#allism parenting

[devotedlystrangewizard]

its so sad to grow up and realize you didnt get the affection you needed from your parents when you were a kid. its even worse when youre aware you will never get it and should find support elsewhere but deep down it still hurts every time youre reminded of how you still wont get it

[syskid-terms-archive]

Maybe these will do?

Caterpillar kid- trauma related to being autistic and allism. (Allism being autistic specific ableism)

Wasp kid- trauma related to being considered violent/having anger issues but it was more so lashing out due to mistreatment. Can be related to ird, BPD, bipolar, aspd, etc related but doesn't have to be.

Chickadee kid - trauma related to babysitters/babysitting, usually via mistreatment from said caregiver.

Unicorn kid- trauma related to homophobia/homophobic slurs/ being a victim of and/or witnessing a homophobic hatecrime.

Peacock kid - trauma related to neglect, body shaming and/or abuse by parents who were more concerned about their image to the public/church/friends/etc than their child's health, often dressing the child in ways they didnt want, forcing them to smile for pictures, telling them to hide their tears/marks/etc.

Monkey kid- trauma related to sports/physical activities/coaches and/or gym class.

Pugkid- trauma related to being called ugly and unattractive. Not nessesarily body shaming/weight related though

Huskykid- trauma related to yelling and loud verbal abuse, can also include abuse via using loud noises to hurt someone.

Hawkkid- trauma related to medical gaslighting.

And lastly

Mousekid- trauma related to being embarrassed and/or degraded as a form of punishment/discipline, usually from parents/caregivers/teachers/etc. This can include not allowing them to go to the bathroom till they wet themselves, shaving hair off, forcing them to stand outside and wear an embarrassing sign, etc.

I hope that's not too much, don't feel pressured to do them all :)

If not, please focus on peacockkid, mousekid- and huskykid, they are the most important to me though all are important.

Since there’s so many, I’ll post them over a while! And I hope it’s okay if I change mousekid to hamsterkid, since mouse is already taken :)

[smeargledshades]

// So having seen some of the posts people on my dash have been making lately, I just want to mention one of the ground rules of Monet's setting:

In my personal canon, the Pokemon world is a kinder, gentler place than our world. This means that bigotry as we know it doesn't really... exist.

Most people spend a significant portion of their lives learning to empathize with very alien (cute! cuddly!) monsters. Human differences kind of fall apart when your Very Best Friend is a 6-foot-tall firebreathing lizard. And in the rare cases that they don't? A ten-year-old with a funny hat will come kick any bigot's ass with the power of friendship and this Beedrill they found.

So most people don't judge you by skin colour, creed, gender, sexuality, neurotype, etc.; there's friendly banter about people from different regions, but nothing approaching our world's xenophobia.

The world isn't perfect- there are still awful parents, there's still parts of the world where poverty exists, there's still organized crime. But in Monet's world specifically, bigotry isn't a problem your average person is going to have to contend with day-to-day.

Also, in my continuity, most people are autistic. People have spilled a lot of ink about how friendly the Pokemon setting is to autistic people, so I won't reiterate it here- but being autistic is normal in Monet's world. Not being autistic is seen as a neurodevelopmental disorder called "allism". When you have allism, you have problems interacting with normal (read: autistic) people; more importantly, you have problems reading Pokemon body language and interacting with them.

I can't promise I'm going to be able to write this consistently, because I live in our world and bigotry is a day-to-day part of my life. I'm probably going to screw it up at some point. I'm also not going to contradict anyone who wants to use their rotomblrsona to explore how they feel about the Bad Shit that's happening in their real life; as we said Back In My Day, RP is cheaper than therapy.

But if you come to Monet with bigoted shit- or needing sympathy because someone threw bigoted shit at you- it's not going to grok what's going on. He's going to treat bigotry as the fucking bizarre, irrational bullshit it is- as one person having a really strange stick up their ass- and be Very Confused about why the bigot in question is doing this.

Again: this is a personal choice for Monet's canon, and I'm not going to directly contradict anyone on rotomblr who wants to use this setting as a way to explore the shit they have to deal with every day. Call it a quirk of the multiverse.

