Children with AS, ADHD and autism during the war?

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I never heard the oldsters refer to “The War” for WW II—honest I didn’t. You have a different experience, that’s all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism#History

Autism was prominently featured in case studies by the 1950s—even the later 40s. I know this because I actually read those case studies.

Kanner published his study in 1943.

I've never thought of how it would have been to be aspie during the war; I've only wondered what life was like here then.

I'm surprised your grandparents said they didn't take it seriously, Joe. It seems that a lot of people, kids and adults alike, were marked by the war.
Although I also heard stories of kids finding unexploded bombs and riding on them, which I found very surprising, because that's not something I would have done as a kid if I understood that it was a bomb. I think you're right about our thinking maybe causing us to be more affected by a war.

That's what it's called here too. Maybe it's a European thing?

My grandparents were just small kids when the second world war was happening. They seemed to be oblivious to most of the awful things that happened. The adults, however, were terrified though.

It was a global thing because it was global war that traumatically changed the whole world.

Don't mean to be attacking him, but Krafty has it ass-backward. Its not that it "hasn't been established in America" (like its trend for the future). Its that it WAS established in America, but over the decades it gradually faded and trended away in America. But in other parts of the world WWII is still often called simply "the War".

The generation of Americans who came of age during the war (my parents' generation) referred to it as "the War" during the war. And continued to call it that until at least the Vietnam/Sixties era when it started to become confusing (because by then we had had two other wars already). So today it sounds quaint to Americans to read a post from a Brit that calls it "the War" in 2018. But back in my childhood it would not have seemed quaint, because back in Sixties Americans also talked about it that way still. Or at least the older folks talked that way.

But it makes sense that in both the British Isles and on the mainland of Europe they would still call WWII "the war" because except for Yugoslavia there haven't been many major wars fought in Europe since the defeat of Hitler.

Its hard to unpack this question.

Small children are very different from both teens and adults, and can be oblivious to things that traumatize teens and adults.

Like I said above American children were probably more traumatized by the Great Depression then by WWII.

Then when you try to subdivide autistic children from NT kids, and subdivide autistic kids into differing function levels, and you try to do that for an era that predated when those terms were even recognized as medical labels its hard to tackle. And many of the men who fought the war often weren't much beyond children themselves in age. Many soldiers on both sides were probably autistics who were only slightly more than children themselves.

And nations differed. Both Sweden and the US were largely untouched by direct fighting in their heartlands. Britain was bombed, but never actually invaded. But China, and mainland Europe experienced actual ground fighting and foreign occupation. So the civilian populations all had very different experiences. And so did the children in those populations.

@ naturalplastic

What you say makes a lot of sense. A country that never saw action on home soil and has fought in several wars since would be more likely to call a war by its name rather than just 'the war'. Here on the other hand, there were bombings and occupation. My country was occupied from April 1940 and until the peace came 5 years and a month later. It was a very big deal to my grandparents who lived through it, and even people in my generation has called it the war.
Although we have had Norwegian soldiers participate in international operations, like the war on terror, there has not been fighting on home soil, so it is natural that the last war that happened still remains the warto us.

Yes, of course, because adults and teens (and even older kids) will have a different understanding of what's going on than small children will. The world of a little kid is much smaller than that of older people.

Anyone saying something like that here would likely be thought to have an attitude, because it's so obvious what the war means when Norwegians say so. At least for my generation and older. I don't know how the younger generations talk about it.

* 1968, Czechoslovakia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pa ... hoslovakia

* 1974, Cyprus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_i ... _of_Cyprus

* 2014, Ukraine (ongoing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass

If you meant "the European community", then no. There is a difference between EU and Europe.

My dad had some very strong AS traits although perhaps not quite significant enough for a clinical diagnosis had such a thing existed at the time. He was growing up in south east England during WWII.

Because he lived in the countryside he was not evacuated to a safer location but I don't think the war really affected him that much. He could watch the endless processions of aircraft going back and forth all the time but there were no targets nearby for the enemy aircraft to attack. He said that V-1 Doodlebug rockets sometimes landed nearby having fallen well short of their intended targets. He never said he was particularly scared by this but he never talked about his emotions anyway and always explained things in a very matter of fact manner.

From what he told us I think he just spent much of the war doing what he had always done; disappearing into the woods behind his house with his dog and absorbing himself in the natural world. He always became so engrossed by things when out in the woods that maybe he just tuned out whatever else was going on.

Thanks for backing up what I said and agreeing with me.

Thanks for backing me up, and agreeing with me. You didn't have to.

naturalplastic, keep dreaming. I wasn't.

Okay. You post a link to an article that basically says the same thing that I said. Your point?

So your INTENTION was to refute what I said. But you are so incompetent at arguing your own point that it backfired and you accidently confirmed what I said.

Got it.

Dude, I said "not many". I never said "not any....wars in Europe since 1945".

The crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968 by the Warsaw Pact and Russia doesn't even count as a real "war" because Czechslovakia pretty much collapsed in days without a fight (not that fighting would have done them any good against the odds).

My point was that as a rule of thumb in most countries in Europe WWII is often still called simply "the war". Nothing in what you linked to argues against that statement.