Are we making the spectrum larger?

[Gomendosi]

Now no mucking about, things have changed, so are we responsible as a generation for making the spectrum bigger in the next generation.

In my day (NO, I am not in fact 88 years old, nor do I wear bloomers, have false teeth chiselled out of oak or call people varmints and whippersnappers), in my day we would get a hiding for being bad and then a stern talking to, which we listened to if we knew what was good for us, now you can't even look cross-eyed at anyone under 30 or risk prison <--- slight exaggeration? Your call!
If you got sent to your room for any reason it actually was a punishment because the tress and dirt and imagination and potential friends were all outside, where you weren?t allowed to go!

We ate what was put in front of us or we went without until the next meal, and we often ate things we didn't necessarily like, we wore a uniform to school and looked 'smart' to go out anywhere, we respected old people, not because they deserved it (they did) but because that was the done thing.
We didn't use bad language in crowds or make a scene, we went out everyday and played in the dirt and climbed trees, if we got hurt we got a hiding for being an idiot (and then the love and care and attention, or was it the other way around?)

We hardly ever wore shoes and we had a different best friend every week which led to a new enemy each week too (the old best friend possibly), we didn?t have computers and such so instead of utilising other peoples imagination to keep us amused we had to do it ourself, a stick became a gun and you 'shot' your mates because you were the good guy right...
But if you were the bad guy, you got a turn later at being the good guy, unless you were aces at being bad and then you were typecast in the neighbourhood, which was good?!?

If you read all of the above you know where I am going with this don't you... are we breeding our kids to the spectrum, is it possible that taking away the things that made us who we are, made us strong, are we taking that away from the next generation so they have to stay indoors under fluorescents and can only eat noodles and spag boll and ice cream and tins of peaches.

The spectrum is getting larger it's said, so is it us now putting the children in cotton wool that?s doing it or was it always that large and it's only being noticed now?

 

[Soup]

Interesting (& entertaining) post! As for the spectrum getting bigger, I too have expressed suspicion at the motives of those responsible for making it 'officially' expanded. Many of these are professional shrinks motivated, of course by profit & entrenching their legitimacy as 'experts' more deeply into the minds of the populace, the medical profession as well as the pharma industry. Another BIG promoter of this expanded spectrum theory are the APA, authors of the infamous & highly specious tome known as the DSM (hang onto your hat: # 5 is on the way!).

In their esteemed (& pseudoscientific) opinion, we Aspies are all to cease to exist!!! All of us who were told that we are Aspies, no longer will be. Asperger's is being eliminated as a diagnosis. We are all now simply Autistic BUT located differently on the autism spectrum in different areas. The new diagnostic criteria (you can read them online) are different, more stringent, have a different emphasis & depend too heavily upon the interpretations of some shrink. Some of us, for instance, who are 'high functioning' will fall off of the spectrum! They seem to be tailoring the spectrum to sit the interests of big pharma. They want to diagnose people who can be readily 'treated' with some kind of prescription. Your & my health & well-being & needs are not at the crux of these changes: their profits (& expediency) is.

It is much faster & easier for them to simply write a series of prescriptions & keep adding to & tweaking these as they deem necessary. Having to supply meaningful resources for Aspies is costly & time consuming. If we complain of feeling anxious in social situations, they can simply say, "Here: pop a couple of these" rather than expend the time & energy to help you learn the skills to navigate & comprehend said social situations. Feeling depressed because your girlfriends (boyfriends) keep dumping you, you can't find gainful employment & you're tired of living in your parents' basement? "Here: pop a couple of these" rather than helping you find the resources you need to really solve relational & economic/autonomy problems.

Your point about the way child-rearing is contributing to their dysfunction is an astute one that many of us who work with children see daily. Parents have become so overbearing, controlling, paranoid & at the other end, neglectful that kids are becoming pathologized. They are being made fragile & incompetent. Their physical health is suffering too: they're so sanitized & disinfected that their immune systems aren't developing & they're sickly. Every 2nd kid seems to have asthma & be carrying a nebulizer. Every 2nd kid is riddled with all kinds of food allergies & is armed with an Epipen. Don't even get me started on ADHD & the spectrum.