[allism-mom]

The Toll of Allism

As hard as my son struggles with his allism, he is not its only victim.

When your child has allism, there is no break or vacation. My son woke frequently in the night - waking every two hours until he was two and not sleeping reliably through the night until nearly three - and the only thing that would soothe him was human contact.

His hunger for connection is insatiable.

When I was a child I played happily by myself for hours. But at eight my son is still fixated on people. He wants to talk, he wants me to play a board game with him, he wants me to “verse” him in a minecraft mini game.

Sometimes I feel like he is a vampire sucking words and energy right out of me. When he is around talking happens. He will talk or demand speech from me. Even in his quieter moments he wants to be touching me, leaning on me.

It’s how his brain is wired, and I understand that and I accept him for who he is - this loving, generous, good hearted boy child of mine. And it comes with those “allism superpowers” that makes children with allism such sweet angles.

“He gets along with every kid in class. Everyone loves him.” His teacher reported in his report card.

But when you are the caretaker of your child, there is no break from the overstimulation, the constant flow and deman for words. No time to dive into a hyperfocus to recharge.

His challenging behaviours sometimes lead me to snap at him - his affectionate nature means he is forever trying to hug and kiss or pick up or talk to his baby sister and she loses her patience sometimes.

“Don’t TALK to me!” She says impatiently.

“But I just want a huggy...” my son will implore. Then I remind his sister that this is how her brother shows love.

Of course I don’t make her accept his attentions but I think it helps her to have his behaviour explained. And I just keep coaching my son to help him understand that if he just gives his sister some space, she will give him a hug when she is ready.

And she usually does. She’s quite huggy herself, as long as it’s on HER terms.

I can only work part time due to the demands of raising a child with allism. His class starts at nine and ends at three, and then he needs me to pick him up and feed him a snack and talk to him about his day.

He and his sister and their relentless needs sometimes drive me to the point of snapping at them.

And then I feel terrible because this isn’t their fault.

It isn’t their fault that I’ve been in burnout for years now.

It isn’t their fault that I’m overstimulated and drained from masking all the time.

It isn’t their fault that I have to pop Advil every morning to keep the headache at bay.

But it is because of them. Because allism parenting is incredibly stressful.

In fact studies show that parents show higher stress levels than childfree people. The stress comes with the job.

And when your child has special needs like excessive human interaction demands, it’s bound to take a toll on a non-allistic parent.

I need solitude the way he needs companionship. I need silence the way he needs laughter.

And I wouldn’t give him up for anything in the world.

It won’t always be this stressful. My husband and I are working to teach him how to be comfortable in his own thoughts, how to rest and read, how to respect people’s bodies instead of getting up into their faces or grabbing them all the time.

And he is so so much improved from where we were when he was a preschooler.

But if we ignore the toll that this takes on parents, we do a disservice to the kids. How can I give my son the unconditional love and care that he deserves when I can’t even care for myself?

Respite is incredibly important and while I sometimes feel like I am alone in this, I know I’m not.

I have friends who will take my kids to give me the time alone in the house that I crave, and sometimes I schedule a day when I can stay home while they are at school and do nothing and talk to no one.

And I always feel guilty when I do it, but I know that my children deserve a parent who can give them all they need, and when it feels like they need more than I can give, well, then it is up to me to fix that.

And I have to learn to forgive myself. People always praise how well I seem to cope given the circumstances. But I don’t feel like I’m coping at all.

My doctor wrote me a prescription tonight for an SNRI. I’ve tried SSRIs without any luck and while my Wellbutrin helps it hasn’t been enough lately.

Here is hoping this will help give me the strength I need to give my children the support they need.

[lesbian-bookworm]

RANT MOMENT

since its holoday season and we all have to see family that we dont like. Pop into my inbox and rant about what it is your families/relatives do that make you furious.

[cominupwthisinasubway]

I don't understand why allistics feel this intense need to call things anything except what it actually is

Like, I'm a child of divorce, I've been since I was like 10.

And my parents still refuse to call their fights anything but dissagrements.

Like

Y'all are divorced.

You do not divorce someone cause you disagreed to often about wheter or not you did the dishes.

