how autistic do you look in your childhood pictures?

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I was watching some youtube videos of people with autism/AS and some of them showed pictures of themselves as children. In their pictures they looked distant...they were not looking at the camera and not smiling. However they did not look very strange or awkward. In my childhood pictures I look incredibly strange. I am often making a very strange facial expression scrunching up my nose, I am in weird postures or doing something weird with my hands. I have ones where I am often holding or rubbing an object. In some of them someone is trying to put their arm around me for the picture and I am arching my back and pushing them away. I just look really really autistic in my pictures!! Of course in some of the ones where I was over 9 years old I look perfectly normal and am smiling and in some I just have that distant look.....but in the majority of my 9 years old and under photos I look quite strange. I should mention that I have a very severe co-morbid learning disability (NVLD).....Anyways, I'm curious how other people with ASD's looked in their childhood photos.

Not nearly as bad as current photos. Or maybe i just havent seen many actual pics not staged.

Not nearly as bad as current photos. Or maybe i just havent seen many actual pics not staged.

Very much to me. Ive always thought my childhood photos are when I looked the strangest.

Not going to post them though.

To be perfectly honest, un-beknownst to me at the time, I looked horribly autistic, and had I a time machine, I would probably use it to go back and smack some fashion sense into myself after a short trip "0 BC/AD" to clear up the whole christianity thing.

It probably wouldn't have done any good to be honest though.

I don't know where any pictures are (I do have yearbooks, somewhere, though). I recall that I really had horrible fashion sense (like Chronos) to the point that I actually burned most of my clothes after high school. I recall that people often told me I looked stoned, and I hated smiling for cameras ... I hated cameras, to be honest.

My guess is, based on recollections that are totally biased, that I did look autistic.

In the pictures and old movies that I saw, I looked pretty normal. I don't think that you would have noticed anything strange.

Strangely I look significantly less 'autistic' than I do now.

As a child I was especially bad too - despite considering myself an aspie, as a child I was more classically autistic in my characteristics and there was no way you could not know there was something 'wrong' with me, thus no one can decide which I am yet - but for some reason in photo's I look like a 'normal' child.

In my school pictures my mother coached me on smiling before I went to school. I had okay looking pictures for first and second grade but then the smile coaching stopped. My pictures started turning out weird. I had wide eyes usually blank and staring at something, sometimes not even the camera. I could no longer muster a smile either. I tried but they just looked weird.

I look distant now but in a great many of my photos when it was just me and my family I was a complete camera hog and loved to smile and do poses and always wanted my picture taken.

In some of the pictures at parties I noticed I often sat alone or away, and I always stripped off my clothing so a majority of my pictures I'm in some clothing disarray.

I was very proper sometimes and would smile and stand in a 'proper', respectful way.

Videos are a bit more telling.

This was when I was truly innocent.

Sometimes you can tell, sometimes not. Sometimes I get the smile right, sometimes it just looks like a grimace... Sometimes I look like a pretty typical kid, playing with dolls or Legos; other pictures show me patterning beans and dried pasta or drawing the same tree fifty times in a row. It's really a toss-up. You could probably pick a set of photos that made me look totally NT, or you could pick a set that made it look like I was a textbook case and profoundly autistic... In reality, of course, I was somewhere in the middle, with some autistic traits very strong and others barely there or not there at all.

I think it would be easier to tell if there had been candid home videos of me as a youngster. That would have shown up the odd movement, pedantic speech, sensitivity, etc. and made it fairly obvious to an observer who knew what to look for.

I always had the deer-in-the-headlights look. I also had that "I don't want to be here" look.

that's possibly the best jumper i've ever seen.

Not so innocent btw. The smile is so fake i want to go back in time and tell little you that if you want , you can just not smile for the picture! just, don't smile if you don't feel like smiling....omg you were very cute

I remember teaching myself to smile as a kid. It wasn't easy to get it right.