9:39pm September 8, 2014

➸ And yes, in case you've guessed.

youneedacat:

That means I’m one of the infamous Silicon Valley Auties.

You know, the ones whose parents moved there to find jobs in the tech industry, and then had lots of autistic children because they themselves were either on or close to the spectrum.

My father and mother met because my mom’s brother was…

My family is rather similar to this(nearly everyone at least on my dad’s side is ND and Im pretty sure my father is autistic) but we definitely dont have the silicon valley cluster(no one went into STEM. At all, as far as I know). My entire family is ND and they all married into entirely ND families. People who come from largely NT families are always shocked at the bizarre variances of cognition and perception that crop up and the inexplicable things various relatives have said. Maybe not a walking Baron Cohen stereotype exactly but not far off.

Yeah my family was definitely not a mostly-STEM family. They came from mostly farming and working-class jobs. My father and uncle (on the other side) went into STEM, and that’s how he met my mother. My brothers are both in STEM jobs. But the family as a whole, not STEM, at all. My father talks about graduating eighth grade and realizing that he’d done something that his grandfather – who he really looked up to – had never done. My grandfather on the other side had an eighth grade education but was an autodidact. Both sides of the family had people who put a big emphasis on education, but it wasn’t always formal education.

I would like to see more discussion of poor and working-class rural autistic and neurodivergent families, because there’s a whole way that plays out that is not the same as people in STEM fields in the city. And that’s basically the vast majority of my family. My dad grew up on a farm and went to a one-room schoolhouse. He learned about electronics by taking things apart and putting them back together again. And most of his learning, even when it came to his STEM job, didn’t happen in tech school.

My brother is now in a similar position – he has a STEM job that he has no degree attached to at all. I won’t say much more because he values his privacy, but he’s definitely following in the family footsteps of getting jobs that we don’t have the formal qualifications for, and excelling at them.

Prior to my parents’ generation though – farmers, millworkers, that kind of thing. And still a lot of people going that route.

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