NT Children may exhibit Aspie traits?

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I was reading Tony Attwood (who is an NT with an Aspie father) and he said that NT children often show signs of Asperger's, but don't actually have it. I also read a lot about how children mistakenly perceive their Aspie parents as being abusive and cold etc and that they often begin to act like perfectionists and show some of the Aspie-OCD-like traits in order to please their parent/s and avoid criticism. This has made me question whether I am Aspie at all, and maybe that only my parents are and a couple of my siblings?

Is anyone here an NT with Aspie parents, and can you shed some light on how this is true for you?

Only a few more days till I start the diagnostic process, but now beginning to wonder if I may just present as an Aspie...

I believe ASD traits exist on a continuum.

In science, the Bell Curve describes distribution of traits across general human populations. It's a continuum that starts at one end with strong trait dominance and at tailing off to no trait dominance at the other. You could apply it to the distribution of ASD traits in the population as a whole. I don't think anyone has actually done this, though there is a possible Ph D in it waiting for some enterprising social scientist.

(Don't confuse this with Bell's Theorem, which is totally different and relates to physics).

Why do think it's called the Autistic SPECTRUM?

As per B19, I believe ASD traits exist on a continuum. Of course, there are NT's who exhibit autistic-type symptoms--including sensory overload. An NT's capacity to receive sensory input, on average, might be better than on the Spectrum--but everyone has a breaking point. Narrow interests are another NT "symptom" which I have commonly encountered. I've actually seen that quite frequently, especially within those who might be termed "NT nerds."

I think what's meant by NT children showing aspie signs is that AS traits show up in a normal distribution. All people have autistic tendencies, a tiny minority has enough to a severe enough extent that they fall within the spectrum.

I'm on the same page as you actually, where I question whether I actually have the communication challenges that characterize autism or I just underestimate my abilities due to being gaslighted (it's where abusers play head games until you think every bad interaction is due to some deficit of yours instead of the abusers). From online interactions with survivors, I've actually seen (and experienced) how abuse can leave people feeling different from others, with sensory sensitivities due to PTSD, socially anxious, with OCD or OCD tendencies, etc. I don't know where my mental illnesses end and autism potentially starts, sometimes.

Last edited by thirteenboats on 16 Jun 2014, 7:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's the thing, I don't think I have narrow interests, but recognise them in half my family. I have intense interests, but these change from one thing to another throughout my life. And my sensory overload issues could be attributed to childhood issues (my mother is hyposensitive to touch, so she touches things very hard, even bringing us great pain when having dressed us or brushed our hair for example. I think I may have an aversion to touch because of this.) I'm shy, but often I think this has been due to embarrassing situations involving my Aspie mother being very honest and NT children can be shy as well. I think it may have more to do with the thought processes behind the behaviour than the behaviour you exhibit, as someone may be shy for different reasons than someone else.

I do think that my mother is probably more affected than any other Aspie person in my family, but then I think if I am Aspie, I'd be the least affected. I'm not as honest as my Aspie family, and in fact don't have a problem with telling white lies. I don't know any other Aspie people apart from my family (that I know of) and from them I can tell that either I'm so High Functioning I can genuinely pass off as just a shy NT, or I am an NT. I do have a slow reaction time, mostly with people I don't know, but I get jokes and sarcasm. I sometimes struggle with facial expressions etc. but not to the same extent my Aspie family members do.

I understand that NTs may have Aspie traits as it's on a continuum and is a spectrum disorder, but NTs may have mental illnesses (which I've had since a child) that may make them have Aspie-like traits, as mental illness can cause cognitive deficiency, causing delays and other Aspie-like problems, but for very different reasons. Which is why I'm seeking opinions from NTs who have Aspie parents, to compare notes and see if I may have gotten it wrong. Of course, I will be finding out soon when I go see my Psych, and hopefully she can clear it up for me.

Yes - exactly what I'm talking about. I mean I like interacting with people, but often I'm unsure of what to say. But this could be due to bad socialisation as a child, since my family didn't exactly have too many people over.
I do think I've been gaslighted by my Aspie family (unintentionally of course) during discussions. Asperger's can often appear on the surface to be very much like Narcissism in certain individuals, my family included. Obviously there are different reasons behind it and they would never intentionally hurt me, but that's the thing, as an NT maybe I've never understood that? I know I used to wonder why my parents hated me so much one minute and seemed so loving the next. Often I did feel like hugs in my family were empty and meaningless, so maybe that's why I'm not really a fan of touch, and maybe it's not about sensory overload. So I don't know... It's hard to really know for sure. Hopefully the tests I do with the psych will help her evaluate this.

