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Is it normal for all nearly 5 year olds not to listen or is it the autism?

Does it mean they are "high functioning" if they do not exhibit a deep hatred of demands on their time?
It's just one form and Pathological Demand Avoidance was also called Newson's syndrome just like other presentations had other names such as Kanner's syndrome or Asperger's syndrome. There was also Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified for those who did not fit well within a certain subtype and yet had notable autism like struggles. I am not entirely certain if PDA is supposed to be an actual type of autism or a common comorbidity of autism. There seems to be disagreement between different sources that I have looked at.
 
Does it mean they are "high functioning" if they do not exhibit a deep hatred of demands on their time?
Not at all. I might suggest that many of us so-called "high functioning" autistics really dislike interruptions in our train of thought or being pulled away from something we were focused on.

A phone rings. The first thing I do is blurt out a swear word and hope no one heard me. I kid you not! :D I purposely turn off the ringer on my phone. My wife, complaining, "I was trying to call you." "Ooops, left the ringer off again."

I get interrupted all-the-time at work. You'd think after some 40 years I'd be simply beaten down and totally used to it. NO. I despise it. Let me get from point A to point B without having to go through the entire alphabet. Please.
 
I do not answer the phone so no issue.
When I was gang-stalked, I didn't either.
I later bought an answering machine and screened the calls.
The harassment on the phone stopped after that, for some reason. 🤔
 
I agree If talking to me is important leave a message, only family and friends leave messages. If I do not know you I have no interest in getting to know you. I make my friends in person.
 
PDA is only one presentation and not every autistic person has this.

True, but a lot of children do. They can come off as rather "passive-aggressive" about it as well. I see a fair amount of this when they come into the hospital.
Some of those children could be presenting look alike symptoms but for different reasons. One child with autism could resist certain commands due to other factors such as sensory overwhelm without actually having an issue with commands as such. For example two children one with PDA and the other without could both freeze up and refuse to step inside a busy shopping center. The child with PDA stopped because their parent told them to go in and they don't want anyone telling them what to do. The other child while still autistic is perhaps usually obedient but is overwhelmed by the noise and crowds and has frozen up in a shutdown and can't move.
 
I've got no kids and have no idea how to deal with kids, but...

Kids are little people (autistic or not). They have reasons for what they do that seem good to them. Those reasons may not make any sense to adults, but they ARE reasons.

With kids who are too young to have a sensible discussion about "why do you do that thing", it might be useful to look for common patterns. (Is it all shops? Or just big ones? Is it all the time, or just when it's busy? Is it just shops, or is it all public environments?) Maybe make notes and comparisons?

Kids are also learning how to be independent entities. Apparently the "terrible twos" is the point at which kids realise that they are people and they can make decisions and choose actions. Some of the acting up is them figuring out "what happens if I do this?" and "How far can I go?" Probably that lasts for a few years. This is obviously extremely frustrating for parents - possibly all the more when you try to explain in kid-friendly terms why we do not touch the hot things and they do it anyway. ("Hm, mum says it's hot, but is it really? What would REALLY happen if I touched it?")

Then you get into the age where they've got the whole autonomy thing figured out and they resent the fact that other people (parents) A) Have more of it than them, and B) Have the power to reduce their own autonomy. Cue the door-slamming years.

When it comes to autistic kids, there are a whole new set of things to think about. Not only might they have sensory issues (too loud, too quiet, too bright, too dim...) but they don't process social rules the same way. So not only might they experience a supermarket differently (ALL THE COLOURS! THE NOISE! THE PEOPLE MOVING ABOUT! - all of which might be cool and exciting to be explored, or terrifying), but they might have more trouble getting the hang of "how we behave in a supermarket" just by observing other people.

My non-autistic husband used to "throw tantrums" in places with high roofs when he was a child. Obviously that got him into trouble with his mother. It was only much later he was able to explain that high-roofed buildings give him an awful, vertiginous feeling as if he's falling towards the ceiling. Even as an adult, there are buildings he physically can't go into. So what LOOKED like bad behaviour was actually a totally logical response to the way he experienced that environment.

Then, of course, if you've explained the rules, remembering them is a different thing. A lot of autistic people have problems with short-term "working" memory. Or distractibility.

One thing that potentially might be interesting is to read articles/books written by autistic adults. A lot of the older stuff written about autistic kids was written when autism was seen as only a childhood problem. Now the range of autism diagnosis is wider, and diagnosed people are getting older, there's more written by autistic people explaining autism from the inside. I think maybe things might be moving away from, "They do X because they're autistic, and we need to make them stop" towards, "Because they are autistic, they experience A or B in a different way, and react to it by doing X. If X is not a healthy/appropriate behaviour, we need to consider how to modulate the experience of A or B so they don't feel the need to do X."

But parenting is hard. It's even harder in modern, particularly Western societies, where it's done almost all by the parents alone. Not only does it mean that parents (particularly first-timers) are on their own with this THING that keeps doing weird stuff and DID NOT COME WITH A MANUAL, but they may not have anyone to just hand it over to so they can have a rest (like handing over your Tamagotchi to the school secretary), let alone get a second opinion ("Does yours do this? Is this normal? Can you have a go and see if you can make it stop?").

Also, it's not done to admit that it's hard (or even so hard that you sometimes wonder whether it was a good idea at all), so you may get the impression you are the only one who finds it so.
 
An additional thought.

Some people do things purely because they know it will upset or annoy someone else. However, in order to do this, the person has to:

1. Have theory of mind: the knowledge that other people have their own beliefs, thoughts, and feelings that are different from yours. Also, that just because you know something, it doesn't mean they know it too.

2. Know that the action to be taken will upset the other person.

3. Have a desire to do the action anyway (which could be for amusement, curiosity, or just a desire to be hurtful/annoying).

We can probably assume that babies don't have the ability to think their way through this process ("Is mummy sleeping? How upset will she be if I wake her up? How much fun will that be? WAHHHH!!!!"). And we know that adults do have the ability. So the ability must develop at some point in childhood.

There is also some discussion about whether autistic people develop theory of mind as early/as well as neurotypical people.

If a child doesn't have theory of mind (yet), then it might be difficult for him to understand that Mummy will ALWAYS be annoyed if we throw eggs on the floor at the supermarket, even if it was done as a serious scientific experiment to find out how hard you have to throw to make them break, or if just a drop will do - and from how high.

Furthermore, autistic people tend to find it more difficult to interpret neurotypical people's emotions, even when they do have theory of mind. So an autistic child might find it more difficult to gauge exactly how much s/he is getting on Mummy's nerves and how much patience Mummy has left.

So says the person with no kids, and who would rather scrub floors (or toilets) all day than look after anybody else's for an hour.
 

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