The atmosphere & the planet haven't changed that much since the late 1960s where it was RARE for a kid to have Asthma (or Diabetes). When I was a school kid, I remember there being 2 kids in the entire school with ADHD. Now, there's about 5 in every classroom. There were a handful of Autistic kids as well. It's true that diagnostic methods have improved meaning that many kids who were just called 'retarded' (means nothing medically!) are now known to be Autistic or have other differences, also knowledge of Asperger's deepened over the past 15 yrs or so BUT none of it matters -since Asperger's will no longer exist as a diagnosis!

All those 'NOS' diagnoses are getting the axe as well, which I see as a good thing since these diagnose nothing whatsoever. BUT...that leaves all the PDD NOS people kind of screwed.

"The spectrum is getting larger it's said, so is it us now putting the children in cotton wool that’s doing it or was it always that large and it's only being noticed now?" - Gomendosi

As for the big question you pose, I don't think it is going to be an either/or type answer but a BOTH type of answer. YES to all of it.

 

[Kelly]

I'm just about to go out so can't really type alot but I agree with both of you and as a parent of a young kid it's always hard finding that balance between accommadating her issues (like the noise being too loud) and telling her to deal with it the way I had to as a child. It always worries me that I'll either be too lenient or too hard and that will affect her very negatively as she grows up and she'll either cope with far too much or she will bail at the first sign of struggle. Couple of examples;

Kyoko hates having her hair brushed, when I do it she screams, cries and stims like mad, clapping, shaking her hands, sometimes hitting whatever is available (I tend to do it in her bedroom so she can hit her pillow). Some days I just let her get on with it, some days I apologise for hurting her and some days I will get irritated and say to her "surely it can hurt that much so why are you making such a big deal out of it?"(because this is recent up until a year ago it didn't bother her). I really don't know what else to do, we are seeing her OT about it at the end of this month to try and figure out a solution.

Her underwear has been very trial and error, we used to have a daily meltdown over underwear 'annoying' her, we tried allsorts of different styles of underwear, we tried ignoring her (incase she was just playing up), asking her what the problem was specifically what was annoying her, she could not explain she would just repeat over and over "it's annoying, you know what annoying means". So we started trying larger sizes, she's 7 years old so we tried size 8-9 slight improvement but randomly she would cry out that it was annoying and we'd have to go through the entire draw trying to find some that fit. Thankfully now we have found that age 11-12 is loose enough not to annoy her but not so big as to just fall off her.

We have situations daily and it's hard knowing how to react, do we sort out the problem, ignore it, tell her to just deal with it as to us it's not such a big deal. Yesterday my mother in law took Kyoko and I out shopping, we stopped at the local playgroup's xmas fayre, initially Kyoko was fine looking around but then she spotted santa's grotto. She became really agitated, demanding to leave and getting (to put it bluntly) arsey and tantrum like as the minutes ticked by, I asked what the problem was but she said she wanted to leave, she would not explain and became increasingly agitated. My mother in law wanted to look at a particular stall so I told Kyoko we would leave once granny was finished, but she kept on and on and was almost in tears, my mother in law as always just gave in right away "it's okay I'll have a look later or something, we can leave now". As soon as we got outside Kyoko started crying and was hiding her face in my side, so I asked what was wrong and she said she wanted granny to go away that it was private, I told her not to be so rude, but again mother in law was all smiles "don't worry I'll go and wait in the car". As soon as she was gone Kyoko told me the reason she HAD to leave was because santa was there and grandad(father in law) had been santa a few years ago and that was so embarrassing and everyone knew and they were looking at her. I tried to reassure her that nobody would have remembered it was him, plus he was dressed up and very few of the children there were kids she knew (just 2 or 3 of them) and nobody but the grown ups on the playgroup committee knew it was grandad, it made no difference, in her mind it was an absolute disaster. So then I wondered afterwards whether it was right of me to make her wait (the 10 mins or so between the first time she said she wanted to go and when we actually left) or should I have removed her from the situation the second she got upset?

