Digital/Internet abuse by parents of ASD children

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http://theautismwars.blogspot.co.nz/201 ... utism.html

From my perspective, this issue is minimised in terms of its harmfulness, and flies way under the radar even in those who are particularly interested in the politics of autism.

These parents are unwittingly encouraging the bullying of their children (and may well be bullies themselves), reinforcing prejudice. It's despicable to my way of thinking.

There are definitely "groupings" of ASD parents (not much research on this?) Just brainstorming the possible groupings here (have not thought this through in any depth yet):

- the concerned/protective parent (my child has a right to be who he/she is, without abuse from ignorant people)
- the affronted/narcissistic parent (how dare my child ruin my image as a perfect person)
- the curebie parent (I will accept my child if he/she is turned into "normal")
- the "look at this freak" parent (the kind this thread is focusing on)
- the "I don't want to know and I'd rather ignore/live in denial about it" parent
- the "He'll grow out of it parent" (He'd better or else)
- the "just try harder" parent (closely related to the denial parent)
- the toxic, freak parent (abuses the child with MMR and freak cures that are harmful at every level)
- the unaware of ASD but concerned sheltering parent (knows child is different somehow, protective)
- the Autism Speaks parent (enough said, you know that kind pretty well on this particular forum - key words are "punish and exterminate")
- closely allied to the "parents are the victims" parents - it's all about them. "Look how hard I have suffered.."

The percentage of non-toxic parents? We can only make random guesses about this though somehow I am guessing that more than 50% are in the toxic categories. Perhaps a lot more. Autism Speaks would like it to be 100%, IMO.

These parents are despicable. They put the cherry on top of the cake that is living with autism. Isn't it enough that we are humiliated and insulted by our cohorts in schools, workplaces, churches, politics and even, too often, at WrongPlanet.net? Must families, themselves, take up the activity, too, as a new form of "fun (and probably profitable)" attention-getting?

Yes. Suppose that a parent of a blind child, where the child is still learning how to negotiate physical space and objects safely around the home, posted a video of the child colliding with things "see what I have to put up with? It just broke my favourite vase". I think such a parent would be likely to attract condemnation -along the lines of "can't you see that the child has a disability, you bully? Do you only care about yourself and your objects?". I think that people generally would have no difficulty in seeing that as victim-blaming. But blaming the victim seems to be a sport in terms of the digital bullying of ASD children - they are considered "fair game" for the bullying parents, the latter not even recognised as bullies - well that's my view of it, anyway. The bully parents present themselves as the victims - an inversion of reality. And other bully parents congratulate and sympathise with them. And in the worst cases, it leads to murder and then the murderers are congratulated and sympathised with.

Psychology has recently recognized something called Munchhausen Syndrome, a psychiatric disorder where a person harms themselves in order to get attention. And then there's "MS By Proxy", where the person harms somebody else, usually their child, in order to attract attention. I wonder if Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy is the true culprit in the cases of "autism warrior moms" who eventually kill (or try to) their kid. Recently a case broke where a woman was inducing illness in her son (not ASD related) in order to feed approval of herself via social media. In the end she poured salt into the kid's IV bag, and live tweeted her son's death. In the Issy Stapleton case I noted that when the mom was removed from the home that Issy calmed down and went from 90 meltdowns a day to only a couple. It makes one wonder how much of "Issy's problems" were in fact her mom's doing.

I think it's one aspect that applies - the Munchausens parents - though only in some of these cases. You have the NPD parents as another sub-group (both are utterly toxic types to their children) and then you (probably) have a whole bunch of just ignorant people who are easily swayed by AS rhetoric. There's no one group though you have rightly noted that MH is one of the subgroups I overlooked. Thanks.

B19, the blogger you linked to refused to post the article about the Canadian parents, the Wellses, who live tweeted their son's meltdown. I however will give the link, since this sort of narcissistic behavior is WRONG and MUST be brought into the light.

http://www.ptbocanada.com/journal/2015/ ... stic-child

Look for the link to an interview with Kate Wells, towards the bottom of the article.

It seems like a lot of parents these days try to bully their kids on social media. So that part of it, at least, is not specific to AS kids, although AS kids have it worse because they are often bully magnets in general.

Glad it was never a real option for my parents...

Our culture is trying to recover from the really bad parenting fads of the past, but it's a slow process. Lots of parents only know how to educate their kids by physically assaulting them whenever they behaving wrongly, because that's how their parents raised them and goodness forbid you read a parenting book. But if modern taboos take away violence as an option, that doesn't actually give them any other parenting skills, so they try to use the same tactics with shame as the punishment.

I found that interview very hard to watch because of the way the woman waved her hands and arms around while she was talking, all the time, it was so distracting that it gave me a headache and I wasn't able to concentrate on what she was actually saying - which may have been a good thing. What is it with these NT "hand talkers"?? Is it their form of stimming? I just can't stand the non-stop hand movement, it really gets to me, alas.

it is called masking...many earth humans have a trait of wearing a mask... freaks us aspies out