Yes, it's a surprisingly good article. Dredging through the "conversations" at the bottom, I was surprised to find that the author disclaimed that it was all based on personal experience.
I also found mention of the original title: "The Little Professors: A vibrant hue in the Autistic rainbow". Not that it should be changed to this (apparently it was very shortlived) but it's a nice image.
It's not a dismissal. It's common on HN to point out the year if the submitter forgot to include it in the title, both for other readers and so a mod that sees the note can add it to the title.
No worries. They updated to choose the revised 2008 date instead, which is good enough. It's also interesting to note that it's easy to ascribe negative intent to entirely [helpful and] descriptive statements. I've done this before too. A Jerry Springer Learning moment, perhaps! This is quite a common ape attribute that it is worth practising not doing. Instead: 'if in doubt, assume good and helpful intent' makes for a useful rule of thumb.
If you like this, then you may be interested in Pathological Demand Avoidance, an autism profile characterised by better social skills relative to other people with autism but a lot of anxiety around the everyday demands of life.
It's increasingly being recognised in the UK, but is only just beginning to spread abroad. (I haven't yet been diagnosed, but I believe that this describes me exceptionally well.)
Genuine question and not a dismissal - what makes this a form of autism, of all things? Plenty of people who are generally considered NT are indeed anxious, sometimes to an extreme and pathological extent. And it's only natural for anxiety to center on demands of some sort that may have been placed on the individual.
I have two daughters on the spectrum and this profile of Pathological Demand Avoidance describes their challenges very accurately. There are many factors that go into an autism diagnosis, but to your specific question of how this autism profile differs from an NT with anxiety challenges - I think it's the degree to which the extreme avoidance occurs and the downstream effects. For instance, a request to brush teeth can result in a 3 hour violent meltdown. Attempting to get a 60-pound child from the car into school can result in an injury and visit to the ER for a para-trained, full grown adult. And it's not just once in a while, it is every single demand asked of the child every single day.
A very reasonable question, and there is still some controversy over that in the medical community.
For me, it's because it comes with a whole host of classically autistic symptoms like struggling with eye contact, overload from sensory processing, difficulty understanding social norms, etc, but only at times when I'm stressed or otherwise in a low energy mood. I also had to put a lot of effort into learning other people's social norms - my intuitive ones were different in ways which seem similar to other people on the autism spectrum - but unlike some forms of autism, I have been able to learn the rules of neurotypical people to the point that you probably wouldn't be able to tell I was autistic if you met me. I still find a lot of these rules utterly bizarre.
When I read their official description of it, it strikes me as a pretty reasonable response for a not-as-social person forced by social context to engage with much-more-social people on an ongoing basis. Of course they'd be anxious and avoidant. Of course they'd become skilled at getting out of things that are unpleasant and unrewarding for them.
I should read more, but at first blush I'd see this not as a disease, but a coping strategy.
The trigger for the avoidant behaviour in PDA people isn't socialising, many of them including me very much enjoy socialising (although there may be stressed around social expectations). It's anything that's perceived as a demand (i.e. something that must be done, or is expected). For many people with PDA (esp. children) this can be things as simple as putting their shoes on or brushing their teeth. It may also include activities that they otherwise enjoy.
(Side note: if you're from the US, then you may see much more forced socialisation. In europe, quiet people are allowed to be quiet to a much greater degree. It's not seen as rude to be quiet here)
Wow, we don't quite know what autism is (don't know if it is a spectrum or a set of separate conditions) therefore it becomes possible to assign the label to almost every condition. I think that's amazing.
And I was unaware that children with foot infections, say, stubbornly refuse to brush their teeth as a result as you seem to suggest. (Sarcasm for Sarcasm.)
Many children would rather avoid brushing their teeth. Few children are radically opposed to tooth-brushing, say to the point where they'll skip a meal to avoid it. I don't think you understand how unusual the behavior being discussed, is.
I'm totally open to this being a diagnosis. But I think the point is more that a kid with a foot infection who refuses demands would probably be called "independent". Stubborn, even. But it wouldn't necessarily be medicalized.
There was a recent study on ADHD and birthdates; the upshot was that kids on the younger end of the age spectrum are medicated for ADHD more if they're young for their grade. Which implies that some number of kids are medicated more for "teacher inconvenience syndrome" than any real disease.
There's a long history of medicine treating different as bad. (The formal academic term is "medicalization of deviance".) So I think it's worth being a bit skeptical that traits that teachers and parents might inconvenient are diseases on the order of foot infections. Rather than, say, how homosexuality was medicalized for decades.
If you don't insert this social "fluff", you come across as rude.
