Bright, autistic or both? Parents of older children please share your wisdom

[Sumshinebound]

I hope I don’t get hate mail for this post but I am wondering if anyone with older children have found over the years what they suspected to be dare I say it high functioning autism was in fact just the child being sensitive and quite bright. Or both quite bright and autistic? A parent of a severely autistic child who works in a school as a teaching assistant recently said that she feels there is a fine line between autism and high intelligence.

interested to hear if anyone has wondered this themselves and or whether certain quirks turned out to be just that - quirks and as they grew up they showed more of themselves and less of what may be traditionally diagnosed as autism.

appreciate there is no right answer here. Just throwing it out into the mumsnet world. Please don’t send negative comments. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being autistic or not being autistic. And people who are can be highly intelligent and the opposite is probably also true. Just interested to hear about it.

I thought my child was a genius at 5/6 - some of the things she was understanding were gobsmacking. 19 now and despite being very bright, she's not at genius level. She is definitely autistic though. Her development was pretty atypical and some of her peers have caught up. She's also amazing, resilient, kind, funny and interesting. I'm confident that she'll have a great time at university.

It's definitely the case that sometimes parents are worried about autism and it turns out not to be the case, but ime this is with very young children, under three usually.

With older children it's usually the other way round, children who present as very bright, with some quirks/sensitivities being diagnosed later with autism.

Thanks that’s helpful to know

She sounds brilliant! Hope she has a great time at uni

in what way was her development atypical growing up and what traits did she develop that showed the autism clearly over time?

This was me as a child, and likely many women my age - very rule-abiding and fastidious from pre-school age, liked praise, did very well academically but lagged behind socially. It seems to not be an unusual pattern for ND girls. By the time I was late primary I had developed some OCD type behaviours; by the time I was in secondary I was self-harming from anxiety.

Diagnosed in my 30s. Despite being on paper smarter than most of the population and conscientious to the point of neuroticism, I couldn’t keep a job. Eventually went self employed and now doing well.

I see a lot of similarities in my eldest - reading by three, inevitably the class helper etc, some signs of anxiety type behaviour. I guess we will see.

I suspected my eldest son was autistic from a very early age. He's now 19 and just getting his diagnosis this week. Intelligent....yes. but can also have massive meltdown emotionally. Once threatened suicide because he had a bad hair cut....Assessment this Friday 🤞🥰

I'm a teacher and have taught many autistic children over the years. Some were extremely intelligent while others weren't academic at all. I have also taught many neurotypical children who were extremely bright (as well as neurotypical children who struggled at school).

I don't see a correlation between high functioning autism and intelligence although special interests can lead to a child being extremely knowledgeable about a particular subject which could give a misleading impression of their general intelligence.

Many children with high functioning autism are also big readers and many also find it easier to talk to adults than children. Both of these can give them a vocabulary which is advanced for their age.

For full disclosure, I'm an autistic woman. I was bright and did well academically but found the social side tricky, especially at secondary school. Adult diagnosis.

I have several children, all with above average IQs and two with genius level. All late diagnosed as autistic.

I don't think that TA knows what she is talking about tbh.

Some autistic kids are incredibly bright. Others are academically average or below average.

Equally, some neurotypical kids (and indeed some kids who are ND but not autistic) are incredibly bright. Others are academically average or below average.

Autism (and other forms of ND) can be missed in children who are very bright because their intelligence can help them to mask/over-compensate for their neurodivergence to the extent that the ND traits are ignored or dismissed as random quirks etc. This is often what has happened where people are diagnosed much later in life after having spent years wondering what's wrong with themselves.

On the other side of the coin, there are some autistic children whose parents are simply in denial of the autism and prefer to explain away the child's difficulties as a by-product of their high intelligence. Which is bollocks.

