Parents that make no effort to understand

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I've talked with my mother about this, and she believes I have AS (from the little she knows about it), but refuses to take any time to understand it. She doesn't like to read, so I couldn't possibly give her a book on AS. My grandmother is too wrapped up in her own little world of Farmtown, Bible Study and romance novels to care about it. Talking to my father is out of the question cos he's hardly a father, and more like the party dad.

I finally find out the reason for so much of who I am and what I deal with, and despite the fact that my family acknowledges the issue, they take no initiative to truly understand it so that they can learn how to talk to me without me getting irritated or angry.

Anyone else dealing with this type of nonsense?

My parents don't want to understand AS, either, but they don't really believe I have it at all.

I worry about telling my family because growing up, while they provided everything I "needed," I often felt that they didn't like the inconvenience of things they didn't plan for. So, I didn't tell them about a lot of bad things that were done to me because I felt they would be angry at me because I did something wrong. Why else would I not be like every other child?

I think a lot of parents just want their kids to behave and be normal, and they don't want to cope with anything that deviates from that.

On one hand I was quite lucky. My mum was the one who, along with myself, belived I had AS and TS. She fought endlessly to get me diagnosed to get some help along with the man who is now my Step-dad. My real dad on the other hand was not so sympathetic. As far as he was concerned, I was just a naughty child in need of a little 'good old fashioned parenting' in other words, spanking. He was angry about people saying I had AS and would shout at them if they did. When we discovered I might have tourettes as well (it's hard to deny when you are twitching, howling and cussing) my dad freaked out. He was saying that I was faking it for attention and then that I was copying it off Pete Bennett (who was on a series of Big Brother), however if he'd bothered to read about TS he'd have realised that a common symptom is to 'pick up' or mimic other tics. I wish that parents wouldn't deny things like this, but sometimes they just need a bit of time to come to terms with it. My Dad, although not perfect (he still thinks I'm going to get better) is no longer so angry about my conditions.

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

I used to avoid going to my mom with problems when I was young. I didn't think she cared, nor did I want to make her angry. Now I'm a mom and have since gained a whole new perspective on things. I care about my kids more than I can express into words, as the overwhelming majority of parents do. I always want to know what's troubling them and want to help them in any way I possibly can. It's my job and I'm honored to have it.

Parents are not perfect, at all. Sometimes we get easily frazzled by the day-to-day stresses and can seem rather grumpy. Sometimes our kids can mistake this for being a result of something they did, which it rarely is. As parents, we often need to do a better job of being more approachable.

Maybe they're just not sure how to talk to you about it. I know my son is very sensitive and can be easily embarrassed. Maybe they think that you don't want to talk about it. They probably don't understand the magnitude to which it affects you. I'm not trying to make excusses for them, but maybe you could explore other possibilities as to why they haven't taken the initiative. Perhaps you could try giving them the benefit of the doubt and talk to them about how you truly feel. It's impossible for them to read your mind, even if they had read all of the books.

As a sidenote, the less normal my kids are - the more proud I am!

Parents, unfortunately, come with their own baggage, and their own strengths and weaknesses. If they don't enjoy books, perhaps they enjoy chatting on forums. Or maybe they believe it can be worked out by talking. The problem, of course, is when the parent's personal limitations and yours run head on into each other and make serious communication difficult or impossible.

But do understand that they probably care and want to understand, and may not be as disinterested as they seem. It could be an issue of timing, or an issue of method. Don't give up; try a different tack. And if none of that works, see what you can do within your own little world to find their ways of trying to communicate with you less irritating.

I have to confess, I know that both my kids are extremely frustrated with me, but I don't know what to do about it. I am losing my hearing and can't understand half of what they say, and my son prattles on about things I have little patience for or interest in. In a place like this, all the issues I have with communication fade away; that is probably why I get so drawn to the internet. It is just, for me, so much easier. But I really hate to think that someday they will be posting as you have, thinking that I don't want to understand ... I have actually worked hard to understand, and its why I'm here, but everything looks different from the child's perspective, and there isn't much any parent can do about that, its just the way its always been.

My father doesn't want to understand. I guess my mother tries, but with very bad results. That's why I try to hide everything about myself from them.

My mother doesn't even try to understand, and won't listen to anything I tell her. My father at least will listen, although his opinions tend to get poisoned by my mother, who just makes up her own mind and ignores everything else. She just wants to "fix" me, her way.

DW_a_mom wrote something very important, I think.

In my case, I have encountered the same problem at the beginning, but came to see it very differently now.

The possibility of me having autism was hard to grasp for my family who only wanted me to be happy and healthy. When they started to accept the idea, they did not want to know as much as I had wanted to learn about it. It was an uncomfortable situation and I was concerned that they rejected this huge part of me for not jumping right in and doing what I did to learn about everything on autism in reach.

With time then, I understood that actually, they were interested and wanted to know more, because they were interested in me which automatically confronts them with my disorders. They just couldn't do what I did because they weren't like me, they were different, unique people.

And slowly then, they made remarks about wanting to know something, about feeling left out but wanting in. So I gave them something to read, simple but lengthy. I wondered if they had questions and would now talk about, but they didn't. I was okay with that, because I knew that they had wanted to learn about it and I had by now learnt that all people didn't follow my way.

So yes, I would like to talk about it a lot with them, but I'm okay with not doing it, because I know they handle it their way. I'm there to take part in that. They watch TV stuff about PDDs, they seem to think about it too, because sometimes they make a remark about autism or special skills out of the blue and they are a little more comfortable with neurological disorders. I'm happy with how the family handles this.

It's not how I want it to be, but nothing ever is and I too am not want people want me to be. I got to get along with that everybody's doing their own thing somehow, allowing people to connect to me in their way, reacting to it emphatically to not push them away, though my autism makes that real hard. Empathy really isn't my thing.

I don't think my dad understands, though he doesn't really talk about it much. My mom knows I have Asperger's but goes from one extreme to the other in how she approaches it. She keeps saying she's trying to help, but she badgers the heck out of me with a million questions that I HATE answering. She pesters me about my weight, my future, everything.

And she wants to blame my social problems on a stuffed toy fish that I sometimes carry in the sleeve or pocket of my coat...that I got in 1992.

I can definitely sympathize with parents that don't understand completely. As much as I don't like to admit this because she drives me absolutely insane, my mother does care about me. She just has no ability to understand the problems and difficulties that I go through almost on a daily basis. She never thought to help me and think that there might be a problem when I started showing all the symptoms of AS. But then again I didn't either, but I genuinely never thought there was a problem until I really started looking it up and trying to figure it out after I became so depressed about it.

My family, with one exception, seems to ignore all medical information related to me. My parents are old enough that memory lapses are not uncommon, and probably augmented by their desire to have "normal" children, that is to say a child who does not require work but instead improves the family image.

Others in my family started ignoring or avoiding me years before my formal diagnosis, since I was obviously not normal at all even from a very young age.

Yeah, my parents just think that I'm either being difficult or that if I have some sort of condition, it's something more curable/less permanent. I think they just don't want me to struggle the way I do, and if I have AS, I'll always be this way.

Mine think I have it because I like it, and that it's my fault. If I want to get better, I wil get better.