AS or bad parenting?

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Could a child from a home where no social skills are used or taught by the parents present as having High functioning AS ? Aquired from the environment?

What would be the traits that would tip the balance over to the AS side vs just bad parenting?

Are there key social skills that must be aquired by an early age to stop the slide in the AS direction?

Even ordinary everyday talking is part of social skills, not sure exactly what you mean "where no social skills are used or taught".

Do you mean AS or high functioning autism? There's no such thing (to my knowledge) as high functioning AS. Since autism is a neurological difference, a child can't get autism or as because of the home enviroment. However, a child already on the autism spectrum can benefit greatly from early intervention and a child on the spectrum who doesn't get any help can have big problems later in life.

A lot of adults without ASD who had poor socialising as a child can present socially similar to having ASD. However, there are important parts of ASD that they wouldn't have to an ASD level and that should allow ASD to be ruled out.
A lot of children come from parents who for whatever reason did not allow their children to develope adequate social skills, I can think of a number of people.
Myself, I come from an incredibly social family and thank god because it does mean that even with ASD, I am aware of some things. My mum realised I had problems early on and so she taught me a lot of things by rote, so even though I've not been diagnosed until now (24) i am aware of things I would never have known if I hadn't come from a family that was hypersocial, I learnt to copy my siblings who whilst being younger are not ASD.

It's possible it could mimic some of the symptoms, but I think usually it's in pretty extreme cases because most children still interact outside of the home and will learn some social skills there. But I've heard of cases of severely neglected children who displayed many of the symptoms of ASD.

The Girl in the Window. Look up that story. She was kept in a basement or something like that and had many behaviours similar to autism. Through therapy she recovered though. It's one of those severe neglect cases.

I have this worry for my son. My husband and I are very asocial. The few people we associate with are childless or their children are grown. I take my son to the park every weekend but I never know how much interaction is appropriate and whether I should just leave him be or follow him around. He has a tendency to be rough and I'm afraid if I just hang back, he'll poke someone in the eye or something. He also doesn't want to play with other children, just run off with their toys.

I've sometimes wondered just that. My parents had rather a restricted social life and seemed to want me to stay away from people.....they knew nothing about conflict resolution and failed to demonstrate the look and feel of a happy family. I had no shortage of explanations for my poor social progress, and I fought tooth and claw against acting the part of a lonely introvert.

Years later I discovered AS and was diagnosed. Ever since, there's been this "hard-wired" feeling about the whole social thing.........it had been bad enough to have Hans Eyesenck bleating about basic personality being fixed (I'd scored on his tests as an introvert with self-esteem problems), but if it was going to be a brain wiring thing, I stood even less chance of fixing it.

So yes, it would be nice to think I was just badly trained. But it would seem odd that AS had skipped a generation and that the traits fit so well. I can see how my parents screwed up on my social grooming, but not how they could have taught me to have special interests, to be slow in jumping from the detail to the overview, to be poor at multi-tasking. Nobody obsessionally collected anything much in my family.

I also have a few experiences of achieving the kind of things that only a confident extravert could expect to do, but the learning didn't stick. I found I couldn't repeat my performance. I suspect that's the "rubbery" nature of AS, i.e. you can use a lot of energy and force yourself to perform very well for a while, but as soon as you stop the abnormal effort, everything goes back just the way it was.

Whatever the case, if the right skills weren't provided in childhood, you're going to do a lot better if you get studying and put that right, whether you're AS or not. A lot of our mistakes are made just because we don't know what to do in this or that situation.

I think it's quite possible to develop a type of autism from lack of parenting. It's almost like those stories you here where children are deprived from stimulation and therefore develop poor social skills, lack of motor skills, lack of emotional support and they're non-verbal. I think autism is genetic but forms of it can be because of lack of stimulation when younger as well.

I'm thinking of some of those stories of "feral" children like the story of Genie or that recent story of the girl they found in that room who lacked stimulation and had a lot of the traits associated with autism.