To: romanesq
He’s the one out of 100. I have had a friend with a completely disabled autistic child. And I’d go so far as to say that many autistic children are just poorly parented, I have no idea how many that could be.
I also have friends with mildly autistic children who are pretty fair behaved.
So he’s exaggerating. No surprise. I wouldn’t take this personally if I were you.
27 posted on
07/21/2008 11:38:00 AM PDT by
DeLaine
To: DeLaine
It’s the “mildly autistic” children that probably aren’t even autistic at all. They’re pigeonhold so the drug companies, schools, etc. make a few $$$ off them. I was barely saved from a diagnosis of autism with a simple hearing test when I was 3 years old.
32 posted on
07/21/2008 11:40:50 AM PDT by
Tamar1973
(Catch the Korean Wave, one Bae Yong Joon film at a time!)
To: DeLaine
I’m not taking it personally. Why would I? But I am sympathetic to families going through this. In fact, the divorce rate for parents with autism is very, very high.
And I’ve seen this all through a friend.
That does not mean I’m leading any censorship on Savage. That’s not what’s important to me.
To: DeLaine
My autistic children are very well behaved, but only people ignorant of the spectrum of autistic disorders would say what Savage said. He's an idiot. The parents with autistic children that I know work WAY harder to socialize their children than any parent with “normal” kids. A large portion of the autistic population is intelligent, yet impaired. Autism is characterized by developmental differences in the area of the brain that handles social function. This section of the brain aids in socialization by helping to translate things like facial expression, body language and tone of voice to help in processing language. A physical disability (ie. the underdevelopment of one portion of the brain) leads to social blindness. In the most severe cases of autism, the person doesn't connect the verbalizations of another with any meaning and therefore language is never developed. In many cases, the functions of the underdeveloped area of the brain can be taught. In these cases, the person never gains the instinctive social intuition that most of us have. But they do learn how to parse social situations well enough to get by in society. I liken it to a computer with or without a graphics processor. It is possible to code all the graphics functions to be processed by the CPU, but it takes a lot of the processing power that would normally be available.
My 18-yo son, who is entering art school in the fall, has mastered enough social skills to be nearly indistinguishable from his peers (maybe a good bit more standoffish or shy), but no sensible person wouldn't have realized that there was something going on when he was three. Something that went way beyond any parenting mistakes that we might have made (and that all parents make).
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