And my mom says she's quit smoking, she still smokes several times a week, so what's the point of saying you've stopped???

[morlock-holmes]

I hope this doesn't come off as just as crazy as the previous anon, but my own view is that autism (the smart kind, which is the meaningfully real kind; the dumb kind is something different) is just the proper, virtuous state of humanity, and it's the allists who are mentally disordered. It is a spectrum, we're more-or-less all a little allistic, but that's a very bad thing, because allism is a malevolent parasitic hivemind. It trades off general sapience for enhanced ability to fight dirty in dominance contests.

All mental illness is, at this point, essentially... How can I say this... symptom based? You get a mental illness diagnosis by indicating that a certain trait causes you enough harm that it interferes with your ability to live a normal life. We then group some of these people into "Mental illnesses" but as near as I can tell we have almost no idea about causes.

Having a diagnosis of depression, or autism, or whatever, is like having a diagnosis of "Coughing".

Like, imagine we looked at people who coughed, and asked, "How often do you cough? On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does coughing interfere with your ability to live a full life?"

And then we assigned everyone with a score of 6 or more a diagnosis of "Acute Coughing Syndrome".

That really genuinely seems to be how mental illness works, at least in terms of all my interactions with the medical establishment. That doesn't mean that it is unreal; in this analogy the symptom is pretty evident. But on the other hand a number of diverse things can cause a cough.

I'm not sure, but I do think that the changes of the last century or so have created a world where autistic symptoms that would have been considered relatively normal in earlier times cause increasing friction. Someone else mentioned that their mother was incredibly strict about having dinner at 6 every night. Now, I don't know the details, it's possible that said mother had melt-downs that would have been over the top in any time and place. But it also strikes me that, "Mom says we have dinner at six, because that's when civilized people eat dinner, and you're getting an earful if you want it at 6:15" was pretty well-accepted parenting as recently as, say, the 50s.

I do kind of think that as society has changed certain types of inflexibility or conscientiousness about specific rules which might have been classed as "mildly eccentric" in the first half of the century are possibly now classed as "mental illness" simply because society is less built around articulated patterns and is more built around intuition of emotional state.

I don't know that one is better than the other but I do share a sense of frustration at living in a society where people claim not to have any real scripts or patterns while in actuality they have very closely observed expectations and patterns.

[soulvomit]

One of the worst autiphobes and Normie simps I know, is my mother, who is probably ASD-1. This despite also being kind of hippie. (It’s complicated. She has always shunned hippie culture. While also just BEING one undercover, who passed as a Normie after my parents started making more money. My parents were in the 70s-80s hippie-to-yuppie pipeline.)

She is from a family that’s Jewish, poor (thrust into generational poverty because of my wealthy-born, probably-autistic grandmother’s failure to become a Stepford wife) and - I truly believe - heavily autistic. For every male engineer or scientist or accountant that my family produced on either side, it produced an equal number of women with psychiatric labels and drug addictions. And anyone born to those women, if those women were too weird to marry well, became another link in a chain of autism-induced generational poverty.

My mother made a study of “normalcy.” It was not just about not appearing autistic, but about the markers of class and culture. Normalcy itself was her Special Interest for a long time. But she did not construct this as being about autism - she had no word for the thing that her family was, that she subconsciously knew how to spot in others... and discriminate against. That thing she could only call... “being Weird.”

No, it was actually just as much - or far more - about culture. It was about paralanguage. It was about race. She set out to marry a tall white man with a very white last name. (And ironically, he’s only white-passing. He is a tribal citizen of a Pacific Northwest tribe.) She would take his name. She would make a point of assimilating. She consented to joining the Mormon church briefly, playing the role of anthropologist. 

She talks of practicing her smiles in the mirror. This is not, according to her, to pass allistic. It’s to pass as an acceptable, middle class, respectable WASP lady. It’s to give the body and facial language that is *required* by feminine hegemonic WASP culture. My mother cannot consciously tell what is hegemonic culture, from what is allism.

But... subconsciously, she knows.

