Malika, I can perhaps also answer that as I have adults in my family who are on the spectrum.
The vision of the child rocking in the corner was the one that I knew from my childhood reading, and the one that terrified me. But it is far less common than you would think, and also is not necessarily a static situation. All children grow and change, learning as they go. Autistic children are certainly no exception.
The old fallacies were that autistic children choose to secede from the world, almost as if they disapprove of it. They were claimed to be emotionally barren, have no sense of connection with anybody and no desire to connect. I have learned just how wrong this is - autistics feel emotion very keenly, often to a painful extent. But they don't always display it in ways we recognise. The 'flat affect' or lack of expression in voice and face, is fairly common especially in younger autistics. This I suspect is what has misled people in the past to think that these people feel nothing. Such a hurtful assumption!
Autism is a disorder of social skills and communication.
My observations - in my family those with autism tend to be very law-abiding, almost to a fault. How can obeying the law be a fault? When you don't fight for your rights. For example, husband got a speeding ticket and his first reaction was, "I didn't think I was going that fast, but the camera said I was so I'll just pay the fine."
I have gone over it with him and pointed out that I happened to be watching the speedo at that point, as we both knew that it was a speed trap, and I know that he did not go over the limit. And certainly not by the amount the authorities claimed. husband has taken a lot of convincing that the camera could be wrong. We've since been independently told that this particular speed camera is often wrong. We also went over it and realised - at the time the camera said we were speeding, we were driving uphill, heavily laden, and had only just turned onto the highway so would not have been up to speed.
But husband's initial reaction is to believe what authorities have told him and to act accordingly.
Hypothetical example - we are at a street vendor's stall and they are giving away free samples. There is a sign (or someone has said) "Only one per person." Even if other people are stuffing their faces, husband, difficult child 1 and difficult child 3 will only take one. In fact, they may even try to compensate for other people taking too much, by taking just one sample and sharing it around the family, so six of us get a smaller taste but only one sample goes around six.
How did this come about, form the earlier days of a screaming kid who could not be pacified and who could not understand how other people felt? It happened because in each case, a lot of work has gone in to trying to understand how society works. And contrary to what people used to think, much of tat work is done by the autistic individual themselves. But they need help, or they can sometimes feel so discouraged that they want to give up.
There can be problems if a law-abiding autistic person gets in with the wrong crowd. They want to please others. they want to do what the rules say. As a result, they are at risk of being easily led and manipulated. difficult child 1's last job was exploitative; he was at the end working without any pay, even though his boss was being given a government allowance to financially support difficult child 1's apprenticeship. The boss had not filled in the paperwork for the apprenticeship to continue, either. difficult child 1 stuck it out for several months before his friends and his wife convinced him to walk away.
The Sixth Sense program is worth looking up. I was privileged to be present when it was presented to difficult child 3's class when he was 8. it was a way of explaining to kids about autism. difficult child 3 needed to understand as well. The point made - all our senses are what we are born with. We help people who for whatever reason, are having difficulties with any of the senses. If you are deficient, you need to find other ways of doing things. The sixth sense is the social sense and the program explores the sort of problems a person has, when they lack the social sense to any degree. And it is often a matter of degree.
Temple Grandin wrote a book called "An Anthropologist on Mars" because she said that is how you feel - as if you are on the outside looking in; you don't belong but want to, so you study human behaviour in order to best imitate it and blend in. As you get older, you get more skilled. I did note that difficult child 1 had an extreme fascination for animal behaviour; he studied birds especially. We have lots of wild parrots in our backyard and difficult child 1 would feed the white cockatoos (much to the annoyance of our neighbours!) and studied them closely. When we had to stop feeding the cockatoos, difficult child 1 started watching the Rainbow Lorikeets. By this time he was doing volunteer work at he local zoo and would often try to imitate the bird sounds. That is when his autism became both a blessing and a curse - his intense concentration meant he could observe fine detail and imitate it fast. But his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (part of the autism) meant he couldn't STOP! So for months, he went around making noises like a male emu's mating call, and complaining that he couldn't stop. It became a tic.
Tics and stimming - the world can be a confusing noisy upsetting place, especially for the younger autistics. Some repetitive actions or sights or textures can be reliably soothing. The hand flapping, for example (they don't all do it) is thought to actually soothe the brain, to calm them down. It's a flickering effect of light through the spread fingers that is thought to do it. But difficult child 3 never flapped his hands. Instead, he discovered (at only a week old) that looking at the flicker of light through the trees would work for him. We noted his fascination with trees form his first exposure. It got so every afternoon I had to take him for a short walk and he would turn his head to look at the setting sun through the trees. I had to be carrying him, not have him in the stroller. I found he wanted me to face one way, not another. Fourth baby, so I was used to 'reading' what a baby wanted. He was always very sure of what he wanted, from his first days even while we were still in hospital. What he wanted was odd indeed - double feeds. The nurses couldn't believe it, a newborn who would stay awake for two hours, have two feeds in that time, then sleep for six hours! At three days old!
