About

A fine-looking family but with a problem with no name

Judy Singer started ASpar, the online support group for the children of Autistic parents in 1999. To her knowledge, it was the first place in the word to realise: Asperger’s children do grow up, and some become parents.  This may now seem obvious, but in 1999, it hadn’t occurred to anyone. Let alone that the unique characteristics of AS might be problematic for their children.

As a child, Judy had sought the world over, in literature, in film, and even in psychiatry textbooks, for words to explain her mother’s odd behaviour. Finding nothing, she gave up, and assumed her mother had simply made a choice to be self-centred, silly and lazy! But when Judy had a child of her own who began to show similar behaviours to her mother, the penny dropped. It was something hereditary!

Since discovering AS, she now has the words she sought: peseverative, anxious, monologuing, obsessive, compulsive, unable to recognise social cues, etc.

Judy’s next thought was: “If this is a common disability, then I can’t be alone! But how to find others like me?”.  As a social science research student,  she had the academic tools to research the the subject thoroughly. But she found nothing out there anywhere in the world. Then along came the internet, and Judy realised this was the opportunity to reach out that she had been waiting for. And within a few days of her setting up the ASpar website, the very first prospective member showed up!  From then on it seemed like a whole new world of relief and amazement opened up for every new person who joined,  the common theme being “At last, I am not alone!”