Some of the childhood symptoms/behaviours can be found in both Aspies and NT children but it's the duration and intensity and context which give the difference away. Eg, most children spin around at some point but a child who spins for hours, not acknowledging people, when feeling overwhelmed and distressed is different to one who spins for a few minutes giggling, when given a new skirt, dancing to music or playing a silly game with friends. Most Aspie parents are great parents and not cold or abusive at all and most of our children are happy and well adjusted and very well cared for. Stereotyping based on a minority and making generalisations is not helpful. You appear to have had an unusually bad experience and that's really sad but it's not the norm. Picking up a few habits to dodge conflict growing up is not going to be mistaken for meeting the full diagnostic criteria as an adult. It's just not. Any competent clinical psychologist or psychiatrist will be able to easily distinguish Autism from a handful of old adaptive behaviours in childhood. As with children, the intensity, duration and context are important as is the sheer number of symptoms present. A misdiagnosis of Autism is highly unlikely if you are at the very high functioning end - You are more likely to not be diagnosed when you are an Aspie than to be diagnosed when you're really NT. There is a line drawn for a reason - Those who meet the diagnostic criteria have a clinically significant impairment in our lives, those who exhibit a few similar characteristics but are not greatly impaired will not be diagnosed. Just try to step back and stop trying to do the assessor's job for them, they are trained to diagnose you or rule it out, let them do what they are being paid for. You'll know their findings soon enough.

ChameleonKeys - I'm sorry if I offended you with the comment in regards to some Aspie parents seeming cold or abusive. I did not mean to offend, and am not generalising, just trying to find out more. This is something I have read in regards to some parents, not all. I can't make a judgement on all Aspie parents as I only know 3 personally myself, and you are right, I have had an unusually bad experience with all 3 of them. Unfortunately, I don't really know any other Aspie parents that I can compare with, but hear that many can be warm and loving.

What I'm asking is if there are any NT children with parents like mine, who may appear Aspie, but aren't.

I know it is the role of the psych to evaluate me etc, but as you can probably understand, I would like to understand as much as I can before I go in, to prepare myself and also familiarise myself. Being that I'm also interested in psychology, I think you can probably understand that I enjoy analysing and deciphering and finding out as much as possible, which I hear Aspies do a lot with their interests (and I certainly do this too).

I have impairments in my own life which I'm unsure is a result of being Aspie, or being an NT with mental illnesses. Seeing as this is something I've experienced as a child, it is hard to decipher between the two, which is why I'm investigating.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12742874

http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/ ... thy-people

Thanks for posting those links. They are very interesting studies.

NTs may have autistic traits, and autistics may have NT traits.

There is another point in this thing "Autistic traits in general population":

several studies have shown that, in general population, autistic traits are largely independent of each other (there is not a significant association between RRBI and social and communication impairments, and even between social and communication - apparently, very related things - problems the correlation is small).

Then, makes sense to talk about having "autistic traits" if someone have, lets say, some communication problems but not any visible social problems or RRBI? Or we should reserve the concept of "autistic traits" for people who have (even if in a subclinal level) autistic symptoms in all subdomains?

After all, can be argued that, if autism is a "triad of impairments", if someone as autistic-like traits in one area but not in the others, this autistic-like traits are not really "autistic traits", having probably a cause different from the cause that creat this symptoms in autistic individuals; and even other point - if the several dimensions of autism are, in general population, independent of each other, a general "index of autistic traits", calculated adding the several possible autistic symptoms (like Baron-Cohen's AQ), will have a Bell distribution almost by default - if you add several variables who are independent of each other, usually the new composite varible has a Bell distribution.

I can remember when one of my NT cousins was 3, I was quite a lot older than him and was round his house one day. He took me out into the garden and showed me his new slide his parents had got him for his birthday. Then he kept on wanting to climb up the steps and slide down, again and again and again. I was 9 at the time, and I grew quite bored of the repetitive game, but he loved it and was going up the steps and sliding down for ages. Then he wanted me to watch him, which got even more boring than actually sliding down as many times as he was. He didn't seem to get tired at all, even though he had the choice of loads of other toys in the garden to play with. And that's not the only repetitive behaviour I have seen in an NT child. When my NT brother was 2 he used to watch Thomas the Tank Engine over and over and over, until the video got too worn out to even be able to watch it any more. Luckily by then he was a bit older and wasn't into Thomas the Tank Engine so much, but I bet he missed that video for a couple of years or so and would have probably carried on watching it if it hadn't of got worn out. And when my next door neighbour's little boy was 4, he used to hide behind his mum when anybody approached him and not want to make eye contact or speak, even when he's mum encouraged him to. He grew out of it though, and he's older now and is very NT.

The way I see it, Aspie traits in NTs aren't actually labelled as ''Aspie traits'', only to us if we look too closely at the behaviour of an NT.