Where this social buffer comes naturally to most people, I get frustrated and annoyed by it. I just want to borrow the dang pencil sharpener and get back to work!
I have come to understand I don't resemble neurotypicals when it comes to this interaction (and it is likely that many others here on HN are not neurotypical either.) NTs enjoy this fluff, and it helps them feel connected to each other. When I don't play by their rules, I'm viewed as cold and callous.
So...I play by their rules, because even though I'm not NT in this way, I still have basic human needs of wanting to feel loved and desired, and I don't want to upset other people.
> If you don't insert this social "fluff", you come across as rude.
Isn't this a bit overstated? I'm pretty sure that you could also use bog-standard politeness markers (like, "could you please", "I would really appreciate it", "sorry about asking") and so on and so forth. (You might then come across as being a bit formal and old-fashioned, but certainly not rude!) The underlying motivation in both cases is that you need to make it very clear that you're not issuing an outright demand - and you do this by making it easy for Mike to say no (for any reason or no reason!) and providing plausible deniability. There are things that are closer to "fluff" in other contexts, but even they have their own explanation.
I think you might be right. But autistic people may find it difficult to determine these underlying motivations, I think because neurotypical people only intuit them because their instinctive preferences happen to line up with other peoples. If an autistic persons instincts don't give them the same reaction, then it will not be obvious to them that other people will have that reaction (unless they have learnt that this is a common reaction that people have). It can be easy to end up with an overzealous rule, to be on the safe side.
If the justification for something is stated in terms of something that also isn't important to or felt by the autistic person (for example politness), then it can be difficult to be sure what does or does not transgress the social rule.
It's more about culture than neurotype. There's nothing in human nature itself or in human instincts that says "people will feel uncomfortable when refusing something that a stranger of equal social rank is asking of them, unless they have been provided with plausible deniability". It's a feature of our current (Western) culture. And since autism tends to come with issues relating to general intercultural competence, it's no wonder that someone who's autistic would have trouble picking this up. But so would any non-native in the relevant cultural context!
This seems like a reasonable interpretation. People from other cultures may also be excused from cultural norms to some extent as people understand that they don't have the context. And I've definitely gotten very good at politely diffusing situations where I've accidentally crossed social boundaries (I have more problems when I take moral issue with the social norm, and thus am unwilling to go along with it).
Really? In the uk it would be perfectly acceptable just to say "excuse me" or name (to get their attention) and then "please can I borrow your pencil sharpener?".
But definitely empathise with the idea of playing along with to please other people.
I'm highly social. FWIW, I think a lot of standard social expectations are maladapted to modern life. They try to impose a facade of social connection where none really exists and it's problematic, and not just for "aspie" types.
- The whole concept of authority: Wait, so I should do what my teacher or my boss says, even if it's completely dumb, just because they have some social status?
- The idea that you should do anything other than tell people directly if you have a romantic interest in them.
- Many politeness or etiquette rules. I get that you shouldn't outright insult people. But I don't understand things like not starting to eat before everyone has their food, fighting over who is going to pay for something, insisting that others go through a door before you (this might be a British thing).
- Gender norms. Why does it make any difference which sex you were born? (other than things that depend on physical characteristics, or are influenced by hormone levels)
This isn't really to do with social norms, but another thing I do that I associate with autism/PDA, is that I have a strong inclination to interpret things literally. usually, I pick up on sarcasm/irony or implied meanings. But also, really often I don't (but I usually very quickly realise that I've missed something based on how people react to my response)
> - Many politeness or etiquette rules. I get that you shouldn't outright insult people. But I don't understand things like not starting to eat before everyone has their food, fighting over who is going to pay for something, insisting that others go through a door before you (this might be a British thing).
"... a worker negotiating a salary might begin with a eulogy of the employer, followed by a lengthy bargaining session consisting entirely of indirect, polite language – both parties are expected to understand the implied topic of discussion. Likewise, a shopkeeper may initially refuse to quote a price for an item, suggesting that it is worthless ... Taarof obliges the customer to insist on paying, possibly several times (three times), before a shopkeeper finally quotes a price and real negotiation can begin."
"Taarof plays a large role in the etiquette of food. If you go to any meal, are invited to any house for food, then you will be expected to eat seconds and thirds. You must eat to please the host but at the same time taarof demands that you can’t just go ahead and dig into the food ..."
"Demand avoidance can be seen in the development of children, including those on the autism spectrum.
It’s the extent and extreme nature of this avoidance, together with displays of socially shocking behaviour that leads to it being described as 'pathological'."
Autism isn't a fact about the world, it's a category we use to group traits we think belong together. What's actually going on may be varied and rather complex.