She can spot an autist the way that I can. She has the same A-Dar that I do. Except she doesn’t verbalize this as spotting “autistic” people. She verbalizes it as spotting weird people. “You must not associate with weird people. They will drag you down.” She is more aware of other people’s weirdness than people I know who are much more easily Normie, who don’t work hard at it. What makes it specific to traits associated with autism, though, is that these people are always people she will just say are “Weird.” People who are creepy or scary, she can say they are creepy or scary. People who just seem mentally ill, she will just say that. “Weird” is her code word for “autistic.”

I will always spot that person in a crowd and they will usually be the one person in a group to become my friend. 

My mom can spot these people in a crowd. She immediately decides, then, that she does not like these people. That she must avoid them.

If someone pings her A-Dar, she is deeply triggered by them, and worried that they are violating some kind of social contract, and is terrified that they will have poor boundaries and will show up at her door at 2am, or try to sleep with her husband, or make late night “please stop me from killing myself” phone calls.

She is terrified that these people will cost her the social place she has worked very hard to attain. 

Yet she doesn’t exactly have normie friends. Because of her own autism-mappable traits. She burns bridge after bridge.

[kriegborderlands-moved]

my parents 😔😔😔😔 have allism 😔😔😔😔 they are people with allism 😔😔😔😔 you can only imagine how much pain this causes me 😔😔😔😔 it’s all because of the damn vaccines 😔😔😔😔

[smeargledshades]

So, my experiences are Not Universal- I work at a private school, and it's K-12. I get every kind of student from Preschoolers to Rockers through here.

This school's pretty popular if you can afford it, because we have a lot of flexibility for when your kid goes off on their journey. we don't hold kids back a grade the way they normally do in public schools, we've got tutors and after-school cram classes and all kinds of other crap to get them up to speed regardless of when they go.

The standard journey age is still between ages 10-12 in Unova, no matter what you might have heard. but on the one hand some parents want to send their kids off earlier if it's inconvenient for them to have a kid in the house (new baby! new partner! divorce! don't make big life changes while your kid is off on their Journey jfc what's wrong with you). and on the other hand, some kids need a little extra time. some kids are on the allism spectrum, or are scared to leave home, or are just late bloomers.

so you've got a lot of kids on non-traditional journeys here anyway, and the kind of parent who's willing to send little Jimothy out at age 9 (or age 14) is also a lot more open to ... non-traditional... starters.

SO TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION FINALLY:

we still tend to get the Unovan starter trio most often- Snivy, Tepig, and Oshawott. a little less often- but getting more and more common- you get parents who gave their kid "something safer" or kids who caught their own starter. so Patrats, Lillipups, Feebas, Caterpie, the odd Jigglypuff or Farfetch'd. what you'd expect in Unova.

less often still, you get kids whose parents took them to another region to get their starter - either because they're originally from that region and are just in Unova for work, or because they want to follow the latest trend. we've had a good few Sprigatitos and Fuecocos here in the last couple years, because Paldean starters are really trendy right now; you still get the odd Charmander or Pikachu, but they're less common.

and then you get the loon who thinks their kid's first pokemon should be a fucking Espurr. what gives.

Hey! Given that Starter Week is coming up, I'm curious how you and your fellow coworkers are preparing for it. It must be a pretty hectic week for you guys!

Oh, it's the worst week of the school year. The week before winter break, the week before spring break, even the week before school's out for the summer? Less bad.

I'm lucky, because I'm not in charge of any of these kids, so my preparations are mostly "make sure I know where the fire extinguishers are and what the evac routes from the library are", "get in touch with the teachers ahead of time to know which kids in which Media Studies classes are going to be a Problem", and "get ready to tell every kid who comes through that their Oshawott is perfect".

It does help that more kids are coming through with non-traditional starters lately- people tend to go for safer Pokemon for their kids than the traditional fire/water/grass types these days.

But then you get a kid with an Espurr, because some idiot told some other idiot that "Cat-type pokemon" are safe for kids, and they meant Meowth ...

Yeah, I still have a migraine, can you tell?

