Are there many AS who have had a relatively normal childhood

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loko
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24 Oct 2009, 10:17 pm

and let the record show that my childhood was pretty damn warped, im scarred for life..



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25 Oct 2009, 5:20 am

AMD wrote:
And what i mean by that is not being made fun of or preferring to be alone to where people thought you were weird.

I am not saying i definitely have AS. I suspect i do, but my childhood was pretty normal. I had friends at school and i played at their houses afterschool. Although, i WAS held back a year before starting K because i would sit in the corner alone and wouldn't interact with any of the students. I only talked to the teacher. But other than that, i had friends. I can't say who initiated play, but i was always playing with other kids. I was shy and took some time to warm up to people. (of course, as an adult, i have no friends and really don't care to make any). This is the one thing i feel that i can't have AS because i had friends and everywhere i read, kids with AS do not have friends or not many or don't play with them appropriately.

My son, who is dx'd AS seems to follow the same footsteps as me. He has friends, he plays with them at recess and he is pretty popular. Because he is such a pleaser, he is nice to everyone (doesn't want anyone to think negetive of him). The other kids like him cause he is polite and nice. Although, he is easily led. He comes home and does his homework and asks to go out and play with his friends. I thought for sure bullies would be a problem for him, but every kid who has started being rude to him are now friends with him. Next year is middle school and i am hoping this will continue though his school years, but so far he has done well.

Anyone else have a somewhat normal childhood yet on the spectrum? And how are you now as opposed to how you were back then?

I liked being alone. I had one friend and used to play with my sisters friends. People thought I was nice to and weren't mean to me. Funny you say that people that pick on your son become his friends - that happens to me a lot.
I would never hang out at other kids houses often, only if my sisters or brother did. Rarely would kids come over to visit me.
When I was 13 I started to hang out with a girl my age. I was still a bit quiet though.
I don't think I'd call my childhood normal though. I was super quiet and scared of most people. I'd be stuck in my imagination all day. My grades were poor and there was very little progress until I was 14. I would never walk around my own neighborhood until my mid teens.


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JohnnyD017
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25 Oct 2009, 8:13 am

The school I went to had small class sizes so i only had a few friends at once but i did loads of stuff with them and had a pretty good time. I would also play with my 2 eldest cousins who are around my age. In later primary school and sometimes in early highschool i would organise get togethers with my friends on the weekends sometimes. Since i saw most of them at school 5 days a week and i went to church with some of them too it seemed like enough. Plus my parents werent very social people and maybe i thought it was normal. I didnt know any kids down the road or anything but i dont think there was that many of them. I did get anxious sometimes when i had to do new things but what kid doesnt?

Things started to go pearshaped when I got kicked out of school in grade 8. Early next year I got a formal diagnosis of AS and things havent seemed normal for me since that. I didnt go to school for almost a year and a half and during that time i had very little interaction with anyone my age. I just didnt think it was worthwhile, and id given up. When i went back to school for grade 10 i just wasnt the same and i didnt do much social stuff anymore :(

So my self image took a beating during my early teenage years and i dont think it ever recovered. The anxiety started to come back when i got to my later teen years. Started with just worrying about girls then branched out into related stuff and i started getting paranoid about a lot of things. I always had friends and didnt have trouble meeting people, i just sometimes had trouble earning their trust and respect. Now im 25 and most of my friends are married which sux and the others are obsessed with careers so they dont have time. i dunno what ill do now. Myabe ill give it a few more years and see what happens



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25 Oct 2009, 8:23 pm

I went to a school for 'gifted and talented' children, when I was young. We were all what people would consider weird. I did fine enough there, I think... I know that I had times where I would go off and do things like sit alone under a slide or swing or turn a jump rope if I did not want to have to talk to the other kids... but no one thought that was weird or singled me out or teased me for it. One time some boy walked up to the slide I was sitting under and asked me what I was doing. I told him I did not want to talk to anyone or play anything. He said that sounded good and asked if he could sit as well. I did not care. So we sat there in silence until that damn bell rang. I think the only kids in that school who ever were treated badly were the desk throwers and we did have a few of them in my grade. And I do not know that they were treated necessarily badly compared to some of the things I have heard of children doing to other kids. Mostly we just stared at them when they acted up and vocalized not wanting to sit by them. I guess that might have been hurtful, but no one that I know of, threw stuff at them or put them in lockers or anything like that. I might be wrong though, I was mostly oblivious to what went on during recess. I loved school when I was little. It was my sanctuary from the crazy that was my home.


