Did your parents pay attention to you as a child?

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This is a question aimed toward people diagnosed in adulthood.

Did your parents and/or teachers ever show any concern or interest in your behaviors during childhood? Based on my recent discussions with my sister and from reflecting upon my childhood, I can definitely see that I was displaying behaviors that should have raised concerns to any attentive parent or teacher. At no time, however, did my parents or any teacher ever expressed any concerns or interests in my well being. I don't think I have ever had a single talk with my parents about my feelings and problems. The only thing I ever heard from them was things like "stop doing that", "stop being lazy", "get your act together", "stop playing computer games", etc, until I moved away from home. I was basically left to sink or swim on my own throughout whole childhood and school years.

I'm trying to figure out if my parents were exceptionally clueless or if that's a common thing.

Yeeeaaa.....first grade teacher wanted me to get tested for ADHD and I was taught to hate that woman for thinking such a thing....and my fifth grade teacher was successful in holding mine and my mothers hand through fifth grade...after that I was on my own. I just started connecting the aspergers dots on my own....

It's a common thing because society in these parts is exceptionally clueless about normal human behavior - for instance, it was somebody's arbitrary, conscious decision to mark the 'official' start of adulthood at eighteen years. The term "grown-up" exists because even the most powerful figures in the world continue to behave like children. In reality, life is not a race; this sink/swim mentality is imposed to drive home the implications of monetized economics, though to even some of the most conservative people I've ever met, tangible commodities are far more important.

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Got subdued by ADHD meds until I was 11ish, so I guess they paid attention in some ways. Except they were somewhat blind to the fact that I was still struggling until I started having daily panic attacks in relation to school due to sensory overload (wasn't aware of what was causing my school problems at the time..)

My parents rarely paid much attention to me unless they were mad at me. They were too busy arguing with each other. Few other adults ever seemed to know what was different about me, or care; they assumed I was just being difficult or acting out to get attention. I finally got sent to special ed and a psychologist when I was 14...like they helped. All that did was get me transferred to a different school. I turned down the meds because I've always been scared of mind-altering drugs, legal or otherwise.

"Just be yourself." Hypocrites. What they really mean is "just be yourself as long as you do everything we want you to and turn out exactly like us." If your "self" is anything else, you're just a problem, and they make you feel like it every step of the way.

Well my parents started to notice something when I was 16, which isn't that late, but still! However I grew up with my mum and all her friends being actors and musicians and my dad and all his friends were all musicians, so
A everyone was really weird
B I became a really good actor
I was however sent to the principals office a lot and I was bullied by my classmates and tested for ADHD

When I was growing up my parents paid very little positive attention to me at all. Like Evil_Chuck's parents, they were busy arguing with each other. I was treated harshly and pretty much ignored. I had an older brother and sister and it was made clear I was a second class citizen compared to them. My mother once told me a story about a child who was defective and was never expected to succeed and that was pretty much all I heard about being different. Neglect was more what I experienced. The family that I grew up in was/is very dysfunctional.

I do think that currently there is a lot more awareness and active research about ASD and Autistic individuals. Parents used to more generally not want to admit there was a problem.

I would say my parents generally did pay attention to me but I was in a family with 3 sisters and a brother and you do get less attention in a large family.

My parents paid a good amount of attention to me until high school. The family dynamic changed then and that is a long personal story I won't share here.