[caruliaa]

Allism awareness day ajdhehhehe

this❗allism 🤢 awareness 👀 day 😩 lets all be aware 👁️👁️ of the awful 😔 impact allism 🤢😑 has on autistic 🌈♾️✨parents 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 of children 👶🏼 with allism 😑😫 !!! every year 📆 poor 😔😔 parents 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 have their lovely 🤗 autistic 🌈♾️💖🍓✨ chlidren 👶🏽tragicly 😭😭 stolen ❗by the evil 😱😱😱 allisms 🤢😑😬💔 however 👀👀👀 with you help ❗❗❗ we can hopefully 😩 cure 🎉 this awfull 😭😱😱😈 disease 😔 in order to help 👀🏃 us do this 😩😩❗❗❗ simply give your local autistic person all your credit card information HFVJDJDN /j

[franklyautistic]

The Autism Spectra

Uninitiated NTs often think that “the Autism Spectrum” runs from NTs on one side all the way through to severely autistic people on the other side.

If you’re following this blog, you probably know that’s bullshit. You’re probably familiar with alternative metaphors, like the salad bar. All autistic people are salads, but some have lots of tomatoes and no dressing, while others have lots of lettuce and rocket and black pepper. Feel free to roast me in the notes for my lack of salad knowledge.

Now, here’s the thing. Reality is messier than either of these metaphors acknowledge. OK, all autistic people are salads... but what are allistic people?

Furthermore, autism is not binary. Some allistic people are more autistic than others. A classic example is the parent of an autistic kid, who doesn’t have enough impairment to qualify for a diagnosis but still exhibits behaviours and traits we associate with autistic people. I certainly see parts of myself which could be interpreted as autistic in both my parents - I have my mother’s stubbornness and my father’s introversion, for example.

So if some allistics are more autistic than others, are some autistics more autistic than others? This is immediately problematic. No. If you are autistic, then you are autistic. However, we would all acknowledge that different autistic people experience different intensities of autistic characteristics. Personally, I’m relatively good at handling uncertainty, particularly compared to where I was five or ten years ago. I’m relatively bad at social nuance. But having a more severe symptom doesn’t make you more autistic, and having a less severe symptom doesn’t make you less valid as a person.

But, all that being said, it’s important to acknowledge that there isn’t a sharp dividing line between “autistic” and “allistic”. Lots of allistic people - in fact, probably all of them - will have some behaviour or another that you will find on a diagnostic checklist for autism. A sizeable portion of the population will have quite a few of these behaviours, but will come just below the threshold for a diagnosis. And lots of people exist in a space where some clinicians will diagnose them, and others will not. This isn’t an issue that can be solved by switching to community diagnosis and similar concepts, either, because any gatekeeper can fall into the same trap.

Autism is fuzzy. Many of us have an instinctive understanding of it which we have developed from experience of being around autistic people, but these judgements are inherently subjective and come wrapped up in all our own personal biases. Ultimately, there is no reliable way of telling an autistic person from a non-autistic person.

So what’s my solution? Well, autism is a useful label for some people. It helps them understand themselves and be understood by others. If you’re one of those people - and I am - more power to you. But we shouldn’t think too much about the hard dividing line between autism and allism. Many allistic people will display greater intensity of at least one autistic trait than some autistic people. Our experiences exist as spectral conditions, not a single binary condition.

[selchwife]

they would not actually be shitty parents but im thinking about the rake and composer taking care of a kid and being like “we LOVE our ALLISTIC CHILD even when we don’t love her ALLISM #AllismDads #ParentingStrong” bc theyre both so autistic and so weird and all the allistic people they hang out with are ALSO so fucking weird they would forget there are normal people in the world

[lesbian-bookworm]

Casual Allism from my Parents

We were driving around looking at christmas lights. I tell them that i dont like the whote lights because theyre too bright and hurt my eyes. Of course their response is to laugh and me and tell me im crazy and "its a good thing we didnt put the white lights on our house" teasingly (even though our tree is white lughts) and then took us to a church to see the decorations that was 90% white lights.

On the good side. A little earlier the same day they said they make sure to touch things and make sure theyre soft before they buy them for me.