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25 Oct 2009, 8:59 pm

I had maybe really warped versions of some of the the normal childhood experiences...I did not understand boundaries when I was little ...so I made friends by persistence....infuriating many a parent....I had unconventional friendships here and there that did not last long..All the parents of all my friends thought my family and I were weird..except for one odd family in second grade...there were issues of depression and poorness and above average intelligence..they lived in a trailer park...and bad/sad things eventually happend among them.

A lot of the time I had friendships with poor immigrants..or girls who had really horrendous home lives.



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29 Jun 2011, 7:25 pm

No about as aspie as it gets one of the reasons I stay well away from people , that and I find my IQ drops around 30 points when I'm around people which is pretty scary as like most people I'm barely cracking 3 digits. :)


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29 Jun 2011, 7:39 pm

I had a normal childhood, with a bunch of different friends I would spend time with both during and after school, and that would have probably continued into high school and college, but I moved away in the middle of eighth grade, and that pretty much ruined my social life irreparably. I have never been able to make as many friends (and such a wide variety) since then as I had before I moved.


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29 Jun 2011, 7:50 pm

I did not really have friends(there where a few but my family moved every year so I never really got attatched to anyone). I went to friends houses more often when I was younger then when I got older and there was the 'how will I look if I actually hang out with this person outside of school' mindset. I was bullied and picked on, got decent grades and got in trouble on occasion usually as a result of not being able to handle what was going on or how i felt rather then intentionally disobeying the rules and getting caught. Like one time in middle school some girls who pretended to be my friends until they ditched me at a school dance(the first one I had ever gone to) decided to harrass me in class. We went to the computer room and I sat down in the wrong seat apparently because they told me to move so they could sit together and I refused but was quite upset by it so at the end of class when my teacher was rushing me to turn something in I sort of snapped at her(not violently, just was kinda rude or something I guess) so I had to spend the rest of my day in detention or whatever it was called.



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29 Jun 2011, 10:35 pm

My childhood was not normal. We moved around too much. I never could keep any friends; and then as I grew older, I realized I was different, somehow..... :tongue:
I never really understood why until this year, when I got my Autism (AS/HFA) diagnosis.
A normal life WOULD have been kinda nice; but HEY, I'm trying, anyway! :? :)


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30 Jun 2011, 12:11 am

when you say childhood, I'm assuming ages 12 and under. Now, based on that:

I had friends.
I invited them over every other weekend or so.
I wasn't teased or bullied.
I got in trouble maybe once a year at most, and it was never anything serious.

That being said, it was still obvious that I was an aspie, just in other ways, such as interests and stimming. Many of my social issues didn't become extremely noticeable until my first year of secondary school, when I was 13. That was when the fecal matter hit the fan (figuratively speaking). :lol:


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30 Jun 2011, 3:17 am

I always had a group of friends at school. I never had a female best friend (well, I had a best friend for a year or two, then another for a year or two...), but I had a male friend who was a kind of boyfriend. I loved primary school, everyone seemed to be friends with everyone else, except for a few bully types and the headteacher stamped out bullying. I don't have any bad memories of primary school.

I used to play with the kids who stayed closeby, none of whom were in my class at school. If one was there, we played along fine. But, if another came along, I would often be left alone. They knew how to press my buttons and tease me too.

High school was awful. I still had friends, but I was made fun of constantly. And my primary school 'boyfriend' quickly ditched me. I think he wanted a real girlfriend at that point and I wasn't suitable material. That was the worst time of my life on a relationship matter and I was just 12. Any break-ups after that were no big deal.



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30 Jun 2011, 4:10 am

Hhmm, I had friends in my childhood, but I didn't have a "group of friends". Usually a kid or two to play with me at the playground, kindergarten, boarding school. They had never been close friends with me. I had a tendency to play with kids two years older. When there was nobody to play with me, I played alone (legos, other construction toys, sand and puddles were among my favorites, but I used to play with my sister's pram and everything that had wheels). I loved to play with one of my cousins whenever I had the opportunity (his family lived far from us), he has some moderate traits of AS, so we had a lot of common themes.