We do this with a lot of words over time. The word atom, for example, means indivisible. For a long time we believed atoms were the fundamental units of matter. To say to a pre-nuclear physicist that we can now "split the atom" is to speak nonsense; to utter a contradiction.
The same goes for universe. Centuries ago, people thought the earth was the centre of the universe and that the stars and other heavenly bodies were fixed upon spheres. Then came the sun-centred model of the solar system, and the universe grew a little bit larger. More recently, the Hubble ultra-deep field dramatically expanded our view of the universe yet again.
But now there are physicists who speak very seriously about about the idea of a multiverse. What the heck does that even mean? It means we decided, after a certain point, to stop changing the meaning of the word universe.
I was classically autistic, but identified eventually that if I was supposed to do something (use green fingerpaint) it created a strong anxiety response, but if I was simply allowed to do something (fingerpaint however I wanted to) there was no anxiety.
I learned to put dishes away by just putting one away, or moving a group from one spot to another, then making another move, but never saying "I'll put them all away" as that created anxiety.
I think some societies have a case of Pathological Demand Imposition.
Reading this, I'm reminded of a passage from Dostoyevsky in which he said that men would do anything at all -- even self-destructive things -- to prove that they weren't piano-keys; even just to spite you for assuming that they were.
I'm somewhat familiar with 'homeschooling', and I wonder if a lot of the problems described in the article re: social integration could be mitigated with a one-on-one education where a parent is working with the child. Since it seems like a lot of the issues described came out of a (for the child) hostile learning environment.
I totally agree with this. I feel like we generally treat children badly (a complete lack of respect, they are not treated as equals), it's just that typical children put up with this.
A lot of this 'poor behaviour' is a rational reaction to treatment that an adult would never put up with.
50 y/o Aspie here, late diagnosis (about 6 years ago).
This is exactly why my wife is home-schooling our kids. My 14 y/o step-daughter (diagnosed with ASD) and our younger 6 and 7 y/o boys, who show some signs. The eldest is going through the process of diagnosis.
Step-daughter had serious anxiety problems with school, and was falling too far behind. Schools here in the UK are supposed to make provisions for kids with special needs, but don't have the funding or support to do it. The younger boys were also getting left behind in the classroom... Home ed was the only way to get them back on track. Challenging, but it seems to be working - my wife does most of it. She trained as a teacher, so knows how to assess progress and plan curriculum etc.
Isolating that "weird kid" with homeschooling is not going to have any kind of positive effect on their social integration.
How do you expect someone to even hope to learn about social norms if they aren't exposed to them? Especially when most of these wishy washy, unspoken social rules are learned entirely through observation and practice?
Yes, you need coaching, but the bottom line is that no one is going to pick up on social norms to the point of "passing" without being exposed to them regularly. Unfortunately that means lots of fruitless anxiety in those of us who cannot learn such norms, but one must understand that avoidance is not a valid solution to the core problem of social difficulty.
> Isolating that "weird kid" with homeschooling is not going to have any kind of positive effect on their social integration.
Yes it absolutely can. If I can learn in a calm environment how to respond to social stimuli, and still have opportunity to pursue it, I'm going to be able to perform much better.
"Isolating that "weird kid" with homeschooling is not going to have any kind of positive effect on their social integration."
I think the image in your head is that home schooling means the person is completely separated from the society.
Which probably is not the case. I mean, you can have hobbies, go to shopping, the library, etc. You just don't need to follow the school program which might be a really painful daily experience. Bullying is not unheard of - this is something which a normal person really does not need to suffer outside of school. In normal life you can just avoid the person, so learning to suffer bullying and being the victim is not helpfull at all.
The mental anguish a non-neurotypical person can have in a school without any attention to his or her special needs is a consideration as well.
If the environment is supportive, and the kid seems to handle it ok, then sure, regular school is just fine.
But aspie kids can be so different (my sons teacher said she had never met a kid like this) that they really are hard to understand.
Basically school is programmed so that the kids exhibit certain neurotypical behaviour patterns. The most important of these is the inborn need for social cohesion - which asperger kids can totally lack. Hence, when they should do X, and everyone else is doing it, they don't understand why they should do something just because. And then they get negative feedback, which lead to stress.
They can have sensory sensitivity for light, sounds or touch, which can put them on the edge. Social pressure and unexpected events can the push them over the edge leading to meltdown, which is a total shitshow for all relative parties.
There are so many things that normal kids take for granted that can be so difficult with a child on the asperger spectrum.
My son is such a person - he is on the fifth grade, the school has adapted, but boy has it been challenging occasionally. I don't question at all if parents decide to homeschool their asperger kids.