You do well (superficially) with autistic kids, if you give them exactly hat they want. But they need to learn to be adaptable, and giving them only what they want does not challenge them. So you learn, as a parent, to walk a fine line between challenge, and security/sameness.
Temple Grandin has described autism as "an overdose of genius". She has said that autistics have in large measure, what in small measure would produce genius. There does seem to be a correlation between high IQ in the family somewhere, and autism. And how often have we known really bright people who were just a bit off centre? I used to work in a university, and I tell you that a lot of my colleagues were nuts or eccentric in some way. One professor screamed at me for daring to send him a memo instead of a letter. he actually rang my mentor (a more senior professor) at 3 am to scream at him about me too. But the man was a brilliant, entertaining lecturer on his pet topics. I developed a grudging respect for his brilliance when I studied his course. His boss, my mentor, was also eccentric - he loved Latin, to a ridiculous extent. I found myself needing to bone up on Latin and the classics in order to be able to understand a lot of the references. I used the word "decimated" once to my mentor and found myself being corrected in minute detail and told exactly what the word means and why. The modern usage is different. I won't go into it now. by the way, husband also could lecture anybody on the origin and meaning of the word "decimated". Maybe he and my old professor read the same classics! They would have got along brilliantly.
Universities are like a refuge for Aspies and high-functioning autistics. When your colleagues are eccentric, you are more understanding and they in turn are often more accepting of others' differences. But what constitutes "high-functioning"? Temple Grandin, as a child, would not have been described as high functioning. I have been told that if someone is verbal, they are high-functioning. But difficult child 3 was non-verbal and still had significant language delay when he started school at age 5, yet he could easily read the class student list aloud. He was often asked to read the roll. He could fix the class computer. He was learning to follow verbal instructions, but some concepts were still beyond him (such as "why" and "how").
We were given pessimistic forecasts for both our boys, but both have surpassed expectations. Who knows what an individual can achieve?
There have been times when my kids behaved in fairly typical autistic fashion. A casual observer might have dismissed them at that stage. An example I often give, is of the first run I gave to our new front-loader washing machine. We had only ever had a top loader before. The new machine arrived, we unpacked it ,set it up and I got some washing going. Then an hour later (the cycle is long - two hours!) I couldn't find the boys. They were in the laundry, sitting in front of the washing machine, heads tilting this way and that in time with the clothes in the little window. difficult child 1 said, without changing what he was doing or even looking up, "I don't know why, but I find this strangely compelling."
They then got the empty box, cut a small window in the side (leaving the cardboard there so the window could be closed like shutters), filled it with cushions, climbed in and played their computer games, peering at the TV monitor through the little window. Later difficult child 1 shut the window, took a torch and a book in there with him, closed the top of the box after him and read the book by torchlight.
I let them do this - it is pat of them exploring their own senses and interests. I also hung a cargo net in the tree outside, the boys used to wrap themselves in the cargo net but till feel free, hanging out in the open. A feeling of being confined and held, but also free. easy child 2/difficult child 2 bought herself some reproduction corsets. Industrial strength "Gone With the Wind" type. She said it's like wearing a hug. I let her wear them but told her she must only lace herself in, not get someone else to. That way there would be a limit on how tightly laced she was. She wore her corsets to work under her uniform. her job required some lifting, bending and load carrying and she did it all with grace and poise, because she was strapped in rigidly and could not bend at the waist. She ensured her wedding dress included a heavily boned corset. Interestingly, difficult child 1's wife, daughter in law, also had a corset custom-made for her wedding dress. I suspect there is some Aspie there also. I'm convinced daughter in law's mother is full-blown Aspie. I love her to pieces but she is a difficult woman because her rules have to be the ones everyone follows. She was never taught how to compromise with other people.
So there are variations on a theme. But what I see in the adults - they obey laws, as they understand those laws to be. Social laws as much as legal ones. They often learn their own limitations and set their own limits socially, accordingly. Our recently diagnosed friend has a phobia of hearing people slurp their coffee, so if he and I are talking while I make coffee, he will suddenly walk away as I lift the cup to my lips. I have learned to respect this in him and give him space. He has now extended this to not being able to stand listening to people eat or drink. I gather at home he either eats separately, or at the other end of the table from his family. He has other eccentricities, but he's a lovely loving, kind man who you could always rely on. He and husband are good friends. Funny about that... not. Because Aspies tend to 'find' one another and find in each other a kindred spirit. difficult child 1 said about his best friend from school, "I obsess to him about birds, he obsesses to me about reptiles, neither of us listens and we get on great!" Friend was best man at difficult child 1's wedding, and now difficult child 1 is best man at his friend's upcoming wedding. I never thought either of them would find love like this but I am so glad they did. The couples are best friends despite having some big differences in belief systems. difficult child 1 and daughter in law are very pentecostal; best friend and fiancee are atheist. In fact, fiancee is Jewish-born and currently Wiccan/pagan in practice. And yet - no conflict between any of them.
I hope this can help give a little more surprising background to life with autism.
Marg