But, anyways, I don't think they could have picked up on any AS traits in me because
1) I grew up in a time before Aspergers was considered a disorder
2) My uncle is autistic. He is not high functioning enough to live on his own. Compared to him, I wouldn't look like I belong on the spectrum.
3) However, I believe several extended family members may have AS and they are just "eccentric". Since family members are used to the way their own families are, I don't think I displayed any strange behaviors that would have caused alarm.
4) My lack of friends and the teasing I endured growing up was always blamed on other kids. No one considered that maybe I was doing/not doing something that interfered with relationship-building.
5) I was ahead in school by one year and any social deficiencies were attributed to my being younger than my classmates. (I have since known many very smart kids who may or may not have been ahead in school that have/had no social problems at all. Being younger is not necessarily the issue.)
6) Parents do not really know how their kids act in school unless the kid has some extreme problems that get the teachers/principals involved. If an AS kid is obsessive about following the rules, that kid can be especially liked by the teacher, which could cause the teacher to miss certain signs of a problem. Also, teachers do not pay attention to who is getting ignored on the playground. They only look for "real problems" like fights.
7) My incessant knee-bouncing was a "nervous habit" and no one tried to get me to stop. I guess it wasn't that annoying, though it was distracting. My mom did unsuccessfully try to get me to stop biting my nails. My thumb-sucking at age 6 was a "bad habit" that needed to be broken. No one thought of any of these things as stims, but looking back I think they probably were.
I went to speech therapy from the start of school due to a lisp. Perhaps there I also learned how to talk with a proper lilt. I do not know because I can't remember how I talked before I started school. (I only know that I did talk, early.)
9) I was smart so anytime I got "antsy", it was attributed to boredom.
10) I am a musician and musicians are weird.

These are just some examples of how traits can be misinterpreted or missed even by people who are paying attention. Another thing that can happen is that people look at individual traits and do not connect all the dots and realize that all these traits are related. Really, if you think about it, who would imagine that knee-bouncing has anything to do at all with a lack of friends unless one is already looking for ASD traits. Those who display more mild symptoms can easily be missed.

It is easy to for people to continue down a line of thought they are already on, rather than change direction and consider another possibility. In my case, my problem was that I was really smart. All my problems were because I was smart. My IQ was too high to relate to people. End of story.

Ummmm, no, not end of story. But that was the quick and easy answer. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to get my act together regarding a lot of executive function.

Remember that NTs don't find patterns as well. That is one way we have an edge up.

I have no doubt that my parents paid attention to me as I know they are very caring. However, they somehow didn't think of seeing a psychologist etc for whatever reason. Maybe they were worried about the stigma attached to seeing a mental health professional. So I think your parents' not picking up your autism as a child doesn't necessarily mean they didn't pay attention or didn't care.

My teachers were quite horrible. One even said "jk1 is very weird and he needs to change his personality" or something like that to my mother. He was a very incompetent teacher any way. Another one also said something similar to my face. They were not concerned about my being different/weird but were just treating me as a nuisance. After all teachers are not family. They wouldn't care about a weird child in the class. If anything, a weird child is just a nuisance for them.

No, my parents just thought I was an odd loner and have never really taken much interest in me. Not even repeated attempted suicide in my mid teens changed that...

My parents had allot to deal with when my sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia then my mother had a seven year fight with cancer. My father went through bouts of depression and I just had to play the NT son.

I kept getting tested by strange people in my youth but I never thought anything of it, it got me away from the class room.

I had to see the pattern of failed relationships and bad social skills to finally see what was happening.

My parents new something was wrong with me, especially since I wasn't talking when I was supposed to be. I wasn't socializing with the peers at school either. I was more interested in collecting rocks. SO, I do think they paid a lot of attention to me. They did their very best to make sure I grew up into the person I am today.

Well my parents noticed my autistic traits and knew i had autism but never took me to get diagnosed to make me think i'm a normal kid but then as i grew a little older my mum told me that and she also told me that school principel once asked to see them and told them that i did "autistic things" and behaviors. Until today i still never went to any therapist or anything.
And i also never had a conversation with my parents telling them my feelings, i never do have real conversations with them i find it really hard/ashamed to open up.

If my parents noticed odd behaviors I usually got disciplined for them. When I was growing up people did not know about Autism or Asperger's. Unless you were basically Rainman, they would not have known to look for or suspect anything to have you tested. So I got disciplined a lot.

There was no severe behavior (more a lack of behavior -- I wasn't a pain for teachers) that made the school want to get rid of me, and as long as I got good grades my parents didn't care about anything else.