Aspies For Freedom

suddenly the concept of NT genocide sounds quite promising....but to spare nice current and ex girlfriends........maybe we should just kill that forum  :twisted:

god i love my twisted genius..

Ian :]

late addition to this topic.  I would have some questions for Ms Singer mainly around the relationship between ASpar and Ms Sheila Jennings Linehan.  At one time it seemed that Ms Linehan was overseeing a committee of ASpar devoted to nixing custody arrangements in divorce if the parent had AS - no exceptions.   Merlin from Tassie and I were sure that it was highlighted on the site but after all the brouhaha, - Ms Linehan threatened to sue for libel all the folks who wrote something about her article  - all reference to the committee disappeared from the site.  Doesn't  mean the agenda has disappeared - probably laying low for a while to let the dust settle.
  
Really the central question of all is, if Ms Singer thinks she's a great parent, what about the guaranteed negative impact of ASpar on the future lifestyle choices of her AS daughter?  Or doesn't she count?

The view from the left side of the fence:

http://alyric.blogspot.com/2005/10/guide...nting.html

Thanks for the concern Lili.  Regarding Canada, Michelle Dawson has a site that is very informative about life for autistics here.  I'm sure you're already familiar with her work, but here are some links anyways for anyone who isn't.  She is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, and autistic.   She does paint a pretty negative picture about the situation here.  

http://www.autistics.org/library/dawson.html
http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_02.html

Does she know about AFF?

Payoola is quite right.  The situation in Canada is dire  I used to think that nothing beat Autism Canada until the ASA put up their 'Getting the Word Out" campaign.  They're all the same really, but Canada has had more practice in sidelining autistics - standard operating procedure there.  

Michelle Dawson and her research crew in Montreal are this tiny bright light of reality in this world of second rate autism research gloom.  Michelle has a quick topic board  - haven't got the link  - check out google - and I really think that keeping up with the stuff Michelle writes and the Diva brings up is the only way to get some idea of what's happening.  

Not, btw that I haven't had some disagreements with Michelle.  She has this problem you see with people writing things blithely that they shouldn't have written so hastily.  So she makes you think about accuracy and not using the stuff you used two years ago - things may have changed  I've got to do a bit of editing myself.  The one thing that Mixchelle has really made me think about is the idea of linear spectrums - it sounds like a reasonable idea - autism one end, Asperger's the other-  but if you really look at it it doesn't make sense and it's a flaky way of describing autism, if you want to be accurate.

Lili - I could write volumes about NT parents - but since I've joined   the local AS society as the Secretary - I've had the chance to meet a fair cross section of parents.  Yep - the Al Aqsa are there in force, more's the pity, but there are more parents who are just great and so supportive of the autisticness of their kids - and it shows - their kids are the ones who are learning and have some self esteem.   It's tough to be a parent.

About the SBC systematising theory - Michelle doesn't like it much - but I do.  You used some really great words on the AWARES conference to describe the fact that what gets written about autism is by people who are really good empathisers - but can they empathise with spectrumites?   The answer is IMO almost definitely not.   This is a really important point and one I think should be broadcast far and wide.   A very odd thing, but two days before you wrote that, I wrote something similar - must be something in the water!

that webpage on the first post of this thread page looks like a revival and reversal twist of the old 'Battleheim refridorator mother' theory.

I saw a website of children of autistic parents once. It was very negative. I don't think an autistic person is automatically a bad parent.
A lot of people blame their parents' mistakes for everything wrong in their lives long after they grow up. If their parents were horrible people I can see why, but there are a few people that I think judge their parents too harshly.

My parents were very unhappy, mentally disturbed people who were sometimes unable to parent at all, but I know they weren't that way on purpose, and I know they felt they were doing the best they could. They were both NTs.

I'm going to have to say that being raised by an aspie parent is not good, from what I've been put through for the last 8 years did a number on me, I had absolutely nobody other then me.  I myself am an aspie and so is my mom.  I have nothing against aspies but I'm going to have to say that we should not be responsible to raise kids.

at least I know now not to have kids, I dont want them to go through the same thing as me.

I'm an Aspie child of two Aspie parents. My mom raised me, though, because my dad died very early on.

I had an abusive childhood--but not at the hands of my Aspie mother. The problems came from the men who told her they loved her, married her, and then targeted her Aspie child--me--for their own version of schoolyard bullying.

I thought for a long time that my mom was NT with anxiety and depression problems, but then I began to recognize her as an Aspie, like me... only she has a very different personality from me, so I didn't see it right away.

But, when you lok at things concretely, you can see that my mom is socially awkward, loves to lecture on her interests (generally issues of health, education, and currently messianic Jews--no, she's not Jewish), has a loud, unmodulated voice, and generally refuses to follow the norm of the world. She hates fiction of all sorts and sees no point in small talk or social conventions; but she is relatively successful in the workplace.

