Children pretending to have autism

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I am not a parent myself, but I've recently at the age of 29 started to suspect I might have aspergers, so I've been thinking back to things I used to do as a child.

I have always been able to mostly prevent myself from making strange noises, or performing strange actions in social situations, both as a child and as an adult. So it's never been obvious that I have aspergers or autism, and hence my only recently suspecting I have it. I sometimes however used to do things that my mum would tell me to stop, as otherwise if I kept doing them "people would think there was something wrong with me", so sometimes I would do things on purpose, almost deliberately behaving as if I had autism to annoy her. Now it makes me wonder, while it is possible for a kid to be doing something like this and be pretending, but do you think that it is likely that if a kid infact chooses to do this sort of behaviour, it might be a sign of some underlying personality they connect with? i.e. if a kid likes to think they're autistic, they probably are, even if they're not obviously so.

As a child did you know the things you were doing were autistic behaviors or was it just that they were considered weird and your mom wanted you to stop?

I think your title is misleading b/c unless I am misunderstanding you, it sounds like certain things you did made your mom feel self-conscious and she did not want you or her to be judged. If I am understanding you, you feel you could have stopped doing those thing but opted instead to do it more. That does not read as pretending to be autistic. That reads as being pissed at your mom telling you to stop and then you reacting by doing it more.

Is an autistic person more likely to respond that way? I am not sure. I think an NT might be annoyed and go passive-aggressive, too. I also don't think having -some- control means you are not autistic. Sometimes my son can follow directives that make no sense to him, sometimes he can't, and sometimes I do think he opts not to. I think NTs have more control over the things they do and do not do, and in many cases may care also about how people view them, when told something does not look -right.- I think an NT child could also just as easily be annoyed at his/her mom ruining his fun, and maybe get a kick out of disobeying.

I bet I did not answer a thing you asked...