Aspies For Freedom

Found this article at the Feral Children site, very interesting, don't know if anyone has posted this but anyway, here it is:

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/autism.php

I don't see why there would be a connection. Feral children are supposed to be children living without humans, in the wild, often with animals, and it's often been disputed whether many of the alleged feral children really had lived for extended periods of time in the wild. I can see why someone who had done so, assuming some of the stories about feral children are true, could exhibit autistic-like traits, but that would simply be due to not having had the opportunity to develop their natural potential. In other words, they wouldn't be born autists or even be autists, their normal neurology would simply grow in the wrong direction because they didn't grow up in a natural habitat.

In any event, I don't really see why these feral children cases would be cases of autism. Is it so hard to imagine that maladjustment could happen to the most normal child, when left without care, alone, wandering the wild?

But how many of the symptoms of autism stem from the fact that we have our own communication styles that are not mutually intelligible with other people's?  That would certainly cause difficulties with social interaction and communication no matter was innately wired.  Think about the Deaf kids whose parents refused to expose them to sign in the early years, trying to teach them how to talk.  Many of them do learn how to talk, but only after they learn sign language at a residential school!  English is as inaccessible to them as NT body language is to us, and expecting us to learn that first is just ludicrous.

I think there's also reason to believe some feral children were abandoned because of neurological differences that the parents refused to accept.

Well, on the feral children website only few of them were intentionally abandoned by parents (some of them for an apparent mental disability), so I doubt that even 20% of feral children are/were autistic. Most feral children became feral as victim of circumstances (parents-alcoholics, war killing both parents, wolf stealing the kid etc.). The fact they showed later autism-like symptoms is easy explainable - similar symptoms are also showed by traumatized and abused people. The main difference is that autism is genetic/oganic while behaviour of feral and/or abused people has psychological reasons.

My thoughts exactly.

My point is that people are far too quick to attribute each and every one of our problems to being born autistic, when a number of them have more to do with being born autistic in a neurotypical world.

First, we need to recognize that everyone's got problems--no matter how normal they are. Second, problems often have multiple causes. It's almost never really just because you were born this way or that, or only because society was like this or like that.

Did you read the other parts? There was one bit, I forget where, that said that maybe the children were abandoned in the first place cuz they were autistic, not that the feralness came from that.

Well I know several stories about feral children...most of them myth.

Though the story of Amala and Kamala the two indian girls that was raised by wolves was over exagerated. Most likely they were abandoned and had some sort of mental disablity,

I don't think there is a major simularity..or why it's releivent it at all to the Feral children phenomon. Autism I mean

What about Genie? She's not a myth.

The interesting thing about feral children, in my mind, is the interesting implications they have for sociology. These are people as they would be disconnected from other people--and that's a fascinating question: Are we who we were always going to be; or did our environment shape us?

Autistic people are like feral children in a way, in that we also grow up with less social influence than most because we pick up less naturally on the communication we get from others. In fact, I think autistic people are an untapped gold mine for the science of sociology: Here we have people who, despite growing up in a social environment, were never quite part of it. There's a lot of fascinating observation to be done in comparing how we see the world; and anyway, I'm sure the autistic participants would be glad to be part of an effort to increase human knowledge about NTs for a change, rather than to pick apart the weirdnesses of the autistic mind.

Sort of like in the book "The Jungle Book". Rudyard Kipling was my favourite author, when I was a boy. Maybe that explains it.

Yeah, but Disney totally cuteified it.

Yeah I know. I was looking for a picture to go along with my post, and almost all pictures I found on google were Disney related. After going through page after page, I gave up. Even I'm not that obsessed.

The Book is a lot more different then the movie BTW I read a lot of Kiplings stuff

The book is brilliant, as is the sequel. I read loads of Kipling as a child.