I'd say my mom's a well-adjusted Aspie; better than me--she's had more experience--though she completely refuses to admit that she might be an Aspie, or else on the AS side of NT. That's because she is an occupational therapist and when she works with autistic children she sees only the very low-functioning end of the spectrum--the children with low IQs, who might have to be taught to feed themselves and such, have never used language, written, signed, or spoken, in their lives, and communicate mostly by having tantrums. No wonder she never connected autism with me, herself, or my father--all of us with above-average IQs, and my father quite possibly genius-level.

I don't know much about him; but my mother says my father was an introverted, eccentric, intelligent computer programmer who worked on speech recognition. He died way back in 1985, when I was only two, so I don't remember him. She says I take after him, though I'm a physics student and not a computer programmer.

In any case, my mom wasn't a perfect parent--still isn't. She often punished me out of anger, and was unpredictable. The only thing you could count on was that she would closely regulate what we ate, watched, read, listened to, etc. because she had very precise ideas about diet, education, and child-raising in general. We drank no milk, because she thought it was bad for us (we had plenty of vegetables, though, so I don't think we were actually short on calcium), and ate no candy or other junk food. We were told Santa Claus was a myth from infanthood, and so never believed in him to begin with. Fairy tales were banned; fiction was discouraged; any book which had magic or the supernatural in it was banned. We did not celebrate Christmas, Halloween, or Easter. As a result, I became an avid reader of fantasy and science-fiction literature.

My mom doesn't acknowledge the existence of AS, either in herself, my father, or me.... and possibly in my littlest sister, who is eleven years old, is introverted and very intelligent, and has special interests. No stereotypies or communication problems, though, so she might simply be a gifted child rather than an Aspie.

My mother was not a perfect parent; and she is very eccentric; but she did love me--and had no trouble showing it. Had she given me more consistency and predictability, she could have greatly improved my childhood. Her eccentricities bothered us sometimes, but my sisters and I got plenty of Christmas, candy, and fairy tales from our grandparents--and, exposed to opposing viewpoints from the very beginning, we learned to think for ourselves much earlier than most children do.

My mother was never abusive. No, the abuse came from the two NT husbands she married after my father died. Actually, NT is a loose term for them... one was bipolar, the other a sociopath.

Like many Aspies, my mother is relatively gullible; she is also physically beautiful, even now in her fifties after three children and a lot of heartbreak. Naturally, with a bit of bad luck, her beauty attracted the worst of men... and she believed them when they said they loved her. She was also desperate for help in raising me, a typically difficult Aspie as I had regular tantrums well into my teen years. (Had she had more faith in herself, I think she could easily have raised me alone. I did not "need a strong father", as she insists.)

Her first marriage came when I was nine, to a man with bipolar disorder, and lasted six months. This on its own wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't been very unpredictable, (which is horrid for a child with AS), violent, and angry. I think perhaps the bipolar wasn't really his problem--that's a brain-chemical problem--but was aggravating an underlying, bullyish nature.

The second marriage came when I was eleven. The man who charmed my mother this time was a compulsive gambler who gambled away my mother's carefully saved emergency fund, our college funds, and two mortgages on our house. He also pretended to work when he actually wasn't working, pretended to go to college to become an engineer when he didn't know basic algebra, and covered up a six-month stint in prison for stealing a car.

By the time I was thirteen, I knew my stepfather's secrets, but my mother would not believe me. She loved him; I did not; and I am more logical than she is; so it was natural that I should discover his secrets first (though my intuitive NT grandmother had serious suspicions--had she lived with us, she might have uncovered his ruses within weeks).

Eventually, he tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill he had made on a new computer he said he needed for his nonexistent college classes. The police caught him; my mother tried to cover for him, but I gathered evidence, hid in my room, and called the police. He had to plead guilty for five years' probation. He knew what prison meant, and that a child-abuse complaint would send him there; so the physical abuse diminished greatly. I did have to spend a night at my grandmother's due to a death threat, the seriousness of which I have no knowledge.

I left for college before the probation ran out, completing high school early and leaving home just after I turned 17. My two younger sisters learned to hide; being more diplomatic than I, the older of the two seems to have experienced less abuse than I did, and the youngest, just a toddler, was always--thankfully, since babies are so fragile--his favorite.

Two years after I left for college, my stepfather told me he was going to leave my mother. There is a strange sort of closeness between victim and abuser; I was the only one he told before he left.

My mother currently has a live-in boyfriend. He is physically disabled and older than she is; so I don't think he's capable of much physical abuse. He seems rather easygoing, and perhaps tempers my mother's obsessions a little, so that my little sister drinks milk, eats a little chocolate, and "secretly" (my mother knows, but my sister doesn't realize) reads both fiction and nonfiction about her favorite subject--animals, especially birds, cats, and horses. Maybe love's lottery has given my mother a decent man this time around. I can only hope.

Amy and Darkcode-
I liked your "NT parent" comebacks