I don't remember I'd ever invited a friend over back then. I played with my twin sister much, and sometimes it was one of her friends who invited us over on a few occasions.

I wasn't a kind person as a kid, but I always tried to be "good" at least to my own standards and as I was told by my mom. Needless to say I failed more than a couple of times...

I was shy, withdrawn, I didn't like swearing at all at that time, though there were occasions when I found my way to be blunt or rude. Sometimes teasing or harassing happened to me, but not too much, perhaps I was a boring subject. :) The worst of it happened at second grade, I had severe behavioral problems, I often took part in scuffles, disturbed the class, said and did many inappropriate things to my peers and teachers as well...


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30 Jun 2011, 9:54 am

I didn't start to get teased until I was six and then it got worse when I was eight when I started going to my new school. I think the reason why I was left alone by lot of kids at school was because I was in special ed and there is some social taboo about picking on disabled people so that's why people tend to not make fun of them. They get shunned for it is why. But yet there is no social taboo about picking on special needs kids who are in regular ed full time and look normal. :roll:

I also had friends and the first friend I remember having was when I was three and it was this girl who lived across the street from us. She was about a couple years older and she came over a lot and hung out and I liked her company. I used to follow her around too and be at her house and used to take her skates from her garage to play with them. But when mom got me the same pair for my birthday, I lost interest in them after using them once. It was as if now that I had my own, I didn't have to play with them much because I didn't have to go across the street to try and get them to play with since I had my own sitting in our garage. I just didn't play with them much as I used to when I didn't have a pair.

I had friends of my own age until age ten and then it started to get hard so I went for the younger kids since we had more in common. Kids my age only wanted to chit chat. Then by 6th grade, I had none my age.

But I never fit in well and I had always been rejected and I was used. I had school friends but the following school year we weren't friends anymore because we weren't in the same class and they had other friends they hung out with and they didn't hang out with me anymore. I rarely invited school friends to my house.

I am not sure what group of friends means but I assume lot of friends or friends in a group. I guess I had a group of friends but they were hard to be with. It was more easy if we were playing jump rope or something.

I have been invited to birthday parties about seven times and once in my teens. I was invited to a dance three times in my teens also. I have only been invited to two sleepovers twice when I was 12.



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30 Jun 2011, 10:49 am

I was normal up until I started school, which was at 4 years old. Then all the AS signs were thrown at me, all at once, and I so ''frightened'' on my first week of school that I misbehaved, and the teachers and my parents were worried and didn't know what was wrong. Those couple of weeks were abnormal, but after I began getting help at school, I calmed down, and just went along the same lines as everybody else, except I didn't have many friends, and I needed extra help with my reading, writing, and maths.

I got invited to other children's birthday parties, but I didn't go to many friend's houses for tea. But I did play out with other kids in the neighbourhood after school, which is normal. And I also remember conforming (in a normal child way), like keeping up with the latest craze, like collecting beenie babies, Pokemon cards, tamigotchis, conkers, et cetera. I didn't get badly bullied, and I enjoyed holidays down by the sea with my family, and did normal kid stuff, like go swimming, play games on the beach with my cousins, et cetera. So yeh, I must say I did have a relatively normal childhood. Couldn't be happier really. Wish those 90s days were back again.


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Last edited by Joe90 on 30 Jun 2011, 2:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tsukimi
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30 Jun 2011, 12:11 pm

I was quite a problem kid at kindergarten since I was biting other kids and wasn't able to play like others.

In my first age of primary school I had two friends, however it was all decided by one of them. Then it was a very protected private school.

Then I moved to the public school and I have been bullied full time all the following years. Not normal at all. I had some desire to make friends and I enjoyed playing with kids provided by my family or approached at the park but I wanted to play just my way, without allowing them to decide. I wasn't able to bond, either.

It went a little better with teenage hood - still weird but not bullied any longer.



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30 Jun 2011, 12:21 pm

CanadianRose wrote:
I had a couple of friends on and off through school. I smiled and had fun. I enjoyed vacations with my family.

I sometimes had trouble because of my so-so social skills


This is how most of my childhood was, as well. Except for the fact that I also threw tantrums, ended up in a lot of fights, talked back to my teachers, did things that adults told me not to do, got thrown in detention too many times, the list goes on and on.