Like I said it's very hard to get that balance right and I'm sure alot of parents face the same problem spectrum or not, but I do see alot of parents giving in at the first sign of upset or at the other end they scream at their children to shut up.

 

[Soup]

@ Kelly:

Your challenges in raising Kyoko epitomize what parents of Aspie kids go through. Like my son, Kyoko too is not Dxed but you as an Aspie parent know darned well that she's one of us. that is where we really see the short-comings of having to rely upon the will o' the wisp 'observations' experts make. YOU live with Kyoko every day: not for a few hours in a controlled & artificial setting with some dotard who is asking leading questions & getting her to conveniently say what she wants to hear.

Yours is the prime example of just how challenging it is to balance the need to socialize a child somewhat, teach some socially normative behavioural expectations & yet still accommodate the truths about Asperger's. Parents of NT children tend to think in extremes: are they being too hard or too soft. Are they 'giving in'? this is a big mistake. Turning parenting into a battle ground guarantees that both the parent & the child wind up losing. With my son, it was sensory issues around warm clothing. In mid-winter, he'd tear off his hat, gloves, scarf & jacket! Some at the school got the impression that I couldn't afford warm clothing for my son or that I was a negligent mother. His locker was full of the warm clothing I'd send him in wearing! Then too, he'd suddenly run away: & you know how fast their little legs carry them! The teacher wanted get him Dxed with ADHD & medicated. NO WAY! Not for their convenience. They'd just have to do their flippin' job & learn to manage a more challenging child!

As a mom, I tried to see it as compromising & not as 'giving in' as in the child pulled one over on me. If his scarf drove him nuts, it became up to us to find a suitable alternative. He was funny about underwear too. As far as the Santa fiasco goes, who cares? If she doesn't want to be there then nobody got hurt because you removed her from a disturbing situation once it became apparent that it wasn't going to be comfortable for her. As for the exact right second for removing her, I don't think there is any recipe for this. Next time, she may be in a similar situation & require a completely different strategy to the ones that worked previously.

The DSM/shrink approach depends too heavily on stop-gap quick fix solutions. Given a Dx here, they'd simply pressure you to drug Kyoko into compliance. SURE the child then sits still, follows the parent calmly & sits in class, but at what cost to their brain, their humanity & long term health?

 

[Pella]

.
Her underwear has been very trial and error, we used to have a daily meltdown over underwear 'annoying' her, we tried allsorts of different styles of underwear, we tried ignoring her (incase she was just playing up), asking her what the problem was specifically what was annoying her, she could not explain she would just repeat over and over "it's annoying, you know what annoying means". So we started trying larger sizes, she's 7 years old so we tried size 8-9 slight improvement but randomly she would cry out that it was annoying and we'd have to go through the entire draw trying to find some that fit. Thankfully now we have found that age 11-12 is loose enough not to annoy her but not so big as to just fall off her.

I don't know how young they make them for, but I got men's boxer breifs and they are much more comfortable for me, you still have to deal with the waistband, but there is no elastic around the legs.

 

[Loomis]

Kelly

You might want to try Hanro brand underwear. They are expensive but are likely the most comfortable underwear available. Here is some of their advertising copy:

Since 1884, Hanro of Switzerland has stood for luxury, natural elegance, premium quality, comfort and wellness. Hanro's primary product categories include lingerie, sleepwear, loungewear and underwear for men and women. In 2010, Hanro of Switzerland celebrated its 125th Anniversary. It was founded in Liestal, Switzerland with the vision that lingerie should be soft to the touch, comfortable to wear, and made of pure natural fibers. This vision remains the same in today?s Hanro underwear products, just as it was 125 years ago.

 

[Soup]

@ Pella: I've swiped more pairs of my husband's boxers than I care to admit! the loose legs & baggy factor makes them so comfortable. Especially for sleeping in on hot summer nights!