Autistic Pride and a Cat Book

I think it is important for autistic adults to model for autistic youths and children:

- Self-acceptance.

- Pride in being autistic.

- Coping strategies.

I also think it is important for autistic adults to bridge the communication gap between autistic children and their neurotypical parents (or parent). This prevents a lot of parent stress and childhood pain. It increases levels of happiness in families. There is less yelling, less fighting, less judging and more love.

Let me give you an example. For 11 years a pair of parents fought with their child to prevent her from chewing her hair. The autistic child had a long history of chewing her hair. Whenever the parents managed to stop a habit, it would somehow surface somewhere else. When she stopped chewing her hair, she would peel the skin off the ends of her fingers. When the parents put a stop to that, she went onto biting her nails. For 11 years, the child was nagged, scolded, screamed at and punished for these.

I too was severely punished for doing such things. My parents believed that daughters should be taught to sit properly, walk properly and hold oneself still. My parents said that girls had to be 端庄. Yet, there I was, shaking my leg, peeling at my fingernails, touching my forehead incessantly. Discipline was harsh. One minute I was peeling at my fingernails, and the next minute, hard knuckles descended upon my head, or a hard slap came from nowhere to land on my ear, sending my head reeling for a while.

I explained that many things in the neurotypical world make an autistic person anxious:

- smells

- sounds

- mysterious facial expressions

- unwelcome touch

- aggressive tones of voice

So, many autistic people stim. After all that whacking by my parents, I settled on a stim that I could get away with. I twirled the ends of my hair. The more anxious I am, the more furiously I will twirl the ends of my hair. When I started work, I had short hair. Twirling the ends of short hair was very obvious to others. So, I grew very long waist length hair which I can twirl unobtrusively with my fingers at waist level. I sometimes found, after an exam, that my hair had developed a knot at its end that I had to cut away.

I advised the parents to give their daughter something to stim with. There are stimming toys available and there is even chewelry. Chewelry are chewies that you can wear so that those who stim by chewing things, can have something to chew. Simply by explaining the child's needs to the parents, I have saved the child a lot of pain. I have also saved parents a lot of stress.

Autistic adults have a RESPONSIBILITY to represent the needs of autistic children. We need to defend the rights of autistic children to be honoured for their strengths and understood for their weaknesses. Autistic adults have a responsibility to be proud of their autism in the same way PRC people are proud of being Chinese, and Indians are proud of being Indian, and Singaporeans are proud of being Singaporean.

To that end, Kathy Hoopman wrote a lovely book entitled, "All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome." Asperger Syndrome was the old term for ASD Level 1. I vote this my 2020 favourite book.