I don’t think you are wrong exactly, well actually i think in time we will be getting rid of this blanket concept of autism because it simply isn’t helpful, the needs of those who are highly intelligent but struggle with some social skills and often coupled with anxiety is too different from those with “severe” autism for a joint diagnosis to be helpful, there’s actually probably a case for multiple different diagnosis as autism is a symptom not a diagnosis in its own right as far as I can observe. I have one of these bright kids - diagnosed at age 2, non verbal, learned to speak,definitely struggling with the typical social interactions young, as a teen crippling anxiety and behind peers in social development by years, but by mid 20’s is settled, happy, and whilst economically not great they are working using the skills they were gifted in as a tot professionally. Is she autistic, mental health issues, complex anxiety disorder? It doesn’t actually matter as long as we treat people as individuals and accept them for who they are.

Mine is a teenager now but he was very good with numbers/letters at an early age and had a bit of an obsession with them. His favourite toys used to be things like his bath letters. He could count to over a hundred at 2 and he just somehow knew how to read without having to go through the sounding out phase. He’s a teenager now and very autistic, he’s in special school as mainstream didn’t work out from early on. I would say he’s still very naturally intelligent, the information he knows and remembers is mind blowing, but it won’t show up in his qualifications as he barely goes to any lessons other than maths so unlikely to get more than one gcse. He also massively struggles with the social side and barely goes out now

I went to Oxford Uni. Most of the people I went with were autistic, none of them (to my knowledge) diagnosed. The old ‘Asperger’s’ label does seem to correlate with high academic ability and early focus on academia, which makes sense given that hyperfocus and lack of social understanding are two stand-out autistic metrics.

DS1 (12) has a dual AuDHD diagnosis and appears to be in the top few students in his year group for all subjects.

As a clinically trained neuroscientist, I can assure you that autism is definitely NOT a symptom. A symptom is a relatively simple, isolated indicator. Autism is a very complex condition, with lots of interconnected symptoms that form a particular syndrome.

There is no "blanket concept" of autism, neither in science nor in clinical diagnostics if it's done properly. Nor, for that matter, in provision of support as high functioning autistic people are often treated as "not properly autistic" and denied any help in education, work or social security system on the basis of "being bright" (as if being bright equals being able to cope). The OP is one if the illustrations of this widespread attitude.

Thanks all. Re above - I’m not suggesting being bright means you don’t need lots of additional support

Really appreciate everyone’s insights. I really do wonder whether there is a more nuanced diagnoses than blanket ‘autism’. As there is so much variance between someone who is non verbal for instance and or not displaying empathy traits compared with someone who is displaying a lot of verbal and possibility academic ability as well as empathy but struggling with anxiety and or other sensitivities. Both examples need a lot of support but sometimes in different ways. And parents or teachers may not always know the signs to spot with such a blanket reference and diagnosis. High functioning autism may also be misleading as they can’t always function well in some respects but can in others. Lots of lawyers and doctors for example …

anyway not sure what the answer is. Is it a whole new area that hasn’t been properly developed. Plus so many people and children are now being diagnosed. surely the numbers are not that high, or are they? Do we reach a point where actually the majority of society / children are struggling and all need more support - or do we need to change the system. Do we need a better system that supports how diverse we all are but so many have been so good at masking for so long?

Humans are so incredibly complex and I find myself thinking that this needs a bit more work. In a time where there is no money to support real change. Harrumph.

My siblings and I got diagnosed as gifted. Not diagnosed as autistic. Definitely both.

In fact everyone I know who was diagnosed gifted I now recognize as autistic/what used to be Asperger's, just hidden to greater or lesser extents.

It sounds like you might be struggling with the idea of an autism diagnosis. But remember two things: it's already what it is, whether you put a label or not. And: the label gets triggered by something. Either a need for more support (in which case it's a good thing) or perhaps better awareness (in which case it's a good thing or a bad thing or an irrelevant thing). But if the lable is a bad thing, the problem is the labeling and the "building your identity around a diagnosis" and the self-fulfilling prophecies that are the problem, not the autism.

So I would focus less on whether it's possible to be that bright without being autistic (in my extensive experience: no) and more on whether it's possible to be that bright without being diagnosed with or suffering from the fact that you have autism (in my extensive experience: absolutely).

I think the opposite it true for my child. She is autistic and her IQ puts her into the top 1%. I think her intelligence helped her mask so the ASD so teachers didn’t see it.