autismserenity:

palpablenotion:

chitarra10:

So this was on the local news tonight.  A mother in a city about 20 minutes south of me has a 10y/o autistic son, and she said that because he’s autistic, she’s afraid he’s going to get hit by a car on the street because he “can’t think” and might just run out into the street without looking.  So she called some city officials and requested that they put up this sign in front of her home to warn drivers that there’s an autistic child in the area.  Within 3 days, they put this sign up just for her.

As an autistic person myself, this is just rubbing me an enormously wrong way.  I don’t like this.  At all.  In fact, I kinda hate it.  It just strikes me as one of those sympathy-addicted Autism Mom™ things that doesn’t take into account the humanity of their autistic kid.  Like she needs to announce to the world that she has no idea how to communicate with her own child, and rather than learning what kind of communication methods he needs as an autistic person, she just assumes that he’s just this unreachable burden she’s forced to bear, and is calling on the community to “help” her deal with this creature she can’t “control.”  And that lowers this poor boy to sub-human status.  Like she thinks they need their own personal “Deer Crossing” sign, but in her cause “Autistic Crossing.”  It just strikes me as so wrong.

What do you think?

the problem here is that all children will at one time or another run out into the street and you can get a city to put a “children at play” sign up to warn for any children playing or petition for a speed bump to be put into the neighbor hood, there are ways to do this without stigmatizing the “special needs” child (i, as an autistic child, did once run into the road in front of a car, and then i didn’t do it again because first, it scared me, second, it scared my parents, and third, i was punished for it, autistic children? are children, we all made mistakes and we do thoughtless things, like all children do)

also, if you’re so worried about your child and traffic and don’t care about what your yard and neighborhood looks like because that sign is a huge eye sore regardless, just put up a fence

The ableist idea that autistic people “can’t think” is so utterly horrifying, too.

Autism Parents™ are especially awful because they spend a lot of time promoting these ideas to one another.

One of the biggest concerns they push on each other is that their kids might just up and run into the street. There is an entire industry of kid leashes, trackers, etc. around it.

My first kid was autistic. In Autism Parent™ terms, we “had a runner.” Bc she started taking off from preschool and getting out the gates and down the stairs toward the street before anybody could notice/catch her.

Fortunately, none of us knew anything about autism at the time, and she wasn’t diagnosed, so the preschool just sat us down and said, “listen, we love your kid, you know that, she’s fantastic, we don’t have the resources she needs, but we would love to give you a referral to a great therapeutic preschool that would really be able to support her.” (Which she did go to, and freaking loved, fortunately.)

And like: in part BECAUSE I didn’t know anything about autism, (and in part because i get that kids are actually human beings, which should be a much more common concept), it was very fucking clear why she was “running.”

Her birth family was super dysfunctional; it wasn’t safe for her to acknowledge that at age three or four, while still living part time with her birth mom; and that created a lot of social anxiety and fear and stress and big feelings. And I’m sure there was all kinds of sensory shit going on that I didn’t know about. And that adds up to the seemingly-random need to flee.

And I think the same thing applies for any autistic kid, or adult, who has that urge to just take off. I definitely have that when I’m too triggered, ffs.

I don’t have it with sensory stuff, but only because I’m a fucking adult so I have the freedom to control a lot of my environment, and the knowledge of what helps, and safe quiet places to calmly go to when I need them.

I wish there were a program for Autism Parents™ that would teach THEM “social skills” like imagining that their kids are conscious human beings, and imagining how they themselves would feel in the kid’s situation. And like assuming that whatever their kid does or says might be reasonable and understandable, and trying to think of what that would mean.

Instead of the other way around – assuming that their kids are irrational-to-unthinking, and that there’s no meaning or value in what they say and do.