The general public now realises that:
Children with Autism or Asperger’s do grow up.
And many do become parents.
So what is it like to have an Autistic Parent?
To find out
Read some of our stories
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Neurodiversity – for better or worse
http://www.neurodiversity.com.au
Judy Singer identifies as having some AS traits. In the early days she explored this side of her identity, and ended up writing an Honours Thesis in Sociology/ Disability Studies on Autistics and the Internet, a "New Social Movement" based on Neurological Diversity. She believes she coined the term "Neurodiversity", in its sense of a call to a "new politics of difference" in an article which first appeared in an academic publication "Disability Discourse" (eds. Corker and French) published by Open University Press UK,1998. She intended the term to empower people who were "neurologically different". However she always affirmed that Neurodiversity is not "all good". Autistics, especially those who, through superior intellect, have achieved high positions in society, are just as capable of being perpetrators as victims. She believes the Neurodiversity movement can never mature until it has explored both the positive and negative side of Nature's diverse experiments.
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About
Judy Singer started the online support group for the children of Autistic parents, ASpar, in 1999. To her knowledge, it was the first place in the word to realise: Aspie children do grow up. Some have children. Those children may have something in common.
As a child, she had sought the world over, in literature, in film, in psychiatry textbooks, for words to explain her mother's uniquely odd behaviour. Finding nothing, she gave up, and assumed her mother had simply made a choice to be selfish, stupid and lazy! But when she had a child of her own, with similar behaviours, the penny dropped. It was something hereditary!
Since discovering AS, she now has the words: peseverative, anxious, monologuing, obsessive, compulsive, inability to recognise social cues, etc. Her next thought was: "If this is a common disability, then I can't be alone! But how to find others?" She was studying sociology and researched the area thoroughly. There was nothing out there, anywhere in the world. Then along came the internet! She put up her website, and the day the first prospective member showed up, it was "A whole new world of relief and wonder!"
The ASpar website is currently out of action, for the moment replaced by this blog.
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