4:38am May 13, 2013

how to recover from being raised by someone with aspergers

This stopped me in my tracks. I think I’m a good mother. I think the other autistic moms I know are good mothers. Are we kidding ourselves? Are our children ending up scarred by our parenting skills and needing to “recover”?

The entire idea that children need to recover from being raised by autistic parents, is something that was put out there by a handful of people with an agenda. They formed a so called support group, gradually over the years shut out more and more autistic people from the support group, shut out anyone with a positive experience, shut out anyone who disagreed with them, in other words. Or even just had a different experience. Some of this was explicit shutting out. Others of it was stuff like saying “You care about people, are you sure you’re autistic?” And “Your father sounds like a decent guy, he must be extremely high functioning Asperger.” Well it started out with the comments like that, which alienated a lot of us, and then it grew towards more and more shutting us out deliberately until now autistic people aren’t allowed there at all. Except sometimes, if they’re not very identified with autism, whatever the hell that means.

So they shut out everyone with a different experience. Told us it was because they needed a safe space to vent. And that includes telling this to people who liked our autistic parents. Their idea of venting included insulting autistic people in general, insulting all autistic parents, etc.

Then they started not only being a support group, but doing political advocacy. As in, trying to make it so autistic parents would be less likely to get custody in child custody hearings, all other things being equal. They promoted the idea that autistic parents are narcissistic and abusive and can’t give children what they really need, unless the parent is super high functioning. Because we all know that level of abusiveness is correlated with so called functioning level?

Anyway then whenever anyone tried to disagree or say they were doing something horribly wrong and discriminatory, they would tell us that we just didn’t want to admit that autism had a bad side. That autistic people really are less likely to be good parents. That autistic is almost synonymous with abusiveness or emotional neglect.

Some of them themselves are autistic people and also parents, mind you, but I guess none of this applies to them?

But anyway, their “advocacy work” is a huge part of where the stereotype got started. It’s a really good example of why never to combine support groups with political advocacy. They wanted a support group where they had to listen to nobody’s point of view but their own. Which led to a closed atmosphere where they fed into each others belief systems and amplified it. And then they took that as evidence that they were all correct about the matter, and that everyone else just didn’t want to hear how awful parents autistic people are. They accomplished a lot of their closed atmosphere by shutting out anyone who disagreed, then claiming that because nobody was left to disagree then they were right. It was circular and infuriating.

Oh also I think most of their parents weren’t actually diagnosed with autism, even in the loosest and most informal sense. They just started deciding their parents were autistic. Some of them with no more evidence other than that their parents were narcissistic jerks. Similar to the “Cassandra syndrome” women who diagnosed their husbands with Asperger’s and did similar advocacy work around what horrible spouses autistic men make.

And yes it made autistic people who really were parents, feel like total and utter crap. And doubt their parenting skills. And believe that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t be anything other than abusive. And it made other autistic people decide not to be parents, whether or not they’d have made good ones. And it messed with the heads of autistic people who weren’t “super high functioning” but were parents. (One of the best mothers I ever met was diagnosed with autism and a severe intellectual disability growing up, was raped in a mental institution, and went on to confound Child Protective Services by taking perfect care of her severely disabled daughter no matter how many times they came to find evidence that she was a terrible parent. These people would have told her that she either must be a terrible parent because she didn’t meet their definition of high functioning, or else that she must be super high functioning Asperger because she was a good parent. They wouldn’t have it any other way.)

I can’t describe how angry it makes me that all this happened. That it was happening in a support group was bad enough, but that the twisted support group turned into an advocacy group claiming any knowledge of autistic parenting, enrages me. Including enrages me on behalf of the many generations of autistic and otherwise neuro-atypical parents in my family. Which is to say close to every single one of them, given that our family is neurodiverse as far back as you can find. And I can tell you that who made the better parents in my extended family had nothing to do with whether the particular neuro diversity was autism or not. We had problems but that wasn’t the cause.

So no. Don’t believe it. Probably the attitude that we all make terrible parents who must be survived, is inevitable given the hatred and mistrust of disabled parents, and developmentally disabled or mentally ill parents in particular. (Autism has always been seen as a little bit of both those categories, regardless of what it actually is.) But I know that advocacy group made the problem much worse by seeking out publicity for the supposed plight of children of autistic parents – and running everyone out of the group who didn’t have a terrible experience and wouldn’t put up with hearing autistic people dissed in the worst ways possible, so that they had no alternate viewpoints in the end. Ugh.

Normally I don’t post prior Internet drama, but that one goes past Internet drama into something that has and is continuing to have effects on the lives of a lot of autistic people in general.

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