Autism...?

[Hawkmoon269]

It's very important that I start by saying that I'm not trying to upset anyone or cause any offence. Please don't read anything into my question that's not there!

But aibu to not understand why so many people on mn seem to have children who are autistic or on the autistic spectrum?

I have 2 (young) children. One is at a large state primary school. Neither have any friends or classmates who are autistic. None of our family friends are. None of my dc's friend's siblings are. We go to lots of groups (all inclusive things ) and no autistic children (or siblings that I know of). In my student days I nannied for a boy with aspergers. That's it - my sum total of people I know/ have met with children affected.

I've met lots of children with other sn, but it feels like on mn every other poster has a child on the autistic spectrum.

As I understand it, the definition isn't too clear with very high functioning autism (ie people "on the scale" but only just. That was my understanding from about 10 years ago - I'm sure research has moved on since then!

Anyway, not trying to be controversial - just genuinely curious. What do you think?

Cookery for DD - take one slice of bread. And one piece of plain chicken breast. No flavourings. No herbs. No additives. No slime. No jelly. No pink red or brown bits.

Ensure dining room is completely free of smell.

Eat.

Parents of children with SN spend their lives under siege; beset by a child who's behaviour often precludes any social contact, teachers to whom a 1 day training course equals instant expert, professional experts whose best strategies failed years ago and who write reports based on 10 minutes spent with the dc and bear no relation to anything about their behaviour or personality, and government departments that think £50 a week is adequate recompense for back-to-back 24 hour shifts with no toilet/coffee/meal/sleep breaks ever. Oh, and the media constantly telling them they're lazy scroungers for not working on top of caring for their dc.

And you wonder why SN parents are a little touchy sometimes

I have shared on here before how we (actually ds1's first teacher at special school) got him eating. It took a year, but we were so so so so so grateful to him. I still love watching him tucking into an enjoying food now and he's been eating properly again for about 5 or 6 years now.

The op did sound relatively neutral, but it still made my teeth itch.

As someone said very early on, what answer to the question could there possibly be? If there are lots of posters who have children with asd, so what? There are now a lot of people who have children with asd!

You cannot extrapolate things from your own personal experience.

How, saintly?

OP. Although you may have set out not to offend. I think you must appreciate that for lots of parents, having a child with ASD can be very isolating and often hard to get a diagnosis, and even when that happens, school life is fraught with worry and the responses from other parents
Bearing that in mind it was always going to be difficult starting your post with 'I didn't mean to cause offence' to then go onto to say, 'people refer to their dc being ASD whilst posting about other unrelated stuff' was less than tactful, untrue and inflammatory

@Hawkmoon269

taggie why so aggressive?! Seriously? I was just WONDERING. That's all! Good grief. I'm going to ask for this thread to be pulled. There's some scary people online tonight!

We don?t tend to delete whole threads at the original poster?s request unless they are total bunfights full of personal attacks, not least because obviously people have taken the time to reply to them.
So we will let this one stand for now.
Thanks
MNHQ

Basically a sensory desensitisation programme schobe. So he would eat crisps (if they were Walkers Ready Salted, nothing else). Anyway his teacher started by putting a teeny tiny piece of baked bean sauce on the edge of a crisp. Once he was eating that (which took a few months), he made a crisp sandwich, - broke one crisp into quarters and put one baked bean between two pieces. Once he was eating that a tiny bit of mashed potato on the crisp, then mashed potato crisp sandwich, then mashed potato with baked bean sauce. Then a tiny bit of casserole sauce on the crisp.

Anyway after about a year he was eating casseroles (that actually came in quite quickly at the end). From there he was more willing to try other things, so we just kept dishing up foods and he slowly expanded his range. Now he really does eat anything at all. He loves roast dinners, has scoffed BBQ chicken tonight, eats pasta (that was one of the last things to be accepted - maybe 6 months ago, so that took about 5 years to get him to eat).

I suspect he had an aversion to the textures. Or maybe smells.

Admittidly the food reference was a pretty crap one, DS2 (the one with the autism) is a terrible eater so I should have known

Another thing worth emphasising again is that the dx of autistic spectrum is an extremely wide range... So it does tend to affect a higher number of children than other types of specific SN.

Ok, I made a comment about people saying they had an asd child in unrelated posts. What I meant was when people post about a difficult situation or whatever and as PART of their op or subsequent posts mention their dc's sn. So it's thought to be relevant but the op isn't "what do do about my asd dc and food/school etc". Hope that makes sense.