[eeee-lye]

Advisory: I’m an autistic who gets sarcastic by the end of this post. I expect this means an Autism Parent will turn up at my door tomorrow and demand that I turn in my Autism Card, because I can’t possibly be properly autistic, like their kids, if I express my frustration at their ableism by using a literary device. Oh, note to self: write a sarcastically autistic character. I’m thinking a character who copes with allistic society by inventing and rehearsing sarcastic social scripts, with a group of other autistics of course, to explain their sensory needs to ignorant neurotypicals--

(Excuse me while I bolt for my keyboard.)

Anyway, while I still have my precious Autism Card, let me stand on a box and wave my hands at you while I speak.

It’s ironic that so many self-described Autism Parents are leaping in with “my kid is a person before she is autistic so don’t you dare use identity-first language to describe her” comments whenever an autistic person dares to say that, actually, the community more generally prefers identity first language in response to a person-first-using article or work.

Think about that. Autism Parents. Autism Parents put the autism first. Autism Parents, as opposed to autistics who are parents, put the autism first while not being autistic themselves.

Nobody corrects this to the real person-first language version: “person with allism who is a parent of a child with autism”! No, it’s just Autism Parents, as though the parent is somehow defined by autism before they are defined by parenthood, no person reference necessary--almost as though they’re always implicitly a person and I’m not.

We have people who are literally claiming the identity-first language of a neurotype that isn’t theirs but enforcing the use of person-first language by another person of a neurotype that still isn’t theirs.

I prefer “autistic person” or just “autistic” because it’s fewer words (I never get to forget that the supposedly less-ableist “person first” constructions make me, a multiply disabled person, speak and type more words). But if I weren’t already a fan of identity-first language as a disabled-identifying autistic, I’d take it up in defiance to the Autism Parents who are allowed to be, unquestionably, identity-first with regards to an identity that isn’t even theirs while denying the actual people of that identity (autistic folks) the same right.

It is telling, so telling, that people who have usurped identity-first language for themselves, who aren’t even of the identity to begin with, are forcing the rest of us to use person-first constructions to remind the world that we autistics are actually people.

So remember: we can’t call them “autism parents” because that’s identity-first language. If they don’t think it appropriate for us, how can it be appropriate for them? They’re people before they are allistic parents of an autistic child, and that must come first. The only acceptable term, therefore, is People With Allism Who Are Parents Of Autistic Children*. I’m sure they won’t consider it in any way ableist to use a construction that uses more words, and we people with disabilities can just write/speak the initials, so everybody wins.

It is clear to me, after seeing a few posts last night where PWAWAPOACs fought so hard to insist that person-first language is the only correct way to refer to a person who just happens to be autistic, that we can’t let PWAWAPOACs suffer the pain of enduring identity first language. They, who have done so much for we autistics, deserve to have their personhood celebrated and centred in their activism.

When a PWAWAPOAC comes onto an autism post insisting that we use person-first language, it’s the kind and just thing to offer them the same courtesy.

* In terms of parallel construction, it should be People With Allism Who Are Parents Of Children Who Are Autistic, but I’m not interested, even in jest, in using person-first in reference to an autistic person (who has not expressed a personal preference for person-first). I think there’s enough person-first usage in that dreadful initialism to make my point, yes?

[afearing]

someone with adhd is clowning in an autistic person’s inbox about not being able to reblog a post about frustration with allistics. people on this website are so embarrassing i have adhd and it doesnt change the fact that youre allistic at ALL, allism is an extremely specific form of discrimination and autism and adhd are not the same. idk how you get through any school system ever without understanding this tbh. i havent read a lick of autistic rights literature i got this all from attending k-12:

kids with adhd were viewed as spacey, chatty, or hyper. yes it can make socializing harder. but autistic kids get the absolute shit end of the stick socially and were seen as stupid, antisocial, and embarrassing. people make jokes about adhd but ‘autistic’ and the r word are perhaps the top two insults that many people reach for.

autistic people are right to maintain a specific submovement within neurodivergence rights because people with other forms of nd are not immune to this thinking, i was and am not immune to this thinking, how can you think you can lay claim to experiences like dealing with autism speaks which promotes horrific rhetoric like telling parents autism “took their children away”?? when was the last time you heard someone say that adhd stole their ‘real’ child? when was the last time you saw a meme mocking specifically people with adhd? stay in your fucking lane oh my god