are great, but the only thing I wish they had done is encourage me to do things for myself at an appropriate age, so I wouldn't be THAT much behind. Also, I wish they'd told me about my diagnosis earlier.

Identify the "islands of competence", and play to your child's strengths:

https://reclaimingjournal.com/sites/def ... Brooks.pdf

I wish mine were more helpful to me. Most of the time they just left me to my own devices. Outside of asking me every day, "How was your day?" and me responding, "Fine." they really didn't talk to me much. In general they never seemed really interested in my life unless it directly involved them or their image.

I could have tried talking to them, but it always felt mechanical. I couldn't talk to them about anything I liked or thought was important, because they didn't, and made that fact pretty clear.

There were a lot of things that they did for the other kids that they didn't do for me. They made me feel like I was messed up in the head because of living most of my childhood with my oh-so-terrible mother.

They usually weren't directly mean (my step mom was very passive aggressive towards me), but they made me feel like I didn't matter to them. I have basically no connection to them as a result. They think my emotional distance is because I don't like them, or that I don't want them to talk to me. But the reason is that they don't listen to me. They don't like me as I am, they want me to be different, and it's not possible.

Adjust your expectations so that you are not disappointed with your child's way of interacting and emotionally responding. My mother still only realizes how much goes on under my cold exterior. She used to think I didn't care.

Don't try to modify your child's behaviour traits unless they are in conflict with civil behaviour. Be accepting of stims and inappropriate eye contact.

Don't demand that your child speak. Sometimes there is nothing to say.

Don't set your child up for failure by insisting that they participate in activities others enjoy, but they don't. Support what does interests them even if it is not social in nature.

Remember that sounds, voices and movement are likely hard for your child to process and this can lead to confusion and distress.

Read: "Square Peg" by L. Todd Rose. Available on kindle and in hardcover from Amazon. A wealth of information for parents by a man who grew up neuro-atypical and now teaches at Harvard, very important information on what kind of schooling he needed and did not get, and what the solutions are to that.

Probably the best thing my biological mother did was put me up for adoption when I was 2 weeks old. Had she kept me, growing up in a single parent home in Chicago in the 60s, I probably would have grown up in poverty and not had the opportunities I did.

Now for my adoptive parents. I wish my father didn't always point out how other people did stuff better than me. It seemed that nothing I did was good enough for him, until I finally graduated with a Ph.D because no one in even the extended family had done that and he only finished with a Master's degree.

I wish they had also continued to seek therapy for me. They took for me a while because they school district made them, but maybe if I had found a therapist I could bond with and who truly could see what was going on with me, things might have turned out differently for me.

I will say this, though, I gave my parents many reasons to want nothing to do with me, and they never disowned me, so that is pretty special, I guess.

In hindsight, I seriously wish my parents had considered some form of alternative schooling. I understand that my parents didn't have an internet connection until 2005 (and growing up in poverty wasn't exactly helping matters), but it would have done A LOT. At least from middle school-present.

My reasoning: because of my treatment by the school environment. Because I was diagnosed (or was assumed to have) autism, I wasn't treated like a normal child. The teachers pretty much knew about it, and most of my treatment I had received from SpED teachers was that of a robot (or "drilling"). I was constantly given assistant teachers in classes, as well. In hindsight, a lot of these decisions were probably ill-advised, if not harmful to my development. Perhaps the "dumbing down" was actually meant to be a less abrasive form of trying to teach me the basics of life and be a respectful child, given that I had issues with authority (now most of my issues with authority aren't due to autism; they're developed due to treatment).

The bullying affected me in a way that still affects me today, and has given my post-traumatic stress disorder, and made what was already unbearable social anxiety into something even more pronounced. People called me names, excluded me, extorted me, physically hit me, just literally every move and trick in the book. None of it was a pleasant experience. So much torment and exclusion, and perhaps jealousy from my perception that no one had it as bad as I did, has lead to so much anger built up, and perhaps has given me a biased view of NTs.

In things not related to autism, I wish my parents fed me well. It turns out that I have a lot of food sensitivities and that's run havoc on my body (especially in the form of acne, which has brought it's own set of problems), they pretty much fed me crap. If I'd had a diet of fruits, veggies, some grains, etc and my family had known my food sensitivities, I'd be in a lot better shape. On the bright side, I'm not obese (like my brother; I'm actually skinny), and I'm very conscious of what I eat, so I'm in good future shape at the very least.

If I could suggest only one thing to parents of autistic children...it would be to remember that autism is highly heritable. Look at yourself (and your partner, your parents, etc.) to see if you have autistic traits and tendencies as well. Many parents of autistic children find out that they themselves are autistic.

An undiagnosed parent who hasn't come to terms with their own autism may project a lot of issues on to their child.

And in any case if a parent can see more similarities between themselves and their child, it promotes acceptance of those traits within the family as a whole, rather than distancing the child as being alien or different.