Evidence against ASD "epidemic" - the great reclassification

Post Reply New Topic

It still doesn't really make sense to me most of the time, so I definitely understand. It's been a form of survival for me. I was abused and had to learn how to survive.

I just now Googled Vygotsky to see what you were talking about here. It would appear that the social interaction Vygotsky talked about was primarily with adults and primarily parents. See, for example: https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html . So Vygotsky's theories do not, at all, appear to contradict anything I said about how the societal trend toward group daycare may have been good for NT children but not good for autistic children.


I'd like to start a separate thread about the controversy regarding ABA, if that's okay with you, to avoid derailing this thread.


ABA, being very expensive, was not and could not have been widespread until a lot of states passed laws requiring insurance to cover it, which didn't happen until after 2000, largely in response to lobbying by various parent-oriented organizations. But it has a long history of use by a relatively small number of relatively wealthy families, going all the way back to the 1960's.

Anyhow, on other topics, please see my reply to you here.

Can you explain where you got the adult/parent thing from? When I was in college learning all of this, I learned it in the context of Vygotsky studying children. Unless I misread your comment somehow which is entirely possible. What I was trying to say with my comment was that social interaction (away from familial caregivers too) is good for everyone, not just NT children and not just children with ASD.

I saw a study recently on here that talked about communication and they had a group of all NT people playing telephone, a group of all ASD people playing telephone, and a mixed group. The mixed group did the worst. However, it wasn't clear as to whether everyone in the groups knew they were with all NT or all ASD. If the people in the groups were aware of their placement, it makes me question the validity of the results. It makes perfect sense that ASD folks would be more comfortable with other ASD folks and would communicate better, and vice versa, but it seems as though they didn't control for other social factors (for instance, if you told a person with ASD they were going to be put in a mixed group that had NT people in it, I'm sure their brains are primed for "oh no" because they've had bad experiences with NT in the past, even if other ASD were in the group). I hope that makes sense, I'm not very good at explaining things sometimes.

The quality of group interactions matters much more than just simply being put in a group, and I think that's probably what you were trying to get at.... and I agree with you. I think you were saying that it was good for kids with ASD to be with caregivers who are familiar with them and their way of communication, so it wasn't as good when they went to daycare and their regular caregivers had no idea how to interact with them.

So, I advocate for better quality childcare for every child, especially those with disabilities and/or developmental disorders. I think we were trying to say the same thing, just in a different way.

Vygotsky's theories are indeed about children's cognitive development, but, according to the above-linked page, his theories stress the role of adults and especially parents in said development.

The above-linked page says:


Further down on that page:


Anyhow ....


In other words, you're wondering whether this was a double-blind experiment -- a routine precaution against bias in medical and psychological research.


That's one important way that daycare (with caregivers who know nothing about ASD) could be harmful to an autistic child.

Another problem is that many autistic people (including myself) have intrinsic difficulty with group interactions. That doesn't mean autistic children should be kept away from group interactions, but the groups need to be more carefully structured.


Agreed.

Also I tend to have tangents a lot with my own thinking that I don't explicitly express are tangents and I did that a bit. This was a good conversation.