Do you resent your parents for not getting you assessed asap

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My parents were quite against the idea of "head doctors" or "nut job doctors" when I was a kid. They knew I had crippling social issues and I was struggling academically but they never sought any kind of professional opinion. The best my mother did was take me to a pharmacy to look for "IQ Boosting tablets" to make me less stupid in time for my exams at school, around age 15.
My school tried to help me, as they noticed my dysgraphia and my general all-round poor performance in literally every subject. They gave me a private tutor for maths but it didn't help at all because I felt really uncomfortable in such close proximity to someone else as they expected me to calculate things in my head.
Had my parents taken me for an assessment, a psychologist would have immediately picked up that I wasn't normal and diagnosed me with *something*, which would have meant the school I was in would have put me in "special educational needs" away from the other kids, which would have helped a lot.

Looking back, it does bug me that my parents, despite it being glaringly obvious that I was not okay, did barely anything in terms of actual help. I feel like had I have been diagnosed at a younger age I may have stood a chance academically, but instead I failed every one of my exams.
I did try my best. I tried everything to fix my inability to concentrate and understand things, I even started going to bed a lot earlier to see if I was sleep deprived. I assumed the other kids just slept earlier and thats why they understood what was going on. Obviously it didn't work.

Just can't shake the feeling that I could have done better if my parents (mainly my mother) tried to figure out what was actually the matter with me.

I don't resent my parents because I believe my Mum is on the spectrum if I am, so she thinks I am normal because I think like her. My Dad was just happy to end up with two... And then three usually happy and sometimes misschivious boys!

My Dad's sense of humour was passed right onto us! Hehe!



However, what has really puzzled me is how it was not picked up in the schools and then in the college? I know that most teachers may not have known about asperges and autism, but someone should have noticed? Uhmmm. I escaped.

I don't.

It cannot be helped in their case because they would've if they could. They couldn't.

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Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Asperger's wasn't in the news back in the 70's so no.

It's the elephant in the room and my diagnosis (last year) never gets mentioned, though we all cater to the younger

relatives' sensory issues.

I guess that my mother and her two brothers are all aspies in denial, bought up by an aspie father who didn't know

so I don't rock the boat or judge them for missing the signs.

In the United States, Child protective services says "failure to attend to special education need" is illegal

Your profile says you are in England.

Different countries and different years have different laws
.

Sometimes psychologists make wrong diagnoses.


Psychologists are human with their own felony conviction and psychiatric diagnoses

So whatever



My diagnosis was 21

Regional center only provides services to clients diagnosed before 18

Otherwise:

Applied behavior analysis
Occupational therapy
Speech therapist
Mount Diablo unified School district, bridges program goes until 24
Testing accommodation
Government benefits

nice post

With so much else to resent my parents for, not getting me assessed is way down on the list. Besides, they're both dead, so any resentment toward them is pointless.

I "forced" them to get me assessed through my behavior. Assessment in the 1960s was of quite a different nature than assessment from the 1980s on.

I had severe symptoms. I was assessed for many things. Who knows? Maybe they "overassessed" me LOL

When I was little, a diagnostic category for kids like me didn't exist. "Autism" was much more narrowly defined than it is now. Special education didn't exist back then either.

When I was in kindergarten, my parents were told that either (1) I had to repeat kindergarten or (2) I needed to be sent to a small, non-public school. I ended up being sent to a small parochial school, where I did fine academically (but not socially or athletically).

That I did fine academically was a huge relief to my parents, who previously had worried that I was "ret*d" because I was late on a lot of milestones, including not talking until I was four years old.

I was a "pioneer" of sorts because I was in the "first class" of a special school which had just been established: the Summit School.

I used to say I was in "second grade" when I was 7---even though there were no official "grades" in that school. I did grade-level type work, though, and we got conventional report cards.

If you acted up in class, you were thrown out and taken into the hall, or to the principal's office.

Autism was very narrowly defined until at least the late 80s.

@Mona: We're about the same age. "Special Ed" in Michigan during the 1960s was for kids whose mental faculties were obviously diminished. Those kids were shunned by the rest of the students. Parents would threaten their kids with putting them in Special Ed classes if their grades didn't improve, or they would humiliate their kids by implying they belonged there.

"Autism" was one of those words that was whispered between adults when describing someone else's child -- one that likely had been "sent away" by his or her family, or that was "kept inside" and away from the other kids. There was a lot of social stigma involved in even admitting that something could be not-quite-right with one's own children.

Maybe I was better off for not being assessed.

I'm okay with my parents not noticing AS traits in me - I didn't cause enough trouble to get assessed for it. They are very anti-psychology and they refused to take action several times but assessment - or lack of it - wasn't the case.

The case was when me and my brother were severily bullied in the place we moved to and they did literally nothing, leaving us alone to deal with it. The case was when I had obvious severe depression in high school and my mother convinced all the teachers to do nothing about it.

Not picking on subtle manifestation of female-type AS wasn't a problem.

In her own way, your mother probably thought she was doing the right thing. (But thinking you're doing the right thing, vs. actually doing the right thing, are not always the same.)

I think there are 'stages of acceptance' in coming to terms with late diagnosis, similar to the stages of grief. Resentment is a stage many of us go through, and I've certainly struggled with those feelings myself.

Honestly, I feel like some parents don't want a "label" attached to a kid----so they don't bother assessing the kid.

There are some parents who would feel embarrassed about having a kid with any sort of disorder.

There are some parents who are just lazy.

Several schools told my parents that I needed psychology help and they would just beat me saying this was the kind of therapy I needed – this is why even today I still feel uncomfortable seeking mental help. I resent them a lot of it, I feel like they robbed me an opportunity to understand myself and try to adapt or get proper treatment.