Many people incorrectly equate home-schooling with being a shut-in. Home-schooled kids generally have more positive interaction with adults to learn these social norms, and they have activities with other kids.
41 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadI also found mention of the original title: "The Little Professors: A vibrant hue in the Autistic rainbow". Not that it should be changed to this (apparently it was very shortlived) but it's a nice image.
edit: my apologies, I read this as a dismissal but it looks to be an HNism - carry on good sir!
It's increasingly being recognised in the UK, but is only just beginning to spread abroad. (I haven't yet been diagnosed, but I believe that this describes me exceptionally well.)
Article: https://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/pda.aspx Book: http://amzn.eu/d/fPCq5LU
For me, it's because it comes with a whole host of classically autistic symptoms like struggling with eye contact, overload from sensory processing, difficulty understanding social norms, etc, but only at times when I'm stressed or otherwise in a low energy mood. I also had to put a lot of effort into learning other people's social norms - my intuitive ones were different in ways which seem similar to other people on the autism spectrum - but unlike some forms of autism, I have been able to learn the rules of neurotypical people to the point that you probably wouldn't be able to tell I was autistic if you met me. I still find a lot of these rules utterly bizarre.
I should read more, but at first blush I'd see this not as a disease, but a coping strategy.
(Side note: if you're from the US, then you may see much more forced socialisation. In europe, quiet people are allowed to be quiet to a much greater degree. It's not seen as rude to be quiet here)
There was a recent study on ADHD and birthdates; the upshot was that kids on the younger end of the age spectrum are medicated for ADHD more if they're young for their grade. Which implies that some number of kids are medicated more for "teacher inconvenience syndrome" than any real disease.
There's a long history of medicine treating different as bad. (The formal academic term is "medicalization of deviance".) So I think it's worth being a bit skeptical that traits that teachers and parents might inconvenient are diseases on the order of foot infections. Rather than, say, how homosexuality was medicalized for decades.
Like what?
One of the ones that bothers me constantly is the "buffer" of small talk that (particularly American) culture forces on us.
For instance: We work together. You have a pencil sharpener. I need to sharpen my pencil.
My preferred way of handling this situation: Hey Mike, can I borrow your pencil sharpener for a minute?
Now, this is OK in American culture, but ONLY IF you've spoken to each other recently. (I had to learn this the hard way.)
If you haven't, the conversation has to go like this:
Me: Hey Mike. Got a minute?
You: Sure. What's up?
Me: I was wondering, could I borrow your pencil sharpener really quick? I have this pencil I need to sharpen.
(And you should always insert a reason there; see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201310/th...)
If you don't insert this social "fluff", you come across as rude.
Where this social buffer comes naturally to most people, I get frustrated and annoyed by it. I just want to borrow the dang pencil sharpener and get back to work!
I have come to understand I don't resemble neurotypicals when it comes to this interaction (and it is likely that many others here on HN are not neurotypical either.) NTs enjoy this fluff, and it helps them feel connected to each other. When I don't play by their rules, I'm viewed as cold and callous.
So...I play by their rules, because even though I'm not NT in this way, I still have basic human needs of wanting to feel loved and desired, and I don't want to upset other people.
Isn't this a bit overstated? I'm pretty sure that you could also use bog-standard politeness markers (like, "could you please", "I would really appreciate it", "sorry about asking") and so on and so forth. (You might then come across as being a bit formal and old-fashioned, but certainly not rude!) The underlying motivation in both cases is that you need to make it very clear that you're not issuing an outright demand - and you do this by making it easy for Mike to say no (for any reason or no reason!) and providing plausible deniability. There are things that are closer to "fluff" in other contexts, but even they have their own explanation.
If the justification for something is stated in terms of something that also isn't important to or felt by the autistic person (for example politness), then it can be difficult to be sure what does or does not transgress the social rule.
But definitely empathise with the idea of playing along with to please other people.
- The idea that you should do anything other than tell people directly if you have a romantic interest in them.
- Many politeness or etiquette rules. I get that you shouldn't outright insult people. But I don't understand things like not starting to eat before everyone has their food, fighting over who is going to pay for something, insisting that others go through a door before you (this might be a British thing).
- Gender norms. Why does it make any difference which sex you were born? (other than things that depend on physical characteristics, or are influenced by hormone levels)
This isn't really to do with social norms, but another thing I do that I associate with autism/PDA, is that I have a strong inclination to interpret things literally. usually, I pick up on sarcasm/irony or implied meanings. But also, really often I don't (but I usually very quickly realise that I've missed something based on how people react to my response)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taarof
"... a worker negotiating a salary might begin with a eulogy of the employer, followed by a lengthy bargaining session consisting entirely of indirect, polite language – both parties are expected to understand the implied topic of discussion. Likewise, a shopkeeper may initially refuse to quote a price for an item, suggesting that it is worthless ... Taarof obliges the customer to insist on paying, possibly several times (three times), before a shopkeeper finally quotes a price and real negotiation can begin."
