Are your parents very neurotypical?

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My mother unfortunately embodies the worst traits of widely understood neurotypicality, having an aversion for things out of the norm - her recent "pearl of wisdom" (said in a voice expressing sincere suprise I ever would be able to think any different) is "I don't like abnormal things and it's NORMAL", even if this "abnormality" is only a small quirk of one's personality, some unusual way of perceiving things, untypical inclinations etc.

Do your parents accept your behaviours? Or are they still complaining you should change and try to adapt to the normal world more?

My father have some aspie traits, but technically, both my parents are NTs.

I never met my father but he wasn't like me at all according to mother. I don't have any reason to suspect him of having AS traits.

Dad has some AS traits, Mom is pretty NT, shes pretty tollerant for things "abnormal" but yea still NT.

I don't know. My mum and my dad both have symptoms of AS, so..Yeah.

Oh good thread! I think my Dad actually has AS and my mom has a couple AS traits but is definately not AS.

I don't think that's a sign of NT personally. It sounds like someone who is extremely closed-minded and small-minded.

I have plenty of NT friends who have no problem in accepting things that aren't normal (of the norm). My partner is extremely NT, and has no problem with me or any other deviation from the norm.

Sorry about your Mom, dude.

Excellent question!

My mother is very much NT - no doubt in my mind. My father was (he's in a nursing home now & doesn't interact much) very technically oriented & would talk a lot about a limited number of topics. He was a good sport about doing social things - but my mom was the one who arranged all the social stuff & I don't think he would have been very social otherwise - but I just don't know what he would have been like without her.

They both grew up in the Depression, so any AS traits that either of them had as kids are likely to have been suppressed or re-channeled by the time they were in their 30s (when I was born.)

Yeah, my mother once told me to "tone it down and don't act so much like yourself".

My dad surely had AS, although he died decades before the diagnosis existed. My mom is a tolerant NT, although as a child I heard at least once a day "I shouldn't have to tell you, you should just know!" I learned early on that the correct response was not "Well, obviously I don't know, so maybe you should just tell me." We get along much better now.

I think they have tried to make me more not so aspie. But in the end i dont think they succeded at least they havent tried for a long time.

My mom has OCD but otherwise she is neurotypical. However, she is very accepted of my behaviors and is in fact the first person that told me that I may have AS.

My dad had a lot AS traits and I suspect that he had it himself. He was pretty accepting too but he died long before I found out about AS.

I suspect my Dad is somewhere on the spectrum, or at least has some of the traits. My Mom is NT but a very strange NT, so I never really heard that I was "odd" all that much from my parents (though I sometimes did and still do).

It depends on what "abnormal" is and isn't. A certain degree of disorganization and abnormality doesn't concern me. However, if it means breaking the law and going to jail or someplace worse, that bothers me.

My mother always tried to do things to change me, that and ignore my problems because she had confirmation from the folks at a health sciences center where she had me tested, that I could do damn near anything. Plus she always treated me androgynously because she is a feminist and thinks men and women are the same.
I think Men are stronger than women and I don't have the physical strength of a man. Still my mom expected me to do all the things my father would do and used me to fill that void. Not weird things, work things. I had to do all kinds of chores around the house a father would do if he lived with us.

So, I had that burden too, having to do everything growing up. Plus my mother pretending I had no problems which was a joke and everyone knows it.

Needless to say, I grew up without the gender stereotyping most get from their parents.


Even to this day I still do everything.

Is my mother very NT? Everyone in my family obsesses on social skills, talking to everyone they encounter and they know it drives me crazy. Okay. I don't mind talking to people I know are alright but I really do cringe when they have conversations with complete strangers in front of me and when they talk about how they like people so much.

My mom has really good people skills.

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 24 Sep 2008, 3:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

True, mother was raised by poor, uneducated parents (gran's educational achievement was only four grades of elementary school, grandpa's only two as far as I know - before the war education wasn't compulsory) whose intellectual horizons and interests didn't step over boundaries of their village. They were really nice people, especially gran who was always spoiling me but it's everything. Mother never got out of her family's way of looking at things. She never showed any intellectual ambitions nor willingness to exert herself for understanding others' way of life.

Not "very," but they're both... cohesively unconscious enough that their quirks might seem incidental. But, I digress: I'm not any kind of doctor.

My mother has a lot anxiety/depression issues, (hopelessness, guilt, etc.) and my father has what may or may not be depression, but also what I've always called "a reliance on external things." He has what shrinks call an "addictive personality," which means he has an unusual tendency to rely on things (smoking, drinking) to cope with his emotions, in lieu of dealing with them internally.

Both my parents have VERY limited social lives and activities, (although they're not quite at my level ) particularly my father, who basically works and tinkers on his bike. Mind you, they both grew up socially normal and only became more like me after they got married and had me and my sister... heh.

So I guess in hindsight, a trained eye would have seen me coming.