re: How many autistic kids did you know when you were young?

I think there’s definitely something causing a rise but saying you never heard of autistic friends in the 60s is foolish because people like that were probably just locked up and not studied

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Which they would have to have been diagnosed with, right? But I thought the explanation is under diagnosis. Which is it? If they were significantly under diagnosed, they wouldn't have been going to special schools.

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If your kid had special needs in the 50s it wasn’t diagnosed as an in the box term like today.

You were “afflicted”

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First time I even heard of it was Rain Man.

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This might be the first time I had heard of it.

We had a couple that were deemed “hyper”
And then all your average weirdos

So your argument is everyone a mere 60 years ago was perfectly healthy and normal?

Crazy that’s possible considering Tylenol has been over the counter in America since 1950s…..

And again, many of these kids aren’t autistic on the scale we used when we were younger. The spectrum has been widened to include lots of kids who we would have just called quiet kids. I’m not saying the broadening of diagnosis is right, I’m just saying that’s why we have more “autistic” kids these days. More are considered “on the spectrum” because of how they’re currently categorized.

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Born in the 70’s and I can honestly say I knew no one who would fit the definition of autistic today.

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pretty much everyone I know that was born in he 70s is a little autistic

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I want yall to understand this top 50 tennis player in the world is autistic. This is what “autism” is now. You knew a shite ton of kids like this in the 70s

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That’s more like auspergers

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So your argument is everyone a mere 60 years ago was perfectly healthy and normal?

Crazy that’s possible considering Tylenol has been over the counter in America since 1950s…..

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Pretty sure I haven't made an argument.

Pretty sure all I have done is debunk your explanations for why seeing an (actual) autistic person was so rare that hardly any of us ever did growing up, but is now so common that statistically almost every elementary classroom in America has one.

I can buy that over diagnosing pads the numbers quite a bit, but the anecdotal experience I'm referencing isn't considering "autistic" kids, only actually autistic kids.

And I'm telling you that I didn't see any five year old autistic kids when I was five, I didn't see any ten year old autistic kids when I was ten, I didn't see any fifteen year old autistic kids when I was fifteen, I didn't see any autistic people of any age, in fact, until I was around 30-35. Then I stared seeing them. I didn't know of any families growing up with "afflicted" kids, or had kids who were institutionalized.

I did know two families growing up with children who had Down's Syndrome.

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So your argument is everyone a mere 60 years ago was perfectly healthy and normal?

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Do I really need to answer that? Are we going to play that stupid?

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Tylenol has been over the counter in America since 1950s

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Again, I haven't said one thing about Tylenol. Honestly, the threads on the front page here are the first I've ever heard of Tylenol being blamed for autism. I have no idea what the evidence is for that claim, whether it's valid, whether Tylenol changed its ingredients at some point, and I have likewise not floated any other theories regarding what causes autism.

All I have done is expose the inadequacies of explaining the fact that autism used to be so rare that the average person never had any experience with it and now just about everyone does by saying it was because autistic kids weren't in school or some such thing. We still went to other kid's houses. We still heard stuff about people's families. If one in thirty kids were institutionalized for being "afflicted," or if they were being cared for at home but never allowed out in public, or if they were chained up in the basement dungeon and only given bread and water and never saw sunlight, we'd have known about at least some of them. Unless you now want to make the argument that all autistic kids back then were only children.

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Autism is real, and it can looks very different from the “Tennis Story” stereotype. There are kids who are nonverbal, stim 24/7, can’t tolerate loud noises, need GPS trackers because they wander away from home without fear, and will never live independently. These kids exist in far greater numbers than 20 years ago.

If you think autism “means nothing,” I’ll take you to a Miracle League baseball game any weekend in my town and show you a dozen or more kids who don’t fit your narrow idea. That’s the real face of autism. And the word autism means a lot to the parents. They are going to be care-givers for the rest of these kids lives. So please don't be so dismissive of those on the spectrum. How many of these kids did you know 30 years ago?

Both sides of the issue can be true -- an increase in the numbers and the broader definition.

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All of this!!

Said it here many times as the divorced father of two, one of whom is a 15YO autistic boy, I can attest to the fact that autism takes many different forms and can come with multiple challenges.

My son is very verbal, sometimes too verbal, but has a variety of challenges from speech and developmental delays, extreme emotional outbursts to sensory/stim issues. He’s even walked into unlocked residences with no concept of the dangers he could have put himself in. And it’s hard to ever know what will trigger him.

He’s overly attached to my ex so once he turns 18 she will likely have a permanent roommate.