I don't really know if this is the appropriate time to ask this, but I have been wondering for a while (and bearing in mind I have no real experience of SN and I am not trying to be naive its just something I have no understanding of, I guess its like a foreign language).

If you have a child with SN is the official diagnosis very important and who makes it?

I've seen 'pushing for/getting the official diagnosis' a lot on mn but I don't really know what that means and what happens as a result of that.

Also the mention of adults arranging for themselves to be tested. From what I have heard (mainly on mn and the press) parents have to fight for support and services for SN children, is there much out there for adults, what does the diagnosis provide for an adult?

I am really sorry if I offend anyone, I seem to do that all the time so let me apologise in advance. I am a regular poster, I just have some questions and when I read it I never feel its the right time to ask. Also I wouldn't want to ask this in real life because I'd be worried about making people uncomfortable.

I had also meant to say because from what I understand something like autism, isn't 'treatable' as such, its not like being diagnosed with a physical illness like diabetes. I know therapies exist but I just wondered is the diagnosis so you can receive the 'treatment' or what happens?

FWIW I do think you meant to ask the question innocently

Ruby, you will probably get a more comprehensive answer on the SN board.

Also I'd like to apologise to any parents here who've had a tough (or horrendous) time and feel like my post was disrespectful to their experiences. You're right - I don't fully understand and never will. But I'd like to try. You're also right in thinking that my dc will at some stage have asd children in their classes/lives out of school. All the more reason for me to try to understand.

Such an odd question

I will also add that IMHO you are unlikely to see an autistic child at a "group" even an "inclusive" one.

DS just can not manage that environment. At preschool age "groups" generally ended with me (in tears) profusely apologising to another (or several) parents (who were either tutting or looking at me with pity) whilst I removed a screaming DS. We very quickly moved onto special needs groups.....

"So many" people on MN use slings instead of buggies.

"So many" people on MN practise natural term breastfeeding.

"So many" people on MN fancy Justin Fletcher.

Take any minority category and you'll find "so many" people on Mumsnet who fit into it. Because, to begin with, there are loads and loads of posters on Mumsnet. Far, far more by several orders of magnitude than you could possibly know in real life. Also, often people are more inclined to be upfront online where they are anonymous than they are in real life.

So, for example, if you walked into a group of 200 mothers of two-year-olds and said "Is anyone here still breastfeeding?" probably one or two would be. But it's a bit of a toss-up whether they'd tell you about it, because they've seen the Little Britain sketches and the GMTV phone-ins and the BBC Breakfast segments on attachment parenting, and they know what the public reaction tends to be. On here, though, ask if anyone's still breastfeeding a two-year old and you'll get a couple of dozen women happy to tell you about it.

Partly the number of parents on MN who have children on the autistic spectrum is just a factor of this phenomenon (let's call it the Fancying Justin Fletcher Effect or FJFE). But parents of children on the autistic spectrum also tend to feel a need for support and understanding from other parents in a similar position in a way that those who fancy Justin don't. And that means they will gravitate towards sources of support, like MN. And once here they won't necessarily stick to a SN ghetto (would be odd if they did).

So it's a twofold thing -- the FJFE means that parents of children on the autistic spectrum are more visible on MN while the fact that they group together here for support means that probably they are a slightly bigger proportion on MN than in RL.

Mentioning ASD is relevant because otherwise someone will say "well, why don't you do X?" and the poster would say "That wouldn't work because DC has ASD" and then other posters will jump on them and want to know why they didn't say that before and accuse them of dripfeeding. I've seen that happen. So it's easiest to mention upfront anything that might potentially become relevant later in the thread.

I think the SN board is such a wealth of information that anyone searching for Asd related issues will come across it. That's how I found it and how I got much needed help, very kindly, by other parents. They helped me untangle the mass of info and decisions.

thanks for the apology, OP

if you want to learn more about ASD, come on over to the SN section and read, we don't bite can't vouch for DD though

A diagnosis often means the difference between support (which is minimal at the best of times) and fuck all.

It also means the child stops being labelled "naughty" and instead is treated with some tolerance.

It means a parent/carer can narrow down the range of behaviour management strategies and therapies available to those more likely to be beneficial.

It's shorthand when talking to ignorant judgmental fuckers the general public, who seem to think it polite to proffer advice such as "a goid smack would cure him/her of that" while staring in full pearl-clutching cats-bum-mouthing horror at a child behaving "abnormally" (known to those in the know as the child implementing their own coping strategies to handle a confusing and terrifying world)