HFA in Boy's Club

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Actually, you are right. That's why I involved myself in the first place. I thought I saw a glimmer of hope. It's just that the stuff about neurotypicals having the 'gift of empathy' and that sort of crap really stuck in my craw. I'm finding I'm very stressed out these days due to life. I have a lot going on now. I'm probably being oversensitive and losing my patience because of having to say the same things over and over again. Sometimes it feels like chipping away at Ayers' Rock with a toothpick, it's that slow a process.

I'm going to be a lot less active on WP in the foreseeable future. Just too stressed out, and I'm losing my cool and saying things I haven't thought through well enough. Aspie bluntness is just not that great a teaching tool.

I'll be around a bit, but will try to avoid putting my foot in my mouth

Have a nice evening

Sometimes one has to put one's foot in one's mouth

In order to know what the foot smells like.

Otherwise, one will not be able to remedy any stinky smell which emanates from it.

In other words, people have to make mistakes in order to learn from mistakes.

I really do think the culprit here was rigidity. There was a part of the OP that I think wanted to do something positive for this child. He just could not expand his mind beyond viewing the boy as having NT character issues. He went from questioning the validity of the diagnosis for the boy, to doubting the validity of the diagnosis as a whole, to finally thinking of autistic people in an ablest way through his own way of thinking. Each iteration seemed to get worse than the prior one.

The person I feel empathy for most (b/c ahem, yes, I can) is that poor boy. I don't know what lead him to being raised by a great-grandmother -- but I cannot imagine the journey that took him there was not full of trauma that would hit an autistic child especially hard. I wish the person who came here was the great-grandmother herself. A club coordinator can only do so much, anyway. I suspect that the great grandmother is in the weeds herself, and could really use the guidance. From what the OP described as her community (a one stoplight town) she probably does not have a lot of options or resources.

This thread was both fascinating and frustrating. It also reminded me of why I wound up pulling my kid from public school and homeschooling him- because otherwise well-meaning people who I believe really *wanted* to help him, were probably never going to actually understand him, and were pretty butt-headed about being open to learning more about what was REALLY going on inside his head, and learning about what was really going to help him (instead of being dead-set on getting him to respond to their chosen methods and beliefs). They wanted him to fit neatly into some definition, and have *predictable* disabled behavior. Worst of all, much like the OP, they seemed so convinced that he was being a pain in the butt on purpose. As though he just loved the stress created by his misbehavior.

My son never in a million years would have done that Handshake thing. He would have seen it as ludicrously meaningless and therefore impossible to participate in. There are so many things here that I feel are being misread. Like the tomatoes in the salad thing. That actually made me laugh. He's not trying to make life miserable for everyone. He's trying to connect. Extroverted Aspies have a really, really hard time.

If I were to give any advice to the OP, I'd say he should just matter-of-factly explain the situation to Hal in these situations. (For example:) "This is the reason we do [or don't do] this. I can't make you do [or not do] it, but if you refuse, people may think you're a jerk. Your intention may not be for others to think you a jerk, but that will be the outcome." And the adult may have to accept that the kid will hear this information and yet not change his behavior, and be okay with that. The kid may need to let that information percolate for awhile, and it may be an enormous challenge for the kid to change *his* behavior and do something that feels ludicrous to him. This doesn't make the kid rude or conniving or manipulative or dense. I don't know how many times the teachers at my kid's former public school would complain to me, frustrated, about something my kid wasn't doing, when they had just explained to him what to do [or not do]. As though simply by explaining the correct way to behave, a person can instantly adjust and move on. Like say a person is afraid of balloons. Sit the person down and say, "balloons are no threat to you." Then you bring out a balloon and the other person shrieks and hides, and you get frustrated-- "but I just explained to him that balloons aren't anything to be afraid of!" The fearful person isn't being unreasonable; YOU are. I think there is a lot of this going on in this situation.

I hope it is OK to hijack, but welcome back, Carpenter_Bee!

Thanks ASD_Mommy

There were so many things I wanted to respond to in this thread but I don’t have the energy. I’m glad you do.

I agree with you that I feel good intentions from the OP, but there’s a lot to untangle here and I don’t know whether he wants to do that. :/

I read the whole thread and I feel I kinda understand how the OP feels. :/

The one thing is that it's impossible to "see" anyone's intent, ASD or not.

As a parent (or a teacher, or group leader like the OP is), I guess some of us fear that if we don't correct a wrong (or bad) behavior immediately, it will be the same as encouraging the behavior to happen again. I have to admit that I have been making mistakes on guessing my stepson's (who's also HF ASD) intents, same as his dad.
Now that I have lived with him long enough at least I can sometimes sense that I was making wrong assumptions and get my SS to talk about it and sort out the misunderstanding. To be honest though, I really don't know how many more times I wasn't able to catch them.

I guess what I want to say is:
Asking an NT to think like an ASD is just as unnatural as asking an ASD to think like an NT.
It took me quite a while to learn to do the stop and check :/