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mac266
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25 Feb 2008, 12:51 am

I have Asperger's, but I'm 31 years old and just found out. I've always had difficulty with eye contact, but not with babies. I make eye contact with babies just fine. Does anyone else experience that?



Pithlet
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25 Feb 2008, 1:10 am

Yeah, same here. Babies don't really judge, they just observe. Plus I don't have to concentrate so much when I interact with babies, so eye contact with them is much less distracting than with older people.



kit000003
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25 Feb 2008, 1:11 am

i do this with all small kids... and wave sometimes... usually they just grin... kids love me....



oscuria
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25 Feb 2008, 1:38 am

No. If I look at one in the eyes, they'd probably cry. I appear very angry at times, even when I'm not. Worst when I'm observing. Kids smile at me, I scowl. They get the picture.

:lol:



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25 Feb 2008, 2:53 am

Babies have the tendency to stare at me. Literally, staring at me and even their moms and dads don't seem that interesting in the moment during which they stare at me as if I were the most amazing animal.

I totally don't find it any easier to look into the eyes of a baby. When I was a kid even, I found babies to be very intimidating and scary creatures, especially when they wanted to touch me and stare at me with this intense stare.

Eyes are eyes. Baby eyes are worse probably, because they look so... empty?
Don't worry, I'm not a baby-hater. One of my friends will soon have her first son and I find it all very fascinating. I'm just not used to babies, being an only child and with that missing contact to anybody until I was in my teens.



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25 Feb 2008, 3:50 am

Fine with babies and children (prepuberty).



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25 Feb 2008, 5:25 am

I'm ok with eye contact with babies. I'm not sure about children in general, but I'm ok with eye contact with my students (average age 8-10 years old).


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25 Feb 2008, 9:02 am

I love little kids and I have much less problem with eye contact with them. They are all so curious and are not quick to judge people. :D


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Griff
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25 Feb 2008, 9:44 am

mac266 wrote:
I have Asperger's, but I'm 31 years old and just found out. I've always had difficulty with eye contact, but not with babies. I make eye contact with babies just fine. Does anyone else experience that?
This is because the child is not challenging or antagonizing you. When looking at others, don't lock gazes. You want to look their faces over, as if you are taking their measure, and pretend that you are reading a book. This is what they're doing to you. You just have to learn it, whereas they do it naturally. When gazes lock, our natural instinct is to tense up and either retreat or attack. With most people, you want to be careful to avoid this, and keep the timeframe for actually being gaze-locked with another person at a maximum of a half-second at a time. You are able to get away with this when you are dealing with babies and animals because neither will challenge you.

It's actually true. If you watch NTs for a while, you will notice that they rarely actually gaze-lock. Their eye contact is friendly and gentle. You want to handle something like eye contact delicately, as if it were something fragile and precious. You want to brush your gaze across another's as if with a fine paintbrush on a delicate canvas. You want to paint their eyes with yours as you would delicate eggs. As you move your eyes around, envision paths being traced by them in the air, and insure that the lines you make are pleasant ones. When you have completed this, a working of perhaps between one half of a second and a breath, you should be able to relax and make simple eye contact. Think of it as the docking of two spacecraft. It cannot be done well recklessly.

The more difficult matter, however, is figuring out just what in the hell you're saying, so you don't mistakenly say, "I want you to take out your samurai sword, and shave my butt," or, "I like children. I like your children." It's a language all its own, part of it instinctive and part of it cultural. However, immediate gaze-locking is almost always taken as a sign either of hostility or sexual advance. The only exception is between parties whose social positions between one another are already perfectly clear, in which case the matter isn't quite as delicate, simply because all of the rules are written and memorized.

However, sometimes I do like to pick random women and give them my best "psycho" gaze. Hehehehe, it's fun to watch them turn all white and cower away, HAHAHAHAHA! Carve RIGHT INTO the ray of their vision like a blunt sword, hehehe! They never see it coming!



Sora
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25 Feb 2008, 10:43 am

So, er, if anyone who answered up to now feels it's much easier to look into the eyes of young children, is anyone out there who feels more like me and who knows why? I'm quite curious now.

In my opinions the eyes themselves are the issue, not the person behind it or whether they're judging or not. I know only a couple of eyes that I feel comfortable with looking into - because I don't feel anything when I look into them, which makes locking gazes very comfortable.



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25 Feb 2008, 1:59 pm

Children until the age of two are fine, I can just look in their eyes. Above two years it gets difficult, from that age you feel judged... Maybe looking into the eyes of a baby is easy because there are less feelings?



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25 Feb 2008, 2:49 pm

Griff wrote:
However, sometimes I do like to pick random women and give them my best "psycho" gaze. Hehehehe, it's fun to watch them turn all white and cower away, HAHAHAHAHA! Carve RIGHT INTO the ray of their vision like a blunt sword, hehehe! They never see it coming!


:roll: Just women, huh? Coward... That said, if you tried that sh*t on me I'd knee you in the balls.



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25 Feb 2008, 7:13 pm

Never thought about it... I don't might looking babies in the eye, since I feel more like I'm just looking at them than actually catching their eye. Really young babies, anyway; it doesn't really feel like they're looking back at me. They also don't mind if I'm just looking at the colour of their eyes. I wouldn't feel as comfortable with an adult, but then I wouldn't feel comfortable cuddling, bathing, or changing a diaper for an adult either!