Also, I just heard that in some preschools and other public institutions for little kids, there’s a practice of forcing the kids to have a group hug every day (to teach that human contact is fun and pleasurable). That’s horrible-I never would have put up with that if it had happened to me! From what I can remember, a 6-year-old pynchonfangirl would have physically attacked both the kids attempting to hug me, and the teacher when she called for someone to take me out of the room.

I would say that I had a similar experience to you only that it was at opposite age ranges, eg that I was much more functional in secondary school than primary school. 4th-6th grade was the worst in general – constant, constant constant bullying at school, piece of shit teachers who didn’t care, pain from the divorce between my parents and some sexual advances(in 6th grade) from my mom’s new sociopathic boyfriend(who also worked at my school but wasn’t my teacher), etc…. Around this time I stopped caring what my classmates thought and would just cut myself in the middle of class…

Anyway, my mom broke up with her bf, I transferred to a new school that had a much more tolerant environment, and I got a new chance at life. I started to make a few friends in the bigger schools because I could both hide from the bullies and make friends in the nerdier extracurricular clubs. By high school I wasn’t even a target of bullies. I was much less obvious at, say, 16 than 9 or 12 because a lot of what looked like autism was really symptomatic of multiple traumas.

Your comment here reminds me of another blogger who has observed that sometimes a person with disabilities who is perceived as having a supposedly “extreme” or “unusual” need may actually be indicative of a need that many other people have–just in a more mild form. So an accommodation that helps a person with certain disabilities (because they have an absolute NEED for that accommodation) could also make things more comfortable for some other people also.

Ettina talks about this point in these two blog posts:

http://abnormaldiversity.blogspot.com/2008/09/social-value-of-demand-avoidance.html
http://abnormaldiversity.blogspot.com/2008/10/special-accomodations-and-proving.html

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago. I am taking a basic course in counselling skills, the first step on a five-year journey towards accreditation as a professional counsellor. The first thing that the tutor made us do was come out from behind our desks and sit in a circle in the centre of the room. He explained that all our classes would be conducted like this.

I felt very uncomfortable and anxious in this position. I struggle to make eye contact and I dislike being in a group, things that I have always attributed to my autism. The Disability Resource Centre at my university requested the tutors leading my seminars not to position the students round a table, but to have us facing the front. This was done so that I could participate without getting too overwhelmed by the sight of all those faces.

At the end of our first counselling class, we were asked to share what had been the most difficult aspect of the class for us. I was astonished to hear the other students telling the tutor that being in the circle had made them uncomfortable too. One woman said that it had made her so self-conscious that her heart rate had gone up and her palms had started to sweat. Another said that it had made it hard for her to concentrate. Neither of these women are autistic, yet they were articulating my own experience.

Turner Syndrome, maybe? Turner girls have only one X chromosome in some or all of their cells, and one of the traits is being quite short. But of course any short stature condition, particularly if they don’t have noticeably odd proportions, can result in being treated that way.
I wonder if children from one of the African races that are typically very short, if interracially adopted, are prone to being treated younger than they are?
I also know of a condition, Sotos Syndrome, where they’re unusually big for their age and cognitively disabled. Anyway, Sotos kids are described as being prone to aggressive behavior, and some have suggested that they aren’t really much more aggressive than other disabled kids or kids at whatever ‘developmental level’ they’re considered to be at, it just seems more of a problem because they’re big. For example, a normal-sized two year old and a 6 year old who looks 10, tantrumming in the same way for the same reason, are likely to be perceived quite differently.

“I know I’ve sometimes done similar things. I don’t normally go to the same lengths as she has, but if I’m in a context where it’s important for a hearing person to really GET that I’M DEAF (and need certain adaptations), and if I’m not sure they will understand that “deaf” does NOT mean “total inability to hear” (contrary to what a lot of hearing people seem to think, deaf SIMPLY means, “does not hear well enough to talk on the phone” — but this still leaves a WIDE range of possible hearing levels, even without mentioning hard of hearing people who CAN talk on the phone), then sometimes I will find myself automatically supressing my reactions to sound as a way of reinforcing other people’s understanding that, yes, I’m deaf, I can’t hear, I need appropriate accommodations. So I know from first hand experience the ways that one can instinctively learn to fit into other people’s stereotypical expectations even without intending to, as a kind of survival skill to ensure that you get the accommodations you need. It makes sense that autistic people would respond the same way.”

I can relate to this. When I’m extremely tired, I may be inertial to the point of being unable to get up and get my dinner, yet I can get up to go to the bathroom (or get something to read if I know exactly where it is). But after convincing my parents to get me my dinner because I’m too exhausted to get up, I don’t want them to see me walking to the bathroom, so if possible I try to go when they can’t see me.

“I would be interested to hear about the experiences of autistic children raised by autistic, or ASD, parents. I imagine that this happens fairly rarely, but have you ever met or heard of such a person? I wonder if an autistic parent, if he or she had enough support to be able to parent well, would be better able to respond to the child in a way that is not frightening and better able to understand the child’s approaches.”

My father is probably autistic, but he’s done a lot to act more normal, and shut down his emotions probably more than many autistics because he not only grew up weird but was also in a really dysfunctional family and abused quite a bit. In fact he told me that he used to never feel any emotion at all, and during counseling he started to feel anger for the first time (which his counselor dismissed because ‘it’s easy for men to feel angry’).
I am less socially disabled than many autistics, although how much that is due to a) my natural neurological makeup, b) my father being autistic and c) having been abused myself (by other victims of one of my father’s abusers) which tends to cause people to become hyperalert to signals of negative emotions (and I am better at detecting anger than anything else, to the point of mistaking other things for anger).

“I’ve noticed that PTSD seems universal or near-universal among autistic people, and I’ve compared PTSD traits to autistic traits and there clearly is overlap.”

It seems to me that there’s even more overlap with Reactive Attachment Disorder. It’s closely related to PTSD but specifically due to having early childhood experiences that make it very hard to form attachments to others (either parents aren’t loving enough or they’re not consistent, either in behavior or in presence – eg foster care). Anyway, RAD kids can act in some very autistic ways, especially if they were institutionalized. I suspect some of the traits shared between RAD and autistic kids may actually be for the same reasons.

I remember, I think upsetting my grandmother because she knew I wanted my sandwiches in triangles, but she made four triangles instead of two.

(I began to become more wary of my two-triangle approach when the corner of a grilled-chese sandwich somehow triggered my gag reflex. I didn’t know what gagging was, I just felt like the corner attacked me, and I quit eating the corners.)

Interestingly enough, my dad, who is likely also on the spectrum, I rarely had tantrums when he was the one home, which was how it was for me in the early years (my dad was the one who left work to take care of me, rather than my mom). But when my mom was home, things were really different. It also did not help that she had different ways of preparing foods and meals than my dad, and I needed things to be EXACTLY the same. So in this way she always felt inferior, which makes me sad, as my upsetness was a sensory reaction to having the sandwich cut horizontally rather than diagnoally, and it had no value judgment attached to it, it just made me sad to see the sandwich that way.