Dos and Don'ts, what worked for you as a kid and what didn't

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I think your friend did have a point about why only autistic kids. I have read The Difficult Child and now I am reading The Challenging Child and what I am seeing here is, "why is it that when a kid is autistic or has a disorder, they are expected to change their personalities" but when a kid is just difficult, no one expects them to change and their personalities are not considered flaws like they are with autism. Instead the parents just work with them and learn to try and understand them and guess what, they do get better and improve but with autism, there is all this therapy and the kid expecting to just change than being worked with while the other parents just have to change their approach with their child but with autistic kids, it's like don't change your approach with them, fix them. get rid of their behaviors because it's not normal and not a personality, it's a flaw, change it change it. It felt so unfair. It also showed me that even a wrongful diagnoses can be harmful for a child. I mean just imagine if a kid was wrongfully diagnosed with AS, now all his personalities will be seen as AS and now all of a sudden he is expected to change and be more social, etc. and then the kid is unhappy. But then he is an adult and realizes he is just an introvert and socially awkward and has strong hobbies, and he was just a difficult child so he might have had features that were often associated with autism but he never had autism. Now he is resentful and angry about his past because of what he had to go through all because of that diagnoses. He might even be mad at his parents because he feels they didn't really accept him and they saw him as defective and used the diagnoses to justify it. But then again even autistic kids go through that too. Some may even feel they were better off not diagnosed because they feel things were better for them before the diagnoses. Some are happy they were never diagnosed in childhood or else they would have gone through all those treatments and be seen as defective. I assume this is only the ones who are way on the mild end of the spectrum like close to normal where it makes them come off as quirky or eccentric or just difficult.

BirdinFlight, that really made me laugh! And hey, our parents were doing their best and wool was what you had then! Even though my parents were quite radical there was a lot of the 'eat it up, we paid for it'. Or 'you will wear that, there's nothing else'. I really hated eating meat, we had the cheap stewing kind since we didn't have so much money, and i was once left sitting in front of it for ages, i just couldn't!!).

Did you have any issues with being forced to eat certain things?

League_Girl, very true. In fact the underlying point is, we're doing so much wrong in our culture.. thankfully i think this starts to be more recognised. In looking after and raising kids, there's so much that needs to change. .the books you mention sound interesting, I'll take a look at those, I may order them (which would you recommend?)

To diagnose or not to diagnose, that is the question.

I was advised last year when my son was still at school, to take him to a psychologist for 'not fitting in socially', by various friends (American ones actually, is this significant?). I'm afraid I hotly replied - i worked in the school so i had a nice bird's eye view- that I was glad he didn't fit in, since from what I could see it was a snake-pit!! Manipulation, pecking-order, bullying as an instrinsic part of the culture. I'm sorry to say that i now think that rare is the school where this is not so, only that if you do not have a child who is 'different', you may never fully realise it.

I never took him to a psychologist. It seemed to me that the potential damage in making him feel that he was 'different' and more than that, 'wrong', i.e. that our concern was to make him:
a) understand that he MUST fit in, change himself to be more acceptable to us and to a frankly contemptible, mean and narrow-minded culture and;
b) show him, in the name of 'helping him' how to make these changes, i.e. how to hide his true self, pretend, and conform.
No, thank you.

Anyway it was clear to me that the problem was not him but the environment. For all the kids actually, i found it was doing terrible things (though for quite a few it was just perpetuation of a culture already found in their families), but I had my son to take care of as first priority.

After one year.. actually more by now, he shows few 'symptoms' or what i actually see as signs of distress, though he does have many of the traits of 'high funtioning autism';only rarely and in certain very specific situations does he suffer panic-attacks, and outbursts of rage (justified i may add, and better out than in!) have gone completely, where they used to be almost every night He's generally confident, sociable, cheerful, agile and intelligent, and very kind and loving indeed. He's happy now

I would say just read both books. My mom read The Difficult Child when I was in 6th grade and I must say I hated that book when I saw the title (I judged the book by its cover literally ) because I didn't like that I was being called difficult. I was 12 but I sure wasn't stupid to not know why she was reading it. The Challenging Child is similar but it discusses different types of difficult children.

Here's another one about disability and expectations. Let's say that you're not sure your kid will be able to do something. Even if you doubt it very much, consider not telling your child outright. Instead, help them to figure things out for themselves or contact someone in a similar situation who might serve as a mentor. Low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Brilliant, I agree very much that this is the best way, so they feel the drive to do the thing but without the weight of expectation. Also, it may be that the moment for doing something is not yet but later.. there should ideally be no 'failing', in the sense of trying and not managing in front of others where there is pressure to succeed. Often things do take time, and many attempts..

Here's a general thought for parents and teachers everywhere: whatever happened to critical thinking? It seems like so much of the educational system is devoted to memorizing things, rather than figuring out how you agree and how you disagree. As kids get older, they need to learn the process of developing an informed opinion while respecting the informed opinions of others. The U.S. election has really brought home the general overuse of emotional personal attacks and a lack of useful discussion among people who hold different views.

They still taught this when I was in school (class of 2004). That is why school work gets more abstract and thy the questions are no longer have answers that are directly out of textbooks because they want to be sure you are learning and want you to actually think for yourself and we did have politics in our school and we had to do fake laws like passing a law against abortions or passing a law to make learning second language mandatory, etc and we all had to be the senators and vote for it. Plus we learned about bias views and opinions in English.

And people are upset about Trump winning because they are scared. They don't know what is going to happen to them. My cousin's wife is Muslim and she fears what will happen to her and her children because she expressed her fear of Trump on Facebook (no they are not terrorists) and other people who are scared are black, gay, and they are all scared and women are scared too because they don't want to lose their rights to birth control. Some people are even rioting because they can't handle their own emotions so they riot while others are able to protest peacefully. People who also voted Trump are also scared because they want jobs, better economy so they believe he will fix that even though they don't agree with his other views like about racism and xenophobia. Plus he has been talking about better healthcare he is very liberal in and people want that too. People feel those who voted Trump are racists and hate gays and trans and Muslims and stuff like that and immigrants. I thought that too at first but changed my mind when I heard reasons why people voted Trump. I have never seen it this bad before ever about any election. I even asked my mother if it's ever been this bad and she said it's never happened in her lifetime so I then knew I am not being oblivious then about history.

That's great. We didn't do any of that in my classes until college.