"Taarof plays a large role in the etiquette of food. If you go to any meal, are invited to any house for food, then you will be expected to eat seconds and thirds. You must eat to please the host but at the same time taarof demands that you can’t just go ahead and dig into the food ..."
"Demand avoidance can be seen in the development of children, including those on the autism spectrum.
It’s the extent and extreme nature of this avoidance, together with displays of socially shocking behaviour that leads to it being described as 'pathological'."
Autism isn't a fact about the world, it's a category we use to group traits we think belong together. What's actually going on may be varied and rather complex.
We do this with a lot of words over time. The word atom, for example, means indivisible. For a long time we believed atoms were the fundamental units of matter. To say to a pre-nuclear physicist that we can now "split the atom" is to speak nonsense; to utter a contradiction.
The same goes for universe. Centuries ago, people thought the earth was the centre of the universe and that the stars and other heavenly bodies were fixed upon spheres. Then came the sun-centred model of the solar system, and the universe grew a little bit larger. More recently, the Hubble ultra-deep field dramatically expanded our view of the universe yet again.
But now there are physicists who speak very seriously about about the idea of a multiverse. What the heck does that even mean? It means we decided, after a certain point, to stop changing the meaning of the word universe.
I learned to put dishes away by just putting one away, or moving a group from one spot to another, then making another move, but never saying "I'll put them all away" as that created anxiety.
Reading this, I'm reminded of a passage from Dostoyevsky in which he said that men would do anything at all -- even self-destructive things -- to prove that they weren't piano-keys; even just to spite you for assuming that they were.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1
(yes, I know this is not always practical)
A lot of this 'poor behaviour' is a rational reaction to treatment that an adult would never put up with.
This is exactly why my wife is home-schooling our kids. My 14 y/o step-daughter (diagnosed with ASD) and our younger 6 and 7 y/o boys, who show some signs. The eldest is going through the process of diagnosis.
Step-daughter had serious anxiety problems with school, and was falling too far behind. Schools here in the UK are supposed to make provisions for kids with special needs, but don't have the funding or support to do it. The younger boys were also getting left behind in the classroom... Home ed was the only way to get them back on track. Challenging, but it seems to be working - my wife does most of it. She trained as a teacher, so knows how to assess progress and plan curriculum etc.
How do you expect someone to even hope to learn about social norms if they aren't exposed to them? Especially when most of these wishy washy, unspoken social rules are learned entirely through observation and practice?
Yes, you need coaching, but the bottom line is that no one is going to pick up on social norms to the point of "passing" without being exposed to them regularly. Unfortunately that means lots of fruitless anxiety in those of us who cannot learn such norms, but one must understand that avoidance is not a valid solution to the core problem of social difficulty.
Yes it absolutely can. If I can learn in a calm environment how to respond to social stimuli, and still have opportunity to pursue it, I'm going to be able to perform much better.
I think the image in your head is that home schooling means the person is completely separated from the society.
Which probably is not the case. I mean, you can have hobbies, go to shopping, the library, etc. You just don't need to follow the school program which might be a really painful daily experience. Bullying is not unheard of - this is something which a normal person really does not need to suffer outside of school. In normal life you can just avoid the person, so learning to suffer bullying and being the victim is not helpfull at all.
The mental anguish a non-neurotypical person can have in a school without any attention to his or her special needs is a consideration as well.
If the environment is supportive, and the kid seems to handle it ok, then sure, regular school is just fine.
But aspie kids can be so different (my sons teacher said she had never met a kid like this) that they really are hard to understand.
Basically school is programmed so that the kids exhibit certain neurotypical behaviour patterns. The most important of these is the inborn need for social cohesion - which asperger kids can totally lack. Hence, when they should do X, and everyone else is doing it, they don't understand why they should do something just because. And then they get negative feedback, which lead to stress.
They can have sensory sensitivity for light, sounds or touch, which can put them on the edge. Social pressure and unexpected events can the push them over the edge leading to meltdown, which is a total shitshow for all relative parties.
There are so many things that normal kids take for granted that can be so difficult with a child on the asperger spectrum.
My son is such a person - he is on the fifth grade, the school has adapted, but boy has it been challenging occasionally. I don't question at all if parents decide to homeschool their asperger kids.