Anyone ever relate to this...?

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When I was young, I had it in me that adults were supposed to instantly FIX their children's, or students' problems. My parents weren't supposed to JUST get angry at the fact that for example, a teacher was being unfair to me! They were supposed to straighten the teacher out! If they cared enough to rant to me and each other about how unfair it was, they should have cared enough to take action against the person who was for all intents and purposes, harming their child!
Adults were not supposed to be helpless! They were supposed to be able take care of a bad situation!
Anyone else here understand where I'm coming from? To expect the grownups to handle difficult situations, only to be disappointed and disgusted when they slowly began to realize just how helpless and/or lazy adults can be? Especially adults that are responsible for the well-being of others?
Am I making sense here?

I can see where you are coming from. For me, it was more that I saw adults could fix everything and were always good just like super heroes. Then, I got older and I learned that a lot of adults aren't as good as I used to think they were, nor can they fix everything for you. I think it's just a part of growing up.

i was slowly yet surely deflowered by reality.

If a kid was picking on me, why did they tell me what I should do? Surely if they went and found the kid and yelled at him or her, they would stop...right?
I understand now that you can't solve all of a child's problems, as they will grow up to be helpless and lazy, but when I was a little kid, I thought the grown-ups were the helpless and lazy ones. Why do other people grow up understanding this, yet I expected to be constantly protected?

it was my experience, that the adults in my life tacitly approved of the bullies, as a sort of quality control over weaklings, to stigmatize and marginalize such, to limit their proper psycho-social development so that they would be less likely to live long enough to consume public resources or at least to reduce the chances that people like me would ever reproduce. as the recipient of such "officially sanctioned" abuse, i can tell you there is a sinister darwinian aspect to this, IOW the "sink or swim" meme is dominant in our mercenary american culture.

Oh yeah, it's what you don't get about when other children bully you. I often have the feeling that those people who want to make the bullying seem less bad, actually were bullies themselves as kids. Because they were "just kids". Oh, thank you very much, those "kids" f***ed me up greatly and decreased my confidence. Kids who bully become adults who bully. It's as simple as that. You are not born a bully, but people allow you to be one.


God bless imagination.


Your explanation may seem a bit extreme, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Because people who do not work "properly" have to be put "right". I have pondered whether I should get children quite often and I mostly thought - as arrogant as that may sound - that I could be a much better parent than most, because I wouldn't feel it was my obligation to society to reproduce genetically perfect offspring. But I do not think I could raise a child, not right now, so it is out of the question. Having children seems like such a naive concept to me...

I like the Orwellian touch of your post.

^^^
i haven't a clue as to why anybody would want to put children in the world today. do they all honestly believe that would be doing these vulnerable new spirits any favors? do some of them honestly believe that their special children will save this hellworld from itself?

Because of how little I understood of speech and social situations when I was little, I was the opposite and did not rely on that "mom and dad (or another adult) will fix it".

I grew up feeling responsible for myself as a kid already and I didn't go crying for help usually.

I'd have been comforted though and I was very much comforted when someone noticed that something was wrong but I just didn't seek out other people (and expected them to fix what was wrong) when I was hurt or hungry or for whatever other reason. The idea that somebody else other than me can fix things for me sank in with age.

However, most kids with AS that I know do have as much empathy/social ability to intuitively go crying for their parents (or teachers) when they get hurt, want something, have a wish or feel something that happened to them was unfair. They try to initiate interaction (though they don't always succeed) if they feel that something is amiss.

They actually tend to seem to rely more on adults than most of their non-autistic peers.

I noticed that if, say, a child slipped and smacked face down on the ground, only certain people such as their parents seem to be able to calm them down and other children or strangers who try to comfort them don't seem to "get through" to them because they're not the "right" person.

As a former kid with AS, yup. As a parent now with three kids on the spectrum, yup.

Oddly enough, we've felt it necessary to step in and correct educators, or more accurately put, to educate the educators of our kids in several cases of unfair treatment. Apropos of your post, we're going through handling a particularly concerning situation involving a para-educator who recently suggested one of my kids drop out of school (he's barely 14). We're doing exactly what we've always felt our own parents should have done when we were in school, because we know damned well what it feels like when nobody sticks up for you in situations like that.



Absolutely perfect sense.

EDIT: Like other posters here, I had to learn most of this "sticking up for myself," on my own. The problem is though, I spent most of my life fumbling at it because I had no idea how to do it with tact, and usually ended up being offensive, making the situations even worse. Kids need role models. I believe they'll learn better and faster if they see how it's done in ways that actually improve their situations.

We're the parents. It's our job to show them how.

When I was young I pretty much got taught I was garbage and that no one cares, to sum it up as simply as possible. So I started internalizing things, and not going to my parents or teachers for problems with other kids because either teachers where in on it to, I would get ridiculed for being a tattle tale......or I felt my parents had enough to deal with so I didn't tell them because I didn't want them to be worried about me.

I guess I never really had the option of being able to run to any kids or teachers to fix my problems, I just had to deal with it with no coping skills.

I can't figure out if this inaction my parents were guilty of was due to them being helpless people with a lack of resolve, or if they expected me to take care of the problem myself. It's useless to ask them now, as it happened 20 years ago, give or take, and they'd probably just accuse me of holding useless grudges and obsessing over the past.

Not me. It never really occurred to me that other people could be helpful at all.